These exercises soon convinced him that he greatly lacked a fund of words, and a facility of employing them; both of which he thought would have been abundantly supplied, had he but continued his old trade of _making verses_. The continual need of words of the same _meaning_, but of different _lengths_, for the _measure_; or of different sounds, for the _rhyme_, would have obliged him to seek a variety of _synonymes_. From this belief he took some of the papers and turned them into verse; and after he had sufficiently forgotten them, he again converted them into prose. On comparing _his_ Spectator with the original, he discovered many faults; but panting, as he did, for perfection in this noble art, nothing could discourage him. He bravely persevered in his experiments, and though he lamented that in most instances he still fell short of the charming original, yet in some he thought he had clearly improved the order and style. And when this happened, it gave him unspeakable satisfaction, as it sprung the dear hope that in time he should succeed in writing the English language in the same enchanting manner. CHAPTER X. About this time, which was somewhere in his sixteenth year, Ben lighted on a very curious work, by one _Tryon_, recommending vegetable diet altogether, and condemning "_animal food as a great crime_." He read it with all the avidity of a young and honest mind that wished to renounce error and embrace truth. "_From start to pole_," as the racers say, his conscience was under the lash, pointing at him as the dreadful SARCOPHAGIST, or MEAT-EATER alluded to by this severe writer. He could not, without horror reflect, that, young as he was, his stomach had yet been the grave of hundreds of lambs, pigs, birds, and other little animals, "_who had never injured him_." And when he extended the dismal idea over the vast surface of the globe, and saw the whole human race pursuing and butchering the poor brute creation, filling the sea and land with cries and blood and slaughter, he felt a depression of spirits with an anguish of mind that strongly tempted him, not only to detest man, but even to charge God himself with cruelty. But this distress did not continue long. Impatient of such wretchedness, he set all the powers of his mind to work, to discover designs in all this, worthy of the Creator. To his unspeakable satisfaction he soon made these important discoveries. 'Tis true, said he, man is constantly butchering the inferior creatures. And it is also true that they are constantly devouring one another. But after all, shocking as this may seem, it is but _dying_: it is but giving up life, or returning a something which was not their own; which for the honour of his goodness in their enjoyment, was only lent them for a season; and which, therefore, they ought not to think hard to return.