who take their dinner about one o’clock, and so successively dropping in upon the next and the next, till by the time I got among my more fashionable intimates, whose hour was six or seven, I have nearly made up the body of a just and complete meal (as I reckon it), without taking more than one dinner (as they account of dinners) at one person’s house.  Since I have been found out, I endeavor to make up by a damper, as I call it, at home, before I go out.  But, alas! with me, increase of appetite truly grows by what it feeds on.  What is peculiarly offensive to me at those dinner-parties is, the senseless custom of cheese, and the dessert afterwards.  I have a rational antipathy to the former; and for fruit, and those other vain vegetable substitutes for meat (meat, the only legitimate aliment for human creatures since the Flood, as I take it to be deduced from that permission, or ordinance rather, given to Noah and his descendants), I hold them in perfect contempt.  Hay for horses.  I remember a pretty apologue, which Mandeville tells, very much to this purpose, in his Fable of the Bees:—­He brings in a Lion arguing with a Merchant, who had ventured to expostulate with this king of beasts upon his violent methods of feeding.  The Lion thus retorts:—­“Savage I am, but no creature can be called cruel but what either by malice or insensibility extinguishes his natural pity.  The Lion was born without compassion:  we follow the instinct of our nature; the gods have appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other animals, and as long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt after the living; ’tis only man, mischievous man, that can make death a sport.  Nature taught your stomach to crave nothing but vegetables.—­(Under favor of the Lion, if he meant to assert this universally of mankind, it is not true.  However, what he says presently is very sensible.)—­Your violent fondness to change, and greater eagerness after novelties, have prompted you to the destruction of animals without justice or necessity.  The Lion has a ferment within him, that consumes the toughest skin and hardest bones, as well as the flesh of all animals without exception.  Your squeamish stomach, in which the digestive heat is weak and inconsiderable, won’t so much as admit of the most tender parts of them, unless above half the concoction has been performed by artificial fire beforehand; and yet what animal have you spared, to satisfy the caprices of a languid appetite?  Languid, I say; for what is man’s hunger if compared with the Lion’s?  Yours, when it is at the worst, makes you faint; mine makes me mad:  oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay the violence of it, but in vain:  nothing but large quantities of flesh can any ways appease it.”—­Allowing for the Lion not having a prophetic instinct to take in every lusus naturae that, was possible of the human appetite, he was, generally speaking, in the right; and the Merchant was so impressed with his argument that, we are told, he replied not, but fainted away.  O, Mr. Reflector, that I were not obliged to add, that the creature who thus argues was but a type of me!  Miserable man! I am that Lion! “Oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay that violence, but in vain; nothing but——.”