Consistently with the expression of this true philosophy, he declares elsewhere that-- “Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of expiring victims, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there. It gives one the image of a giant’s den in romance, bestrewed with scattered heads and mangled limbs.”[147] The personal character of Pope, we may add, has of late been subjected to minute and searching criticism. Some meannesses, springing from an extreme anxiety for fame with after ages, have undoubtedly tarnished his reputation for candour. His excessive animosity towards his public or private enemies may be palliated in part, if not excused, by his well-known feebleness of health and consequent mental irritability. For the rest, he was capable of the most sincere and disinterested attachments; and not his least merit, in literature, is that in an age of servile authorship he cultivated literature not for place or pay, but for its own sake. * * * * * Amongst Pope’s intimate friends were Dr. Arbuthnot, Dean Swift, and Gay. The first of these, best known as the joint author with Pope and Swift of _Martinus Scriblerus_, a satire on the useless pedantry prevalent in education and letters, and especially as the author of the _History of John Bull_ (the original of that immortal personification of beef, beer, and prejudice), published his _Essay Concerning Aliments_, in which the vegetable diet is commended as a preventive or cure of certain diseases, about the year 1730. Not the least meritorious of his works was an epitaph on the notorious Colonel Chartres--one of the few epitaphs which are attentive less to custom than to truth, and, we may add, in marked contrast with that typical one on his unhistorical contemporary Captain Blifil. In the _Travels of Lemuel Gulliver_ the reader will find the _sæva indignatio_ of Swift--or, at all events, of the Houyhnhnms--amongst other things, launched against the indiscriminating diet of his countrymen:-- “I told him” [the Master-Horse], says Gulliver, “we fed on a thousand things which operated contrary to each other--that we eat when we are not hungry, and drink without the provocation of thirst ... that it would be endless to give him a catalogue of all diseases incident to human bodies, for they could not be fewer than five or six hundred, spread over every limb and joint--in short, every part, external and intestine, having diseases appropriated to itself--to remedy which there was a sort of people bred up among us in the profession or pretence of curing the sick.”