“Simply let those, like him of Samos, live: Let herbs to them a _bloodless_ banquet give. In beechen goblets let their beverage shine, Cool from the crystal spring their sober wine! Their youth should pass in innocence secure From stain licentious, and in manners pure. * * * * * For these are sacred bards and, from above, Drink large infusions from the mind of Jove.”[132] To readers of his master-piece the _Paradise Lost_, it is perhaps a work of supererogation to point out the charming passages in which he sympathetically describes the food of the Age of Innocence:-- “Savoury fruits, of taste to please True appetites.” In Raphael’s discourse with his terrestrial entertainers, the ethereal messenger utters a prophecy (as we may take it) of the future general adoption by our race of “fruit, man’s nourishment,” and we may interpret his intimation:-- “time may come when men With angels may participate, and find No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare. And from those corporal nutriments perhaps Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit, Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend Ethereal as we; or may, at choice, _Here_, or in heavenly paradises, dwell,” as a picture of the true earthly paradise to be--“the Paradise of Peace.” With these exquisite pictures of the life of bloodless feasts and ambrosial food we may compare the fearful picture of the Court of Death, displayed in prospective vision before the terror-stricken gaze of the traditional progenitor of our species, where, amongst the occupants, the largest number are the victims of “intemperance in meats and drinks, which on the earth shall bring diseases dire.” In this universal lazar-house might be seen-- “all maladies Of ghastly Spasm, or racking torture, Qualms Of heart-sick agony, all Feverous kinds, Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs, Intestine Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs, Demoniac Phrensy, moping Melancholy, And moon-struck Madness, pining Atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting Pestilence, Dropsies and Asthmas, and joint-racking Rheums.”[133]