nd molasses, with no condiment but common salt."

These ultra-temperance dietetical philosophers never flourished greatly.
They were too languid and too little enthusiastic to propagate their
rules of living and make converts. In a country where meat is within
reach of all, a vegetable dietary is not popular. Doubtless a less
frequent use of fleshly food would be greatly to our advantage as a
people. But utter abstinence is out of the question. A vegetable diet,
however, has great authorities in its favor, both ancient and modern.
Plautus, Plutarch, Porphyry of Tyre, Lord Bacon, Sir William Temple,
Cicero, Cyrus the Great, Pope, Newton, and Shelley have all left their
testimony in favor of it and of simplicity of living. Poor Shelley, who
in his abstract moods forgot even to take vegetable sustenance for days
together, makes a furious onslaught upon flesh-eating in his Notes to
"Queen Mab." The notes, as well as the poem, are crude productions, the
outgivings of a boy; but that boy was Shelley. It was said that he was
traceable, in his lonely wanderings in secluded places in Italy, by the
crumbs of bread which he let fall. Speculative thinkers have generally
been light feeders, eschewing stimulants, both solid and liquid, and
preferring mild food and water for drink. Those who lead an interior
life sedentary and contemplative need not gross pabulum, but would find
their inward joy at the contemplation and discovery of truth seriously
qualified and deadened by it. Spare fast is the companion of the
ecstatic moods of a high truth-seeker such as Newton, Malebranche, etc.
Immanuel Kant was almost the only profound speculative thinker who was
decidedly convivial, and given to gulosity, at least at his dinner.
Asceticism ordinarily reigns in the cloister and student's bower. The
Oxford scholar long ago, as described by Chaucer, was adust and thin.

"As lene was his hors as is a rake,
And he was not right fat, I undertake."

The ancient anchorets of the East, the children of St. Anthony, were a
long-lived sect, rivalling the many-wintered crow in longevity. Yet
their lives were vapid monotonies, only long in months and years. They
were devoid of vivid sensations, and vegetated merely. Milk-eaters were,
in the days of Homer, the longest-lived of men.

Without the ministry of culinary fire, man could not gratify his
carnivorous propensities. He would be obliged to content himself with a
vegetable diet; for, according