What is the reason, can you guess,
Why men are poor, and women thinner?
So much do they for dinner dress,
There’s nothing left to dress for dinner.
On a graceless peer an epigrammatist wrote:—
“‘By proxy I pray, and by proxy I vote,’
A graceless peer said to a churchman of note;
Who answered,‘My lord, then I venture to say,
You’ll to heaven ascend in a similar way.’”
Here is a grateful grace:—
“Some hae meat that canna eat,
An’ some cou’d eat that want it;
But we hae meat, an’ we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.”
The Rev. Samuel Wesley, formerly vicar of Epworth, and another friend were entertained to dinner at Temple Belwood, by a host noted as a strange compound of avarice and oddity. Mr. Wesley returned thanks with the following impromptu lines:—
“Thanks for the feast, for ’tis no less
Than eating manna in the wilderness,
Here meagre famine bears controlless sway,
And ever drives each fainting wretch away.
Yet here, O how beyond a saint’s belief,
We’ve seen the glories of a chine of beef;
Here chimneys smoke, which never smoked before,
And we have dined, where we shall dine no more.”
In conclusion we give a vegetarian grace. The first four lines are to be said before the meal:—
“These fruits do Thou, O Father, bless,
Which Mother Earth to us doth give;
No blood doth stain our feast to day,
In Thee we trust, and peaceful live.”
The next is a form of thanksgiving after a vegetarian meal:—