She was telling him where she had dined the day before. “There were several gentlemen there,” said she, “and when some of them came to the tea-table, I found that there had been a good deal of hard drinking.”
She closed this observation with a common and trite moral reflection; which, indeed, is very ill-founded, and does great injustice to animals — “I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves.”
“I wonder, Madam,” replied the Doctor, “that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
– Anecdotes of the Revd. Percival Stockdale; collected in “Johnsonian Miscellanies,” edited by G.B. Hill.
For he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
I just love that.