four of these unhappy men fell to rise no more. The officer alone, slightly wounded, made an ineffectual attempt to escape, but, closely pursued through the intricacies of the forest by two of his merciless foes, he was at length overtaken, and felled to the earth by a blow from a tomahawk. This cruel scene must have taken place at no great distance from our encampment, the shots having been distinctly heard about half an hour before the appearance of the Indians, who, on being questioned, excused the treachery of their conduct, under the plea of the Americans being nearly equal in numbers to themselves, and obstinately refusing to deliver up their arms, circumstances which rendered their destruction at the approach of evening a measure of self-security-especially so, as having been sent in advance four or five days before, they were not aware of our being encamped at so short a distance.

THE DIGNITY OF EATING..

"Tam operosa fit arte deglutitio; tot conspirantes organorum adeo multiplicium et concurrentium actiones huc requirentur.” BOERHAAVE Prælect.

If there is any one point in the science of politics, in which mankind in all ages have concurred, it is in the sentiment that nothing is more abject than to produce,-nothing more noble than to consume. Everywhere the same contempt of "rude mechanicals," "the rank-scented many," everywhere the same respect for the traders in war, and for those scarcely minor scourges-" the caterpillars of the commonwealth," have assigned to individuals their place in society, in the precise inverse ratio of their respective utilities. The ancients attributed agriculture to a goddess, and the Emperors of China, once a year, still condescend to play the husbandman in honour of the art; but this is all make-believe; and the feeders of mankind were not a bit the more respected for the farce. Many reasons have been assigned by philosophers for this extraordinary agreement: some have attributed it to the innate ingratitude of the species; others to their laziness; and others again to their vanity. The truth of the matter, however, is simply that mankind have taken things as they found them, and have reported of the pudding according to its eating. If consumption is, in the nature of things, a more dignified affair than production, can we prevent it? or are we to lie to the world, and to our own consciences, to satisfy the vanity of the hewers of wood and the drawers of water? There are, it is true, a few short-sighted and simple-minded individaals, who have thought that because to produce is good, to consume in idleness must necessarily be mischievous; but their proselytes have always shown by their conduct how little this assumed conviction affected their instinctive sentiments on the point. For while they affected to look down on wealth and power in the general, they have scarcely ever been "able to stand up in the presence of a great mon;" and while they have boasted of an abstract regard and tenderness for the people at large, they have ever treated Tom, Jack, and Harry, and every particular "lean and unwashed artificer," who may have happened to come "between the wind and their nobility," with harshness and hauteur. The absurdity of this notion is now indeed matter of facile demonstration; for recent events have proved as plain as the nose on your face (that is, if you have one) that it is a much easier affair to gird the world with calico, and to compass the equator with broad silks, than to provide the manufacturers with those very indispensable

personages, Messieurs the "consumere nati," to take the goods off their hands. In the outset of society, it is true, production was a slower process; while destruction was sweeping, rapid, and almost inevitable. There was then no complaint of the want of a market; but still, the demonstration of power being on the side of the consumer, a baron or a duke at the head of his lobster-cased banditti, who in a few short hours could make a desert of a paradise, was necessarily esteemed a more proper man, than the toiling slaves who would require as many years to reproduce the paradise out of the desert. Now-adays things are very differently arranged. Steam-engines work faster than cannon; and power-looms are more rapid in their evolutions than battalions; and as the producers have not the wit to consume them selves the fruits of their own labour, and are determined to deal only with those who have nothing to give in return, the consumers have become in such general request, that they are sought for up and down, through all parts of the world, and are sought in vain. In both conditions of society the utility of the consumer was however the same, although not equally felt; and artisans were equally indebted to that laborious class who took the trouble to eat and drink and wear, to kill, burn, and destroy, to make a free field for their renewed exertions. The soundest political economists have determined that consumption is the only legitimate end of production; now, that the end is more noble than the means, is a self-evident truism, as plain as that the masculine is more worthy than the feminine, -a proposition which the youngest boy in a grammar-school (whatever the girls may think of it) makes no scruple of admitting.

But of all the forms of consumption, eating stands conspicuously at the head of the list; and accordingly, from the beginning of time, let forms of government vary as they might, men have been classed pretty closely in the order in which they dine. Indeed the dinner-table has ever been your true body of Patroclus; the rallying point round which both Greeks and Trojans have fought with the greatest fury. The fiercest contests of nations, the most envenomed civil dissensions of factions, and the most strenuous rivalries of individuals, have had one common type, in the contentions of two dogs-for a bone. What are all the pages of Malthus, his fautors, and his opponents, but so much conclusive evidence, that eating is at once the great end, and the master difficulty of existence and all the arts of peace, from a cotton-manufactory to the dancing-dogs, are but so many methods of scrambling for a place at Nature's feast, and getting a share of her scantily covered table-cloth? In no part of the human structure has nature exhibited a greater industry and ingenuity, a more elaborate complexity of resources, and a more masterly adaptation of means to ends, than in the parts subservient to deglutition. "Simple as the process may appear," says a great physiologist, "it is in reality very complicated; and consists of a succession of individual actions, each of which produces an independent effect, yet so connected with the rest, as to attain the object in view in the most perfect manner.*" An infinity of muscles concur in the mastication of the food, and others no less complex and varied are employed in transmitting it, through the pharynx and the

Bostock, Physiology, vol. ii, p. 438, note.

oesophagus, into the stomach; while a multiplicity of glands are pour ing out their fluids at every point of the passage, to lubricate the morsel, and to facilitate its movement " down the red lane." Still further to prove the dignity of eating, it is only necessary to observe that at every mouthful he swallows, man runs the risk of beingschoked which in fallibly he would be, if the epiglottis did not stand sentinel at the windpipe, and, with a vigilance that rarely fails, close the entrance against the intrusion of the sníallest stray crumb. No wonder that so much ingenuity expended upon this little function should have excited the learned Boerhaave to that enthusiasm of surprise and delight, which found vent in the sentence standing at the head of this paper. It is probably from their knowledge of these particulars, and from a just: inference they draw from them, concerning the dignity and importance of the function, that surgeons and physicians acquire that extraordinary fondness for good eating and drinking, which has induced some persons to think that an apoplexy is the universal object of medical ambition. For certain it is that doctors in medicine and doctors in divinity are equally prone to preach one doctrine and practise another, as if they only forbade their clients the good things of this world, in order to have a larger share of them for themselves. In like manner, if those mortified and fastidious ascetics, who look down with contempt on the men they nickname gluttons and epicures, had duly studied anatomy, they would have been assuredly struck with the conviction, that parts on which nature has expended so much skill and contrivance were not absolutely made in vain, and that eating and drinking may have their merits. That good eating and drinking is not only the outward and visible sign of greatness, but also its causa causans, is a verity which is daily gaining ground amongst the well informed. Philosophers are pretty universally agreed in attributing the slavery of the East to the use of a rice diet, and the abject condition of the Irish peasantry to the potatoe. Cratinus would not now stand alone in condemning verses written under water-drinking, since Byron has celebrated the inspiration of gin and brandy, a dictum which agrees well enough with Walter de Mapes' celebrated lines:

"The water-drinkers I despise, and utterly condemn them;

He who would write like Homer, must drink like Agamemnon.” The Romans, the most potent nation the earth ever saw, were great eaters. Their Luculluses and Apicii have become proverbs; and even the stoical Juvenal has expressed a decided opinion in favour of good cheer, and he openly declares his contempt for those pseudo wise men, who, "while they know how much higher Atlas is than all the mountains of Libya, could not distinguish between an iron chest full of money (to purchase dainties withal) and a bag of farthings." The French, who, in their own opinion at least, are at the head of European civilization, are famous not only for their skill in cookery, but for their knowledge in the more refined art of good eating; for it is by no means sufficient to be provided by nature with strong masticators and a capacious swallow, in order to become an adept in epicurism. To attain to the perfection of our nature is the result of a palate, formed in the happiest mould, and cultivated by an education conducted on the most rigorous principles. The English, confessedly inferior to the French in these "finoteries," are equally partizans (ac

cording to their own notions) of a good dinner. The freest nation in the world, and let folks think what they may, the most jealous of their freedom, they have the honesty to attribute this accident to its right cause; and they sing "O the roast beef of Old England" in the midst of starvation and stagnation of commerce. In the most morbid paroxysms of the hot fit of toryism and high-church intolerance, i nothing in the French revolution has so much grieved and alarmed unfortunate Jobu Bull, as the growing corpulence of his "natural enemies, and the impossibility of continuing to taunt them with soup maigre and frogs. While on the other hand no one circumstance has so strongly tended to liberalize our Continental travellers, and to ease them of their fox-hunting and Oxford prejudices against French atheists and jacobins, as the good dinners of Very and Bouvilliers. Roman punch has very much overcome their aversion from the Catholic religion. Iced champaign has cooled their animosity at French congés a langue de bœuf sautée dans sa glace," has reconciled them to the d-d French jabber; and such has been the halo of respectability cast round every thing Gallic by the splendour of the cookery, that the latitudinarian English of every shade of opinion begin to think "His creed can't err, whose cook is in the right." A dinner both at home and abroad is the cheville autrière, the grand lever on which all the affairs of the nation turn. In France the success of the cook. determines, the fortunes of the minister who employs him; and who is himself indeed but a subaltern before the face of his cook. "O may I make a good dinner!", is the sum total of a Frenchman's politics, and a “dindon aux truffes de plus ou de moins" may turn the fortunes of the country, set Saint Ignatius on the throne of the Bourbons, or banish him for ever across the Bidassoa. In England also, is any great measure to be carried, the ministers dine together. Is an opposition to that measure to be organized, the opposition party meet at a tavern. Is a Lord Mayor to be installed, every chin east of Temple-bar is greased with turtle: nay, a poor bastard cannot come into the world, but it forms the subject of a dinner for the overseers. Does not a good dinner crown the ceremony of a coronation? does it not put the seal to the solemnity of a visitation? A marriage is scarcely legal if unaccompanied by good cheer; a christening depends nearly as much on the wine as the water; and even death itself is admitted as a good excuse for a feast or a compotation.

In such a state of public opinion, is it not surprising that the place of our habitual meals should go for a good deal in the establishment of our character, and that from the Thatched-House to the St. Giles's diving cellar, where the knives and forks are chained to the table, and the guests are entertained for three halfpence per head every day on hot roast and boiled-potatoes, every distinct shade of good cheer and refinement should mark beyond appeal the rank and consequence of the person who enjoys them. When our finances are low, and we skulk into the back-parlour of a cook-shop in Shire-lane, can we, dare we, walk with the same erect carriage and roving eye, that looks out, on all sides to canvass a bow or challenge a nod, as when we pass for a beef-steak and a pint of port to the Grecian Coffee-house? This has been many a man's case, whose brow now lours, and whose eye flashes lightning on a trembling witness; yet with all the effrontery

of his trade, and all the terrors of his wig to boot, the stoutest-hearted of them all would not have the courage to look big on such an occasion. Every man, in his heart of heart, esteems himself according as he dines; and at every step upwards in the hierarchy of fashion, from the aforesaid Grecian to Long's, and to the French cookery of the best montés club-houses, we rise a peg higher in conceit, and digest with a complaisance proportionate to the splendour of the repast. In this we but do ourselves simple justice; for the world is quite of the same opinion; and "tell me where you dine, and I'll tell you what you are," is a maxim, if not in every body's mouth, yet deeply rooted in the hearts and heads of all who know the world. What a tedious and miserable piece of business would life be without the agreeable incidents of eating and drinking! Let the stoics say what they may, the pleasures of the table are the first we experience, the last we quit, and those which we enjoy the most frequently. What is falsely called ambition, is but the desire of fruition, and the love of power is but the love of eating, at the expense of others. What indeed is the essence of bad government, but the bad fare of the people?

Il faut, que dans nos besoins

Le peuple dîne un peu moins

is the motto of all corrupt statesmen; for as long as they dine well themselves, they care not how the world wags with the canaille. Digestion is the affair of the stomach, and indigestion is the affair of the doctors; but the enjoyment of a good dinner is the affair of all the world, and to succeed, where all contend, is to be a truly great man. There are, in effect, but two sorts of persons in society-those who have not enough to eat, and those who have too much; and not all the gouts and stone in the nosology would persuade the most hypochondriac epicure, to lose cast, and exchange his fat sorrow for a lean one. The dignity of eating was duly considered by our primitive ancestors, who suffered no one to be seated above the salt, who was not a man of pith and likelihood. The same was the case with the Romans, who always treated their guests according to their quality. The poor devils of dependants were obliged to put up with hungry sour wine, while the proud lord of the feast with his equals drank Falernian.

The dignity of eating is established by the hand of nature itself. Who ever saw a thin, herring-gutted fellow, that had the slightest pretence to an imposing exterior? Whereas a portly carriage inspires an involuntary respect in all beholders. The Chinese let their nails grow, in order to show that they do not labour with their hands, and in the same wise spirit they desire that their Mandarins should look as if they fared sumptuously every day. This is no more than might be expected from so ancient and grave a nation; and so consonant is it with truth and nature, that we find the same notion running in the under-current of most men's ideas. What caricaturist is so ignorant as to paint a fat curate, or a lean rector? Milo was as much famed for eating as for currying his ox; and the great alderman so celebrated for his constancy to any man who is minister, through good and through evil report, will be much longer remembered for his attachment to good living. If there were not something intrinsically excellent in eating, it would not enter so largely into "sound learning and religious educa