In great cities, cannibalism takes an infinite variety of shapes. In the
neighbourhood of St. James's-street there are numerous slaughter-houses,
where men are daily consumed by the operation of cards and dice; and
where they are caught by the same bait, at which Quin said he should
have infallibly bitten. A similar process is likewise carried on in
'Change Alley, on a great scale; not to speak of that snare especially
set for widows and children, called a "joint stock speculation." But
your cannibal of cannibals is a parliament patron. Here, a great borough
proprietor swallows a regiment at a single gulp; and there, the younger
son of a lord ruminates over a colony till the very crows cannot find a
dinner in it; and there again, a duke or a minister, himself and his
family, having first "supped full of horrors," casts a diocese to the
side-table, to be mumbled at leisure by his son's tutor. The town is
occasionally very indignant and very noisy against the gouls of
Surgeons' Hall, because they live upon the dead carcasses of their
fellow-creatures; while, strange to say, it takes but little account of
the hordes of wretches who openly, and in the face of day, hunt down
living men in their nefarious dealings as porter brewers, quack doctors,
informers, attorneys, manufacturers of bean flour, alum, and Portland
stone; and torture their subjects like so many barbacued pigs, in the
complicated processes of their cookery.--_New Month. Mag._
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