[c. 1610.—"They give them also a certain grain like lentils."—Pyrard de Laval, Hak. Soc. ii. 79.]
1702.—"... he confessing before us that their allowance three times a week is but a quart of rice and gram together for five men a day, but promises that for the future it shall be rectified."—In Wheeler, ii. 10.
1776.—"... Lentils, gram ... mustard seed."—Halhed's Code, p. 8 (pt. ii.).
1789.—"... Gram, a small kind of pulse, universally used instead of oats."—Munro's Narrative, 85.
1793.—"... gram, which it is not customary to give to bullocks in the Carnatic."—Dirom's Narrative, 97.
1804.—"The gram alone, for the four regiments with me, has in some months cost 50,000 pagodas."—Wellington, iii. 71.
1865.—"But they had come at a wrong season, gram was dear, and prices low, and the sale concluded in a dead loss."—Palgrave's Arabia, 290.
GRAM-FED, adj. Properly the distinctive description of mutton and beef fattened upon gram, which used to be the pride of Bengal. But applied figuratively to any 'pampered creature.'
c. 1849.—"By an old Indian I mean a man full of curry and of bad Hindustani, with a fat liver and no brains, but with a self-sufficient idea that no one can know India except through long experience of brandy, champagne, gram-fed mutton, cheroots and hookahs."—Sir C. Napier, quoted in Bos. Smith's Life of Ld. Lawrence, i. 338.
1880.—"I missed two persons at the Delhi assemblage in 1877. All the gram-fed secretaries and most of the alcoholic chiefs were there; but the famine-haunted villagers and the delirium-shattered opium-eating Chinaman, who had to pay the bill, were not present."—Ali Baba, 127.