I have a rational antipathy to the former; and for fruit, and those other vain vegetable substitutes for meat (meat, the only legitimate aliment for human creatures since the Flood, as I take it to be deduced from that permission, or ordinance rather, given to Noah and his descendants), I hold them in perfect contempt.

Hay for horses.

I remember a pretty apologue, which Mandeville tells, very much to this purpose, in his Fable of the Bees:--He brings in a Lion arguing with a Merchant, who had ventured to expostulate with this king of beasts upon his violent methods of feeding.

The Lion thus retorts:--"Savage I am, but no creature can be called cruel but what either by malice or insensibility extinguishes his natural pity.

The Lion was born without compassion: we follow the instinct of our nature; the gods have appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other animals, and as long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt after the living; 'tis only man, mischievous man, that can make death a sport.
Nature taught your stomach to crave nothing but vegetables .-- (Under favor of the Lion, if he meant to assert this universally of mankind, it is not true.