image of a giant's den in romance, bestrewed with the
scattered heads and mangled limbs of those who were slain by his
cruelty." Think of the porcine shambles of Cincinnati, with their
swift-handed swine-slayers!
"What loud lament and dismal miserere,"
ear-deafening and horrible, must issue from them. How can a Jew reside
in that porkopolitan municipality? The brutishness of the Bowery
butchers is proverbial. A late number of Leslie's Pictorial represents a
Bowery butcher's wagon crowded with sheep and calves so densely that
their heads are protruded against the wheels, which revolve with the
utmost speed, the brutal driver urging his horse furiously.
The first advocate of a purely vegetable diet was Pythagoras, the Samian
philosopher. His discourse delivered at Crotona, a city of Magna Graecia,
is ably reported for posterity by the poet Ovid. From what materials he
made up his report, it is impossible now to say. Pythagoras says that
flesh-eaters make their stomachs the sepulchres of the lower animals,
the cemeteries of beasts. About thirty years ago there was a vegetable
diet movement hereabouts, which created some excitement at the time. Its
adherents were variously denominated as Grahamites, and, from the fact
of their using bread made of unbolted wheat-meal, bran-eaters. There was
little of muscular Christianity in them. They were a pale, harmless set
of valetudinarians, who were, like all weakly persons, morbidly alive to
their own bodily states, and principally employed in experimenting on
the effects of various insipid articles of diet. Tea and coffee were
tabooed by these people. Ale and wine were abominations in their Index
Expurgatorius of forbidden _ingesta_. The presence of a boiled egg on
their breakfast-tables would cause some of the more sensitive of these
New England Brahmins to betake themselves to their beds for the rest of
the day. They kept themselves in a semi-famished state on principle. One
of the most liberal and latitudinarian of the sect wrote, in 1835,--"For
two years past I have abstained from the use of all the diffusible
stimulants, using no animal food, either flesh, fish, or fowl, nor any
alcoholic or vinous spirits, no form of ale, beer, or porter, no cider,
tea, or coffee; but using milk and water as my only liquid aliment, and
feeding sparingly, or rather moderately, upon farinaceous food,
vegetables, and fruit, seasoned with unmelted butter, slightly boiled
eggs, and sugar a
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