tion of vegetables into meat or fish is a province of the culinary art which we appear to have lost; yet these are cibi innocentes, compared with the things themselves. No people are such gorgers of mere animal food as our own; the art of preparing vegetables, pulse, and roots, is scarcely known in this country. This cheaper and healthful food should be introduced among the common people, who neglect them from not knowing how to dress them. The peasant, for want of this skill, treads under foot the best meat in the world; and sometimes the best way of dressing it is least costly.

The gastric art must have reached to its last perfection, when we find that it had its history; and that they knew how to ascertain the æra of a dish with a sort of chronological exactness. The philosophers of Athenæus at table dissert on every dish, and tell us of one called maati, that there was a treatise composed on it; that it was first introduced at Athens, at the epocha of the Macedonian empire, but that it was undoubtedly a Thessalian invention; the most sumptuous people of all the Greeks. The maati was a term at length applied to any dainty of excessive delicacy, always served the last.

But as no art has ever attained perfection without numerous admirers, and as it is the public which only can make such exquisite cooks, our curiosity may be excited to inquire whether the patrons of the gastric art were as great enthusiasts as its professors.

We see they had writers who exhausted their genius on these professional topics; and books of cookery were much read: for a comic poet, quoted by Athenæus, exhibits a character exulting in having procured "The New Kitchen of Philoxenus, which," says he, "I keep for myself to read in my solitude." That these devotees to the culinary art undertook journeys to remote parts of the world, in quest of these discoveries, sufficient facts authenticate. England had the honour to furnish them with oysters, which they fetched from about Sandwich. Juvenal* records that Montanus was so well skilled in the science of good eating, that he could tell by the first bite whether they were English or not. The well-known Apicius poured into his stomach an immense fortune. He usually resided at Minturna, a town in Campania, where he ate shrimps at a high price: they were so large, that those of

* Sat. iv. 140.

Smyrna, and the prawns of Alexandria, could not be compared with the shrimps of Minturna. However, this luckless epicure was informed that the shrimps in Africa were more monstrous; and he embarks without losing a day. He encounters a great storm, and through imminent danger arrives at the shores of Africa. The fishermen bring him the largest for size their nets could furnish. Apicius shakes his head: "Have you never any larger ?" he inquires. The answer was not favourable to his hopes. Apicius rejects them, and fondly remembers the shrimps of his own Minturna. He orders his pilot to return to Italy, and leaves Africa with a look of contempt.

A fraternal genius was Philoxenus: he whose higher wish was to possess a crane's neck, that he might be the longer in savouring his dainties; and who appears to have invented some expedients which might answer, in some degree, the purpose. This impudent epicure was so little attentive to the feelings of his brother guests, that in the hot bath he avowedly habituated himself to keep his hands in the scalding water; and even used to gargle his throat with it, that he might feel less impediment in swallowing the hottest dishes. He bribed the cooks to serve up the repast smoking hot, that he might gloriously devour what he chose before any one else could venture to touch the dish. It seemed as if he had used his fingers to handle fire. "He is an oven, not a man!" exclaimed a grumbling fellow-guest. Once having embarked for Ephesus, for the purpose of eating fish, his favourite food, he arrived at the market, and found all the stalls empty. There was a wedding in the town, and all the fish had been bespoken. He hastens to embrace the new-married couple, and singing an epithalamium, the dithyrambic epicure enchanted the company. The bridegroom was delighted by the honour of the presence of such a poet, and earnestly requested he would come on the morrow. "I will come, young friend, if there is no fish at the market!"-It was this Philoxenus, who, at the table of Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily, having near him a small barbel, and observing a large one near the prince, took the little one, and held it to his ear. Dionysius inquired the reason. "At present," replied the ingenious epicure, "I am so occupied by my Galatea," (a poem in honour of the mistress of the tyrant,) "that I wished to inquire of this little fish, whether he could give me some information about Nereus; but he is silent, and

I imagine they have taken him up too young: I have no doubt that old one, opposite to you, would perfectly satisfy me.' Dionysius rewarded the pleasant conceit with the large barbel.

ANCIENT AND MODERN SATURNALIA.

THE Stagyrite discovered that our nature delights in imitation, and perhaps in nothing more than in representing personages different from ourselves in mockery of them; in fact, there is a passion for masquerade in human nature. Children discover this propensity; and the populace, who are the children of society, through all ages have been humoured by their governors with festivals and recreations, which are made up of this malicious transformation of persons and things; and the humble orders of society have been privileged by the higher, to please themselves by burlesquing and ridiculing the great, at short seasons, as some consolation for the rest of the year.

The Saturnalia of the Romans is a remarkable instance of this characteristic of mankind. Macrobius could not trace the origin of this institution, and seems to derive it from the Grecians; so that it might have arisen in some rude period of antiquity, and among another people. This conjecture seems supported by a passage in Gibbon's Miscellanies,* who discovers traces of this institution among the more ancient nations; and Huet imagined that he saw in the jubilee of the Hebrews some similar usages. It is to be regretted, that Gibbon does not afford us any new light on the cause in which originated the institution itself. The jubilee of the Hebrews was the solemn festival of an agricultural people, but bears none of the ludicrous characteristics of the Roman Saturnalia.

It would have been satisfactory to have discovered the occasion of the inconceivable licentiousness which was thus sanctioned by the legislator, this overturning of the principles of society, and this public ridicule of its laws, its customs, and its feelings. We are told, these festivals, dedicated to Saturn, were designed to represent the natural equality which prevailed in his golden age; and for this purpose the slaves were allowed to change places with the masters.

* Miscellaneous Works, vol. v. 504.

This was, however, giving the people a false notion of the equality of men; for, while the slave was converted into the master, the pretended equality was as much violated as in the usual situation of the parties. The political misconception of this term of natural equality seems, however, to have been carried on through all ages; and the political Saturnalia had lately nearly thrown Europe into a state of that worse than >slavery, where slaves are masters.

The Roman Saturnalia were latterly prolonged to a week's debauchery and folly; and a diary of that week's words and deeds would have furnished a copious chronicle of Facetiæ. Some notions we acquire from the laws of the Saturnalia of Lucian, an Epistle of Seneca's, * and from Horace, who from his love of quiet, retired from the city during this noisy

season.

It was towards the close of December, that all the town was in an unusual motion, and the children everywhere invoking Saturn; nothing now to be seen but tables spread out for feasting, and nothing heard but shouts of merriment: all business was dismissed, and none at work but cooks and confectioners; no account of expenses was to be kept, and it appears that one-tenth part of a man's income was to be appropriated to this jollity. All exertion of mind and body was forbidden, except for the purposes of recreation; nothing to be read or recited which did not provoke mirth, adapted to the season and the place. The slaves were allowed the utmost freedom of raillery and truth, with their masters ;† sitting with them at the table, dressed in their clothes, playing all sorts of tricks, telling them of their faults to their faces, while they smutted them. The slaves were imaginary kings, as indeed a lottery determined their rank; and as their masters attended them, whenever it happened that these performed their offices clumsily, doubtless with some recollections of their own similar misdemeanors, the slave made the master leap into the water head-foremost. No one was allowed to be angry, and he who was played on, if he loved his own comfort, would be the first to laugh. Glasses of all sizes were to be ready, and all were to drink when and what they chose; none but the most skilful musicians and tumblers were allowed to perform, for those people are worth * Seneca, Ep. 18.

Horace, in his dialogue with his slave Davus, exhibits a lively picture of this circumstance. Lib. ii. Sat. 7.

VOL. II.

S

nothing unless exquisite, as the Saturnalian laws decreed. Dancing, singing, and shouting, and carrying a female musician thrice round on their shoulders, accompanied by every grotesque humour they imagined, were indulged in that short week, which was to repay the many in which the masters had their revenge for the reign of this pretended equality. Another custom prevailed at this season: the priests performed their sacrifices to Saturn bare-headed, which Pitiscus explains in the spirit of this extraordinary institution, as designed to show that time discovers, or, as in the present case of the bare-headed priests, uncovers, all things.

Such was the Roman Saturnalia, the favourite popular recreations of Paganism; and as the sports and games of the people outlast the date of their empires, and are carried with them, however they may change their name and their place on the globe, the grosser pleasures of the Saturnalia were too well adapted to their tastes to be forgotten. The Saturnalia, therefore, long generated the most extraordinary institutions among the nations of modern Europe; and what seems more extraordinary than the unknown origin of the parent absurdity itself, the Saturnalia crept into the services and offices of the Christian church. Strange it is to observe at the altar the rites of religion burlesqued, and all its offices performed with the utmost buffoonery. It is only by tracing them to the Roman Saturnalia that we can at all account for these grotesque sports-that extraordinary mixture of libertinism and profaneness, so long continued under Christianity.

Such were the feasts of the ass, the feast of fools or madmen, fêtes des fous-the feast of the bull-of the Innocentsand that of the soudiacres, which, perhaps, in its original term, meant only sub-deacons, but their conduct was expressed by the conversion of a pun into saoudiacres or diacres saouls, drunken deacons. Institutions of this nature, even more numerous than the historian has usually recorded, and varied in their mode, seem to surpass each other in their utter extravagance.*

A large volume might be composed on these grotesque, profane, and licentious feasts. Du Cange notices several under different terms in his Glossary-Festum Asinorum, Kalendæ, Cervula. A curious collection has been made by the Abbé Artigny, in the fourth and seventh volumes of his "Mémoires d'Histoire," &c. Du Radier, in his "Récréations Historiques," vol. i. p. 109, has noticed several writers on the subject, and preserves one on the hunting of a man, called Adam, from Ash-Wednesday to Holy-Thursday, and treating him with a good supper at night,