Note 1382 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
MS.:
The glutton priest first tasted living food.
Bolingbroke, Fragment 24: "As if God was appeased whenever the priest was glutted with roast meat." Wakefield remarks that Pope followed Pythagoras in calling food "living," because it had once been alive. A meat diet is said, ver. 167, to have been the origin of wars, and here we are told that the "flamen first tasted living food" after war and tyranny had over-spread the earth, which is an inconsistency, unless Pope believed that his "glutton priests" were more abstemious than the rest of mankind till animals were sacrificed in the name of religion. The poet, in this Epistle, is loud in denouncing the practice of eating animal food, but he ate it without scruple himself.