WE MEET IN CROWDS! BY MRS. C. BARON WILSON. We meet in crowds! who used to meet all lonely, Where the soft moonbeams trembling lit the shade; And, for the vows we interchanged, now only Are the cold courtesies of fashion paid! We meet in crowds !-where empty mirth is lighting We meet in crowds!-ah! how unlike the meeting We meet in crowds!—as strangers, cold and sadly, THE MORALITY OF THE STOMACH. "Mais quelle folie est plus contre la nature, que d'estimer les actions vicieuses pour ce qu'elles sont naturelles, indignés pour ce qu'elles sont nécessaires."-CHARRON. Croyez le si voulez; si ne voulez, allez y voir.”—RABELAIS. UPON a mature consideration of human nature (and we are now alas! an essayist of some twenty, or perhaps five-and-twenty years standing), we have satisfied ourselves that the greatest fault, and at the same time the greatest misfortune, incidental to the chétive espèce, is it's never knowing on which side its bread is buttered. This will be thought, perhaps, a paradox by many, who will be tempted, if they be sailors, to cry out avast;" if sportsmen, to halloo into our ear "hark back;" or, if honest cockneys, to put on their knowingest slang look, and tell us to "draw it mild." We are right, nevertheless; and we pray all such objectors to remember that most truths are paradoxes to those who know no better; and that things in general have something else to do, than adapt themselves to the apprehensions, or rather misapprehensions, of the ignorant multitude. Not that we would go the whole length of the French philosopher, who suspected himself of having uttered some marvellous piece of absurdity, whenever he was generally ap plauded by the public-far from it. Common sense is not necessarily common nonsense, however often it may happen to be so. Horace (a keen judge of such matters) admits that interdum vulgus rectum videt, est ubi peccat; which being interpreted, may signify that "it's not, on any particular occasion, more than an even chance the public are wrong." We beg, therefore, not to be misunderstood as meaning to discourage our "gentle" friends, or hinting that they should abstain altogether from exercising their judgment, as a matter "beyond their sphere." On the contrary, we opine that the mistakes of the public are principally owing to a villanous mauvaise honte, a mock modesty, which disposes them to take up with any second-hand authority, rather than venture upon an opinion honestly got by inquiry and meditation. A newspaper advertisement, a theatrical criticism, a paragraph in a review, will satisfy half the town on the expediency of taking vegetable pills, of applauding a bad actor, of adopting a nonsensical philosophy, or sporting a false creed; when half an hour's calm reflection, would show the parties that they are in reality just as good (it will go hard with them if they are not better) judges of the points at issue, than their interested misleaders. Our admonition, then, extends only to a desire that our readers would not fly off at a tangent, because we may not happen to coincide with some half-a-score of such "best possible instructors;" and that they may take the trouble to follow us patiently through what we have to say in behalf of our own notion. But to return from this digression,-it is not because every here and there, we may meet with a man who really understands his own interest, or, as he would himself express it, knows a thing or two, that we are to conclude that mankind in general are in the same happy condition. We need only look at the great majority of the species, who, if they have bread to butter, most assuredly have not the unctuous antiattrition compound to spread it withal; thereby, as we are apt to con clude, clearly establishing their deficiency in the aforesaid particular branch of their education. It cannot, indeed, escape observation that as there must be two parties to every bargain, and as no one can win, unless somebody loses, there would be no use in the beatific knowledge in question, if all the world were equally instructed. Now, it is an undeniable fact, that some people have not only the butter laid on an inch thick, but regularly scored in "glass windows," and powdered with sugar; therefore, some must have it spread with the sharp edge of the knife, and many more eat their meal absolutely dry. q. e. d. After this, if any one, at the risk of choking, doubts that we are right, all we ask of him, is to sit down and write a history of opinions, moral, political, economical, and fashionable, going no further back than the invention of tertiary strata; and if he is not convinced, before he arrives at his twentieth folio volume, then our name is not μ., that's all. But why, it may be asked, have we embarked in this sweeping assertion? Not for the sake, most assuredly, of picking a german quarrel with any man's self-conceit; we do not say that A. B. and C., know not on which side their bread is buttered, but leave the matter to their own honour and conscience; and if any half-dozen of these alphabetical personages, really think themselves in the enviable predicament of possessing such knowledge, they have our free leave to enjoy the notion in peace, and be thankful. We made the general remark, as most general remarks are made by essayists, for the sake of introducing a particular instance: for it is a rule worth all Aristotle's not to start with particulars, which conveys an impression of a paltry imagination -besides, the public have such confidence in generals! A particular instance, too, may have been discovered hap-hazard, lying, like rebellion, in one's way; whereas a general proposition implies, that he who uses it, knows what he is about. It saves the rushing at once into the heart of a subject, point blank, without note of preparation; serving, like the orator's exordium, to introduce himself and his cause to his auditors, and to break ground for future operations. But enough of this,-we have gained our end, and erected a decent portico in front of the main body of our discourse; so we can afford to come without more ado, to the specialities for the sake of which we commenced thus magniloquently wide of our mark. We take it, then, that among the signs of a prevailing ignorance concerning the geological stratification of our bread and butter, there are none more pregnant than the contempt which sciolists have been permitted to cast upon that respectable part of our microcosm, the organ of digestion, and the universal neglect of much valuable instruction, which it is capable of affording upon a thousand circumstances, most interesting to society, and hitherto most open to dispute. Such ignorance, amongst its manifold other bad consequences, has been the occasion of the wide diffusion of an unpardonable ingratitude. Scarcely once in a hundred, nay, in a thousand times, shall we find a man honest enough to admit the many satisfactions he derives from the ventricular inlet to pleasurable sensations: nay, may we not rather say, that the more assiduously the world addicts itself to the cultivation of such pleasures, the more strenuously does it deny that it gives them a thought? How many subscribers to public charities hide, even from themselves, that the dinner is the hinge upon which their subscriptions depend! How many worthy holders-forth preach against carnal pleasures, unconscious that their mind is at the very moment going astray from the holy work in hand, to the sucking-pig in course of roasting at home, and on the prune sauce which is to accompany it! How many pietists are there, who, looking down from the height of their spiritual superiority upon the attributes of their bodily humanity, forget that they consider the mortification of this same flesh as of consequence enough to become an acceptable sacrifice. How many learned judges and high-minded statesmen, who "fling from them with indignation" the charge of being influenced in their public life by any thing but the most elevated motives, would leave justice (but for the quarterly salary that supports the digestive process) to administer itself, and allow the public to go to leeward for want of an executive. That they should thus be influenced is no matter of reproach. Tout pour la tripe may be no very elevated impulse, but it is an honest one; and those who disparage it, would do well to remember, that there is no adding a cubit to the stature of our motives, more than to that of our persons. Is it not then better to candidly admit, that la tripe in all ages has been a little thing great to little men? For our part, we say, with a certain ex-autocrat of cabs and jarveys, that we have no objection to salary; that the labourer is worthy of his hire; and we contend with our best energies, that the public would be badly served indeed in all its departments,-from the prime minister's to the butterman's, from an encyclopædia to a penny magazine, if it got its accommodations for nothing. It is not the prac tice, but the abominable hypocrisy of denying it which moves our bile: for we hold that a man who looks down on his own stomach, is a born idiot, or an educated and accomplished knave, and a barefaced pretender. It is a fundamental truth in natural science, that the whole organized world is mounted with an especial regard to the stomach. Cuvier, and the other comparative anatomists, have demonstrated to evidence, that a membranous digesting sack is the simplest primeval form of animal being; and that, as organization progresses in complexity, the stomach is ever the nucleus round which heads, hearts, legs, wings, and tails, are arranged, with an all but exclusive view to the especial interests of that part. While, therefore, a stomach can do very well by itself, in independence of all that we are accustomed to consider as the animal, no animal can carry on the war for five minutes, without a stomach. The stomach is in truth the causa causans of all the endless varieties of animal form; and digestion, the one main end of animal existence. Man himself, that perpetual object of his own admiration, (" how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god !") is but a more complicated zoophyte, a perfectionated stomach, a transcendental machine for the assimilation and elaboration of nutritious particles. To eat, and be eaten, is the common lot of all living beings; and if man be indeed the lord of the creation, it is manifestly only in the right of his omnivorous faculty. With good reason has Aretaus (who with Hippocrates, forms the gemini of Greek medicine) declared, in very choice and undeniable Greek, that the stomach is the generalissimo of our pleasures and pains; for nothing can go wrong in this important part of the microcosm, without implicating the rest of the members, or go right without making them the better for it: just as, in all other domestic establishments, if the masters be disturbed, the valets feel the weight of their tem→ per; and if the mistresses like their own looks and lovers, the waitingmaids are a gown or a cast bonnet in pocket by their self-satisfaction. On these grounds we hold that the first obligation, the main point of morality, the one thing needful to man, is a due sense of his obligations to his stomach, and an adequate provision for its wants, without which it is impossible, or next to impossible, that he should properly perform his duty, either to God or man. Terence very wisely places life itself in good living (vixit dum vixit bene), well knowing that there is no fulfilling the parts of manhood upon an empty stomach, and that ventre affamé n'a point d'oreilles. If we regard the matter in its generality, it is easy to see that the affairs of the stomach are liable to two mistakes, the having too little, or too much for its occupation. Accordingly, diseases may be divided, as they spring from one or other of these excesses; and crimes (the diseases of social man) are all referrible to one or other of these faulty conditions. A Greek proverb tells us that the stomach is heavy when empty, and light when filled; which is obviously a mere figure of speech, a pars pro toto, the stomach being used "tropically" as a constitutional representative of the whole man. A worthy collaborateur was not so much out when, in a recent number of the New Monthly, he advised that favours should not be asked before dinner; it is a physiological no less than a moral truth. Without recurring to those painfully distressing instances in which a whole crew of mariners, having been shipwrecked and left to die with hunger, have forgotten their Christian nature, to cast the eyes of covetousness upon the least attenuated of their fellow-sufferers, there can be no question that the mollia tempora fandi, the moment in which benevolence is most active, and a man most anxious to please, is that which follows a light and agreeable digestion :-so much has the stomach to do with virtue. In descending to particulars, a moment's reflection will satisfy the most incredulous, that the stomach is the great parent of industry; and we would lay any wager, that if nature spread her table gratis to all mankind, all mankind would keep Saint Monday every day in the week. "Magister artis ingenîque largitor," is an universal proposition; and Juvenal was narrow-minded in confining what he wrote of the Græculus esuriens to one particular country. No matter the race, the climate, or the religion, in every house where "things are so so," and the stomach finds a difficulty in raising the supplies by honest means, the conscience of the inhabitants, without much hesitation, permits a recurrence to modes of industry, about which," the least said is the soonest mended." In such a case, however, if, as Juvenal surmises, the Græculus in cœlum jusseris ibit, he will form a lucky exception to the general rule, which indicates what Moore delicately calls "the other way," as being the more fashionable road to take, under the contingency; and the grater number will, we opine, incontinently betake themselves to it without awaiting the previous formula of the command indicated by Johnhis energetic translation of Juvenal's Latin. But though much hunger will thwart the best-directed effort spion, in then is of vice |