CANTO iv. OF GOOD AND EVIL. 135 



" THE brow of Man erect, with thought elate, 

 Ducks to the mandate of resistless fate; 

 Nor Love retains him, nor can Virtue save 

 Her sages, saints, or heroes from the grave. 

 While cold and hunger by defect oppress, 

 Repletion, heat, and labour by excess, 



thick as blades of grass, with no restraint to their numbers but the 

 want of local room. 



It would seem that roots fixed in the earth and leaves innumerable 

 waving in the air were necessary for the decomposition of water and air, 

 and the conversion of them into saccharine matter, which would have 

 been not only cumberous but totally incompatible with the loco- 

 motion of animal bodies. For how could a man or quadruped have 

 carried on his head or back a forest of leaves, or have had long branch- 

 ing lacteal or absorbent vessels terminating in the earth? Animals 

 therefore subsist on vegetables; that is they take the matter so pre- 

 pared, and have organs to prepare it further for the purposes of 

 higher animation and greater sensibility. 



While cold and hunger, 1. 71. Those parts of our system, which are 

 in health excited into perpetual action, give us pain, when they are 

 not excited into action : thus when the bands are for a time immersed 

 in snow, an inaction of the cutaneous capillaries is induced, as is seen 

 from the paleness of the skin, which is attended with the pain of 

 coldness. So the pain of hunger is probably produced by the inaction 

 of the muscular fibres .of the stomach from the want of the stimulus 

 of food. 



Thus those, who have used much voluntary exertion in their early 

 years, and have continued to do so, till the decline of life commences, 

 if they then lay aside their employment, whether that of a minister 

 of state, a general of an army, or a merchant, or manufacturer; 



