SHELLEY'S VEGETARIANISM.
By William E. A. Axon, F.R.S.L.,
Vice-President and Hon. Secretary of the Vegetarian Society.
[Read at a meeting of the Shelley Society, University College, Gower
Street, London, November 12th, 1890.]
I.
Let us first see what are the facts as to Shelley's Vegetarianism. The practice is as old as Paradise, but the word was not invented until 1847, and in all the earlier literature of the subject we read of "natural diet," "vegetable regimen," "Pythagorean system," and other phrases, but never of "Vegetarianism." The question has already been discussed in Howard William's "Ethics of Diet," 1883; in the introduction to the reprint of the "Vindication of Natural Diet," 1887; by Mr. H. S. Salt, in "Almonds and Raisins," 1887; and in "Book Lore," Vol. iii., p. 121.
Shelley's taste in food always appears to have been that of a healthy child, having no liking for flesh foods, but enjoying bread and fruit and sweets of all kinds. Prof. Dowden says that at Oxford, where there was a certain anticipation of a vegetable diet, "his fare, though temperate, was not meagre; he was, as Trelawney knew him in Italy, 'like a healthy, well-conditioned boy.' We find him vigorous, capable of enduring fatigue, and in the main happy; not troubled by nervous excitement or thick-coming fancies."—(Dowden's "Life," Vol. i., p. 87.) Shelley, however, did not formally adopt Vegetarianism until the spring of 1812. Harriet Westbrook wrote from Dublin to Miss Hitchiner, on March 14th, 1812, "You do not know that we have forsworn meat and adopted the
