our animal part shamefully and dangerously over nourished, and that much
of the immorality of the world was due to the present excessive
indulgence in meats. 'Not in drink?' Miss Graves inquired. 'No,' he said
boldly; 'not equally; meats are more insidious. I say nothing of taking
life--of fattening for that express purpose: diseases of animals: bad
blood made: cruelty superinduced: it will be seen to be, it will be
looked back on, as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism. Let that
pass. I say, that for excess in drinking, the penalty is paid instantly,
or at least on the morrow.'

'Paid by the drunkard's wife, you should say.'

'Whereas intemperance in eating, corrupts constitutionally, more
spiritually vitiates, we think: on the whole, gluttony is the least-
generous of the vices.'

Colney lured Mr. Pempton through a quagmire of the vices to declare,
that it brutalized; and stammeringly to adopt the suggestion, that our
breeding of English ladies--those lights of the civilized world--can
hardly go with a feeding upon flesh of beasts. Priscilla regretted that
champagne should have to be pleaded in excuse of impertinences to her
sex. They were both combative, nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict
wounds; and they were set to shudder openly at one another's practises;
they might have exposed to Colney which of the two maniacal sections of
his English had the vaster conceit of superiority in purity; they were
baring themselves, as it were with a garment flung-off at each retort.
He reproached them for undermineing their countrymen; whose Falstaff
panics demanded blood of animals to restore them; and their periods of
bragging, that they should brandify their wits to imagine themselves
Vikings.