“The more man follows Nature and obeys her laws the longer will he live. The further he removes from them (_je weiter er von ihnen abweicht_) the shorter will be his duration of existence.... Only inartificial, simple nourishment promotes health and long life, while mixed and rich foods but shorten our existence.... We frequently find a very advanced old age amongst men who from youth upwards have lived, for the most part, upon the vegetable diet, and, perhaps, have never tasted flesh.”[205]
Known to the world generally as an eminent antiquarian and, in particular, as one of the earliest and most acute investigators of the sources of English romantic poetry, for future times his best and enduring fame will rest upon his at present almost forgotten Moral Essay upon Abstinence--one of the most able and philosophical of the ethical expositions of anti-kreophagy ever published.
His birthplace was Stockton in the county of Durham. By profession a conveyancer, he enjoyed leisure for literary pursuits by his income from an official appointment. During the twenty years from 1782 to 1802 his time and talents were incessantly employed in the publication of his various works, antiquarian and critical. His first notable critique was his _Observations_ on Warton’s _History of English Poetry_, in the shape of a letter to the author (1782), in which his critical zeal seems to have been in excess of his literary amenity. Of other literary productions may be enumerated his _Remarks on the Commentators of Shakspere_; _A Select Collection of English Songs, with a Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Songs_ (1783); _Ancient Songs from the Time of King Henry III. to the Revolution_ (1790), reprinted in 1829--perhaps the most valuable of his archæological labours; _The English Anthology_ (1793); _Ancient English Metrical Romances_, and _Bibliographia Poetica_, a catalogue of English poets from the 12th to the 16th century, inclusive, with short notices of their works. These are only some of the productions of his industry and genius.
We give the origin of his adhesion to the Humanitarian Creed as recorded by himself in one of the chapters of his Essay, in which, also, he introduces the name of an ardent and well-known humanitarian reformer:--