“The thrones of Asia have been repeatedly overturned by the shepherds of the North, and their arms have spread terror and devastation over the most fertile and warlike countries of Europe. On this occasion, as well as on many others, the sober historian is forcibly awakened from a pleasing vision, and is compelled, with some reluctance, to confess that the pastoral manners, which have been adorned with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence, are much better adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of a military life. “To illustrate this observation, I shall now proceed to consider a nation of shepherds and of warriors in the three important articles of (1) their diet, (2) their habitations, and (3) their exercises. 1. The corn, or even the rice, which constitutes the ordinary and wholesome food of a civilised people, can be obtained only by the patient toil of the husbandman. Some of the happy savages who dwell between the tropics are plentifully nourished by the liberality of Nature; but in the climates of the North a nation of shepherds is reduced to their flocks and herds. The skilful practitioners of the medical art will determine (if they are able to determine) how far the temper of the human mind may be affected by the use of animal or of vegetable food; and whether the common association of carnivorous and cruel deserves to be considered in any other light than that of an innocent, perhaps a salutary, prejudice of humanity. Yet if it be true that the sentiment of compassion is imperceptibly weakened by the sight and practice of domestic cruelty, we may observe that _the horrid objects which are disguised by the arts of European refinement_ are exhibited in their naked and most disgusting simplicity in the tent of a Tartar shepherd. The Oxen or the Sheep are slaughtered by the same hand from which they were accustomed to receive their daily food, and the bleeding limbs are served, with very little preparation, on the table of their unfeeling murderers.”[197] To the poets, who claim to be the interpreters and priests of Nature, we might, with justness, look for celebration of the anti-materialist living. Unhappily we too generally look in vain. The prophet-poets--Hesiod, Kalidâsa, Milton, Thomson, Shelley, Lamartine--form a band more noble than numerous. Of those who, not having entered the very sanctuary of the temple of humanitarianism, have been content to officiate in its outer courts, Burns and Cowper occupy a prominent place. That the latter, who felt so keenly “The persecution and the pain That man inflicts on all inferior kinds Regardless of their plaints,”