So we all live by grace of killing, as indubitably as did any mediæval bravo or headsman. Wheresoever, in the familiar Scriptural phrase, two or three are gathered together, there again is the customary alliance of the Bible and Shakespeare justified by the aptness of the naïve old stage direction, _Enter three murderers_.... Nor is it instantly apparent that an assassination is converted into righteousness by a subsequent eating of the corpse. It is an epilogue, indeed, which savors a little distastefully of the necrophile. Besides, a passionate or disinterested murder may well in many circumstances retain a certain childish grace, as befits the first invention of the first baby: a mere murder is often picturesque and, I am told, enjoyable: but that crime which is called a dinner party was never, to my knowledge, either of these things.... And therefore one laments this obscene crunching and devouring which, when reflected upon, abates man's proper pride in his race, and coolingly checks love and every other exalted sentiment. It is not possible to think with adoration, or even with actual pleasure, of the most dear of ladies as the sarcophagus of fish and chicken, as the moving monument of so many mangled sheep, as the animated ossuary of oxen, as in brief a mere morgue. And man that is born of woman does literally, we see, come out of a coffin into the tedium of life, whereunder he encounters on all sides the yawning of one or another grave, in the persons of his fellow omnivora. So by the considerate our world may hardly be described as the realm of life rather than of death. And in all lands men have obscurely felt that death was perhaps the beginning as well as the end of all things. Thus, naturally enough, you find the Northmen talking of Ymir, the slain giant, whose flesh and blood and bones decayed into our earth and sea and mountains. In India men told of the giant Purusha, from whose dead body the world was just thus mortifyingly made: in Babylon, of rotting Tiamat; in China, of P'an Ku; and in Persia, of Gayomart. Everywhere you encounter the suspicion that this world and the busy life with which it swarms reveal the phenomena attendant upon the putrefying of any other sizable carcass: among all nations the older poets have, with queer unanimity, identified mankind with the worms which breed in a puffed and bubbling corpse; and have protested that, rightly speaking, in our terrestrial existence is nowhere apparent anything save the operation and products of death. § 59