time [his last lapse] I thank God I have gone on in one constant
tenor of diet, and enjoy as good health as, at my time of life
(being now sixty), I or any man can reasonably expect.” When we
remember the complicity of maladies of which he had been the victim
during his adhesion to the orthodox mode of living, such experience
is sufficiently significant. Some ten years later he records his
experiences as follows:--
“It is now about sixteen years since, for the last time, I entered
upon a milk and vegetable diet. At the beginning of this period,
this light food I took as my appetite directed, without any
measures, and found myself easy under it. After some time, I found
it became necessary to lessen this quantity, and I have latterly
reduced it to one-half, at most, of what I at first seemed to
bear; and if it should please God to spare me a few years longer,
in order to preserve, in that case, that freedom and clearness
which by his presence I now enjoy, I shall probably find myself
obliged to deny myself one-half of my present daily sustenance,
which, precisely, is three Winchester pints of new milk, and six
ounces of biscuit, made without salt or yeast, baked in a quick
oven.”[142]--[_Natural Method of Curing Diseases_, &c., page 298;
see also Preface to _Essay on Regimen_].
The last production of Dr. Cheyne was his “_Natural Method of Curing
the Diseases of the Body, and the Disorders of the Mind Depending
on the Body_. In three parts. Part I.--General Reflections on the
Economy of Nature in Animal Life. Part II.--The Means and Methods for
Preserving Life and Faculties; and also Concerning the Nature and Cure
of Acute, Contagious, and Cephalic Disorders. Part III.--Reflections
on the Nature and Cure of Particular Chronic Distempers. 8vo. Strahan,
London, 1742.” It is dedicated to the celebrated Lord Chesterfield, who
records his grateful recognition of the benefits he had experienced
from his methods. He writes: “I read with great pleasure your book,
which your bookseller sent me according to your direction. The physical
part is extremely good, and the metaphysical part _may be_ so too, for
what I know, and I believe it is, for as I look upon all metaphysics
to be guess work of imagination, I know no imagination likelier to hit
upon the right than yours, and I will take your guess against any other
metaphysician’s whatsoever. That part which is founded upon knowledge
and experience I look upon as a work of public utility, and for which
the present age and their posterity may be obliged to you, if they will
be pleased to follow it.” Lord Chesterfield, it will be seen below,
was one of those more refined minds whose better conscience revolted
from, even if they had not the courage or self-control to renounce, the
Slaughter House.
The _Natural Method_ its author considers as a kind of supplement
to his last book, containing “the practical inferences, and the
conclusions drawn from [its principles], in particular cases and
diseases, confirmed by forty years’ experience and observation.”
It is the most practical of all his works, and is full of valuable
observations. Very just and useful is his rebuke of that sort of
John-Bullism which affects to hold “good living” not only as harmless
but even as a sort of merit--
“How it may be in other countries and religions I will not say, but
among us good Protestants, abstinence, temperance, and moderation
(at least in eating), are so far from being thought a virtue, and
their contrary a vice, that it would seem that not eating the
fattest and most delicious, and _to the top_, were the only vice
and disease known among us--against which our parents, relatives,
friends, and physicians exclaim with great vehemence and zeal. And
yet, if we consider the matter attentively we shall find there is
no such danger in abstinence as we imagine, but, on the contrary,
the greatest abstinence and moderation nature and its external laws
will suffer us to go into and practise for any time, will neither
endanger our health, nor weaken our just thinking, be it ever so
unlimited or unrestrained.... And it is a wise providence that
Lent time falls out at that season which, if kept according to its
original intention, in seeds and vegetables well dressed and not in
rich high-dressed fish, would go a great way to preserve the health
of the people in general, as well as dispose them to seriousness
and reflection--so true it is that ‘godliness has the promise of
this life, and of that which is to come,’ and it is very observable
that in all civil and established religious worships hitherto
known among polished nations Lents, days of abstinence, seasons of
fasting and bringing down the brutal part of the rational being,
have had a large share, and been reckoned an indispensable part
of their worship and duty, except among a wrong-headed part of
our Reformation, where it has been despised and ridiculed into a
total neglect. And yet it seems not only natural and convenient for
health, but strongly commended both in the Old and New Testament,
and might allow time and proper disposition for more serious and
weighty purposes. And this ‘Lent,’ or times of abstinence, is one
reason of the cheerfulness or serenity of some Roman Catholic
or Southern countries, which would be still more healthy and
long-lived were it not for their excessive use of aromatics and
opiates, which are the worst kind of dry drams, and the cause of
their unnatural and unbridled lechery and shortness of life.”
Denouncing the general practice of the Profession of encouraging their
patients in indulging vitiated habits and tastes, he reminds them:--
“That such physicians do not consider that they are accountable
to the community, to their patients, to their conscience, and to
their Maker, for every hour and moment they shorten and cut off
their patients’ lives _by their immoral and murderous indulgence_:
and the patients do not duly ponder that suicide (which this is
in effect) is the most mortal and irremissible of all sins, and
neither have sufficiently weighed the possibility that the patient,
if not quickly cut off by both these preposterous means, may linger
out miserably, and be twenty or thirty years a-dying, under these
heart and wheel-breaking miseries thus exasperated; whereas, by the
methods I propose, if they obtain not in time a perfect cure, yet
they certainly lessen their pain, lengthen their days, and continue
under the benign influence of ‘the Sun of Righteousness, who has
healing in His wings,’ and, at worst, soften and lighten the
anguish of their dissolution, as far as the nature of things will
admit.”
Not the least useful and instructive portions of his treatise are his
references to the proper regimen for mental diseases and disordered
brains, which, he reasonably infers, are best treated by the adoption
of a light and pure dietary. He despairs, however, of the general
recognition, or at least adoption, of so rational a method by the
“faculty” or the public at large,
“Who do not consider that _nine parts in ten_ of the whole mass
of mankind are necessarily confined to this diet (of farinacea,
fruits, &c.), or pretty nearly to it, and yet live with the use of
their senses, limbs, and faculties, without diseases or with but
few, and those from accidents or epidemical causes; and that there
have been nations, and now are numbers of tribes, who voluntarily
confine themselves to vegetables only, ... and that there are whole
villages in this kingdom whose inhabitants scarce eat animal food
or drink fermented liquors a dozen times a year.”
In regard to all nervous and brain diseases, he insists that the
reformed diet would
“Greatly alleviate and render tolerable original distempers derived
from diseased parents, and that it is absolutely necessary for the
deep-thinking part of mankind, who would preserve their faculties
ripe and pregnant to a green old age and to the last dregs of life;
and that it is the true and real antidote and preservative from
wrong-headedness, irregular and disorderly intellect and functions,
from loss of the rational faculties, memory, and senses, as far
as the ends of Providence and the condition of mortality will
allow.”--(_Nat. Method_, page 90.)
This benevolent and beneficent dietetic reformer, according to the
testimony of an eye-witness, exemplified by his death the value of
his principles--relinquishing his last breath easily and tranquilly,
while his senses remained entire to the end. During his last illness
he was attended by the famous David Hartley, noticed below. He was
buried at Weston, near Bath. His character is sufficiently seen in his
writings which, if they contain some metaphysical or other ideas which
our reason cannot always endorse, in their _practical_ teaching prove
him to have been actuated by a true and earnest desire for the best
interests of his fellow-men. One of the merits of Cheyne’s writings is
his discarding the common orthodox _esoteric_ style of his profession,
who seem jealously to exclude all but the “initiated” from their sacred
mysteries. One of his biographers has remarked upon this point that
“there is another peculiarity about most of Dr. Cheyne’s writings
which is worthy of notice. Although there are many passages that are
quite unintelligible to the reader unless he possesses a considerable
knowledge, not only of medicine but also of mathematics, yet there
is no doubt but that the greater part of his works were intended for
popular perusal, and in this undertaking he is one of the few medical
writers who have been completely successful. His productions, which
were much read and had an extensive influence in their day, procured
him a considerable degree of reputation, not only with the public, but
also with the members of his own profession. If they present to the
reader no great discoveries (?) they possess the merit of putting more
prominently forward some useful but neglected truths; and though now,
probably, but little read, they contain much matter that is well worth
studying, and have obtained for their author a respectable place in the
history of medical literature.”[143]
Our notice of the author of the _Essay on Regimen_, &c., would
scarcely be complete without some reference to his friendship with
two distinguished characters--John Wesley and Samuel Richardson,[144]
the author of _Pamela_. It was to Dr. Cheyne that Wesley, as he tells
us in his journals, was indebted for his conversion to those dietetic
principles to which he attributes, in great measure, the invigoration
of his naturally feeble constitution, and which enabled him to undergo
an amount of fatigue and toil, both mentally and bodily, seldom or
never surpassed. Of Cheyne’s friendship for Richardson there are
several memorials preserved in his familiar letters to that popular
writer; and his free and naïve criticisms of his novels are not a
little amusing. The novelist, it seems, was one of his patients,
and that he was not always a satisfactory one, under the abstemious
regimen, appears occasionally from the remonstrances of his adviser.
XX.
POPE. 1688-1744.
The most epigrammatic, and one of the most elegant, of poets. He was
also one of the most precocious. His first production of importance
was his _Essay on Criticism_, written at the age of twenty-one,
although not published until two years later. But he had composed, we
are assured, several verses of an Epic at the age of twelve; and his
_Pastorals_ was given to the world by a youth of sixteen. Its division
into the Four Seasons is said to have suggested to Thomson the title of
his great poem. The MS. passed through the hands of some distinguished
persons, who loudly proclaimed the merits of the boy-poet.
In the same year with his fine mock-heroic _Rape of the Lock_ (1712)
appeared _The Messiah_, in imitation of Isaiah and of Virgil (in his
well-known _Eclogue_ IV.), both of whom celebrate, in similar strains,
the advent of a “golden age” to be. The “Sybilline” prophecy, which
Pope supposes the Latin poet to have read, existed, it need scarcely
be added, only in the imagination of himself and of the authorities on
whom he relied. _Windsor Forest_ (1713) deserves special notice as one
of the earliest of that class of poems which derive their inspiration
directly from Nature. It was the precursor of _The Seasons_, although
the anti-barbarous feeling is less pronounced in the former. We find,
however, the germs of that higher feeling which appears more developed
in the _Essay on Man_; and the following verses, descriptive of the
usual “sporting” scenes, are significant:--
“See! from the brake the whirring Pheasant springs,
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings:
Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound,
Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.
Ah, what avail his glossy, varying dyes,
His purple crest and scarlet-circled eyes--
The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,
His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?
* * * * *
To plains with well-breathed beagles they repair,
And trace the mazes of the circling Hare.
Beasts, urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue,
And learn of man each other to undo.
With slaughtering guns the unwearied fowler roves,
When frosts have whitened all the naked groves,
Where Doves, in flocks, the leafless trees o’ershade,
And lonely Woodcocks haunt the watery glade--
He lifts the tube, and level with his eye,
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky.
Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath,
The clamorous Lapwings feel the leaden death:
Oft, as the mounting Larks their notes prepare,
They fall and leave their little lives in air.”
His _Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard_ (a romantic version of a very
realistic story), _Temple of Fame_, _Imitations of Chaucer_,
translation of the _Iliad_ (1713-1720)--characterised by Gibbon as
having “every merit but that of likeness to its original”--an edition
of Shakspere, _The Dunciad_ (1728), translation of the _Odyssey_, are
some of the works which attest his genius and industry. But it is with
his _Moral Essays_--and in particular the _Essay on Man_ (1732-1735),
the most important of his productions--that we are especially concerned.
As is pretty well known, these _Essays_ owe their conception, in great
part, to his intimate friend St. John Bolingbroke. Although the author
by birth and, perhaps, still more from a feeling of pride which might
make him reluctant to abandon an unfashionable sect (such it was at
that time), belonged nominally to the Old Church, the theology and
metaphysics of the work display little of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. The
pervading principles of the _Essay on Man_ are natural theology or,
as Warburton styles it, “Naturalism” (_i.e._, the putting aside human
assertion for the study of the attributes of Deity through its visible
manifestations) and Optimism.[145]
The merits of the _Essay_, it must be added, consist not so much in the
philosophy of the poem as a whole as in the many fine and true thoughts
scattered throughout it, which the author’s epigrammatic terseness
indelibly fixes in the mind. Of the whole poem the most valuable
part, undoubtedly, is its ridicule of the common arrogant (pretended)
belief that all other species on the earth have been brought into
being for the benefit of the human race--an egregious fallacy, by the
way, which, ably exposed as it has been over and over again, still
frequently reappears in our popular theology and morals. To the writers
and talkers of this too numerous class may be commended the rebukes of
Pope:--
“Nothing is foreign--parts relate to whole:
One all-extending, all-preserving soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least--
Made beast in aid of man, and man of beast:
All served, all serving--nothing stands alone.
* * * * *
Has God, thou fool, worked solely for thy good,
Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?
* * * * *
Is it for thee the Lark ascends and sings?
Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings.
Is it for thee the Linnet pours his throat?
Loves of his own and raptures swell the note.
The bounding Steed you pompously bestride
Shares with his lord the pleasure and the pride.
* * * * *
Know Nature’s children all divide her care,
The fur that warms a monarch warmed a Bear.
While Man exclaims, ‘See all things for my use!’
‘See Man for mine!’ replies a pampered Goose.
And just as short of reason he must fall,
Who thinks _all made for one, not one for all_.”
He then paints the picture of the “Times of Innocence” of the Past, or
rather (as we must take it) of the Future:--
“_No murder clothed him, and no murder fed._
In the same temple--the resounding wood--
All vocal beings hymned their equal God.
The shrine, with gore unstained, with gold undrest,
Unbribed, unbloody, stood the blameless priest.
Heaven’s attribute was universal care,
And man’s prerogative to rule but spare.
Ah, how unlike the man of times to come--
_Of half that live the butcher and the tomb_!
Who, foe to Nature, hears the general groan,
Murders their species, and betrays his own.
But just disease to luxury succeeds,
And every death its own avenger breeds:
The fury-passions from that blood began,
And turned on man a fiercer savage, man.”
Again, depicting the growth of despotism and superstition, and
speculating as to--
“Who first taught souls enslaved and realms undone
The enormous faith of Many made for One?”
he traces the gradual horrors of sacrifice beginning with other, and
culminating in that of the human, species:--
“She [Superstition] from the rending earth and bursting skies
Saw gods descend, and fiends infernal rise:
Here fixed the dreadful, there the blest, abodes--
Fear made her devils and weak Hope her gods--
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust--
Such as the souls of cowards might conceive,
And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe.
* * * * *
Altars grew marble then, and reeked with gore;
_Then first the Flamen tasted living food,
Next his grim idol smeared with human blood_.
With Heaven’s own thunders shook the earth below,
And played the God an engine on his foe.”
Whenever occasion arises, Pope fails not to stigmatise the barbarity of
slaughtering for food; and the _sæva indignatio_ urges him to upbraid
his fellows with the slaughter of--
“The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed,
* * * * *
Who licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.”
And, again, he expresses his detestation of the selfishness of our
species who--
“Destroy all creatures for their sport or gust.”
That all this was no mere affectation of feeling appears from his
correspondence and contributions to the periodicals of the time:--
“I cannot think it extravagant,” he writes, “to imagine that
mankind are no less, in proportion, accountable for the ill use
of their dominion over the lower ranks of beings, than for the
exercise of tyranny over their own species. The more entirely the
inferior creation is submitted to our power, the more answerable
we must be for our mismanagement of them; and the rather, as the
very condition of Nature renders them incapable of receiving any
recompense in another life for ill-treatment in this.”[146]
Consistently with the expression of this true philosophy, he declares
elsewhere that--
“Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens
sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of expiring
victims, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up
here and there. It gives one the image of a giant’s den in romance,
bestrewed with scattered heads and mangled limbs.”[147]
The personal character of Pope, we may add, has of late been subjected
to minute and searching criticism. Some meannesses, springing from an
extreme anxiety for fame with after ages, have undoubtedly tarnished
his reputation for candour. His excessive animosity towards his public
or private enemies may be palliated in part, if not excused, by his
well-known feebleness of health and consequent mental irritability.
For the rest, he was capable of the most sincere and disinterested
attachments; and not his least merit, in literature, is that in an age
of servile authorship he cultivated literature not for place or pay,
but for its own sake.
* * * * *
Amongst Pope’s intimate friends were Dr. Arbuthnot, Dean Swift,
and Gay. The first of these, best known as the joint author with
Pope and Swift of _Martinus Scriblerus_, a satire on the useless
pedantry prevalent in education and letters, and especially as the
author of the _History of John Bull_ (the original of that immortal
personification of beef, beer, and prejudice), published his _Essay
Concerning Aliments_, in which the vegetable diet is commended as a
preventive or cure of certain diseases, about the year 1730. Not the
least meritorious of his works was an epitaph on the notorious Colonel
Chartres--one of the few epitaphs which are attentive less to custom
than to truth, and, we may add, in marked contrast with that typical
one on his unhistorical contemporary Captain Blifil.
In the _Travels of Lemuel Gulliver_ the reader will find the _sæva
indignatio_ of Swift--or, at all events, of the Houyhnhnms--amongst
other things, launched against the indiscriminating diet of his
countrymen:--
“I told him” [the Master-Horse], says Gulliver, “we fed on a
thousand things which operated contrary to each other--that we
eat when we are not hungry, and drink without the provocation of
thirst ... that it would be endless to give him a catalogue of all
diseases incident to human bodies, for they could not be fewer than
five or six hundred, spread over every limb and joint--in short,
every part, external and intestine, having diseases appropriated to
itself--to remedy which there was a sort of people bred up among us
in the profession or pretence of curing the sick.”
Among the infinite variety of remedies and prescriptions, in the
human _Materia Medica_, the astounded Houyhnhnm learns, are reckoned
“serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men’s flesh and bones, birds,
beasts, fishes”--no mere travellers’ tales (it is perhaps necessary
to explain), but sober fact, as any one may discover for himself by
an examination of some of the received and popular medical treatises
of the seventeenth century, in which the most absurd “prescriptions,”
involving the most frightful cruelty, are recorded with all
seriousness:--
“My master, continuing his discourse, said there was nothing
that rendered the Yahoos more odious than their undistinguishing
appetite to devour everything that came in their way, whether
herbs, roots, berries, the _corrupted flesh of animals, or all
mingled together_; and that it was peculiar in their temper that
they were fonder of what they could get by rapine or stealth at a
greater distance than much better food provided for them at home.
If their prey held out, they would eat till they were ready to
burst.”
Although unaccustomed to the better living, and finding it “insipid at
first,” the human slave of the Houyhnhnm (a word which, by the way, in
that language, means “the perfection of nature”) records as the result
of his experience, in the first place, how little will sustain human
life; and, in the second place, the fact of the superior healthfulness
of the vegetable food.[148]
About this period or a little earlier, Philippe Hecquet, a French
physician, published his _Traité des Dispenses du Carême_ (“Treatise
on Dispensations in Lent”), 1709, in which he gave in his adhesion
to the principles of Vegetarianism--at all events, so far as health
is concerned. He is mentioned by Voltaire, and is supposed to be the
original of the doctor Sangrado of Le Sage.[149] If this conjecture
have any truth, the author of _Gil Blas_ is open to the grave charge
of misrepresentation, of sacrificing truth to effect, or (what is still
worse and still more common) of pandering to popular prejudices.[150]
XXI.
THOMSON. 1700-1748.