42 SEA-SIDE STUDIES. 



keen intellectual voracities and emotional desires, he is all 

 the healthier, all the stronger, all the better for a noble 

 capacity for food — a capacity which becomes noble when it 

 ministers to a fine, and not merely a gluttonous nature. 

 Moreover, I observe this constant fact, which is worth 

 flinging at the heads of all super-refined superfine spiritual- 

 ists, who talk about our God-given senses as " gross '' — 

 namely, that whenever we get authentic details about a great 

 man, we always find him to have been a generous eater. If 

 I, who Avrite this, must confess to being a small eater, I 

 must also confess to not being a great man. Had nature 



willed it otherwise but she did not so will it ; 



and only gave me sufficient sagacity to perceive that dishes 

 are in no sense despicable. 



When, therefore, I think of the hunter's finale as merely an 

 extra dish, and pronounce that to be an anticlimax to his 

 day's work, instead of being, as my finale is, an ascending 

 crescending culmination of delight, this reflection is not sug- 

 gested by any scorn of eating in itself, but is suggested by 

 the obtrusive fact, that eating is at the best a finite plea- 

 sure. It has no savour of the infinite, which aU true and 

 great pleasures must possess. It is vigorous in sensation, 

 but it is circumscribed ; it throws out no feelers into other, 

 wider regions ; it generates no thoughts ; it leads nowhither ; 

 it is terminal. Therefore, I say the finale of the table is an 

 anticlimax for a hunter ; unless, indeed, he is hunting for 

 subsistence, and then of course his finale becomes proportion- 

 ately aggrandised. 



No such anticlimax was mine ; no such terminal enjoy- 



