DEFENCE OF EATING. 41 



an impression that the speaker is moved, but it necessarily 

 fails to paint the felicitous details which moved him. 



In this approximative and confessedly incomplete style, I 

 will endeavour to describe something of the delights which 

 attend the naturalist when his hunting is over, and his home 

 is reached. For, understand this : the naturalist, and espe- 

 cially the physiologist, has a Morrow to his pleasure, whereas 

 all other hunters have but a fine To-day. Far be it from 

 me to underrate any man's pleasure ; nevertheless tlie most 

 catholic may discriminate, and I must here discriminate be- 

 tween the sportsman's possible pleasure and my own. Brown 

 is excited when he brings down a buck, lands a pike, or re- 

 covers a snipe which has fallen among the reeds. He has 

 his day's sport, has proved his skill — to his own satisfaction 

 entirely proved it ; and now nothing remains but to eat the 

 produce. A dish the more upon his dinner-table — nothing 

 but that ! Not that I mean to speak disrespectfully of dishes ; 

 assuredly not of venison, pike, or snipe, well dressed, well 

 served, well wined, and well companioned. I have no 

 patience with those who pretend not to care for their dinner, 

 on the ludicrous assumption that "spiritual " negations imply 

 superior souls. A man who is careless about his dinner is 

 generally a man of flaccid body, and of feeble mind ; as old 

 ISamuel Johnson authoritatively said, "Sir, a man seldom 

 thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his 

 dinner ; and if he cannot get that well dressed, he should he 

 suspected of inaccuracy in other things." Honto sunn, et 

 nihil, &c. &c. I respect man, and all his appetites. When 



the man is not basely insensible to the hunger of soul, the 



D 



