edibilis,1 I will maintain it to be the most delicate-princeps obsoniorum.2

I speak not of your grown porkersthings between pig and pork-those hobbydehoys-but a young and tender suckling -under a moon old-guiltless as yet of the sty-with no original speck of the amor immunditiæ, the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest-his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble, and a grumble-the mild forerunner, or præludium,* of a grunt.

He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled-but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument!

There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, wellwatched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called-the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistancewith the adhesive oleaginous-O call it not fat-but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it-the tender blossoming of fat-fat cropped in the bud-taken in the shoot-in the first innocence-the cream and quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure foodthe lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna-or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or common substance.

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his memory is odoriferous—no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon-no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages-he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure-and for such a tomb might be content to die.

He is the best of sapors.1 Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendent-a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tender-conscienced person would do well to pause-too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach her-like lovers' kisses, she biteth-she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish-but she stoppeth at the palate-she meddleth not with the appetite-and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton chop.

Pig-let me speak his praise-is no less provocative of the appetite, than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices.

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is-good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbors' fare.

I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind), to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper2 satisfactions, as in mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents.''3 Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chicken (those "tame villatic fowl''), capons, plovers, brawn,5 barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give everything.' I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavors, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house, slightingly, (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what)

a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual taste.-It argues an insensibility.

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt,' who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweet-meat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was over London bridge) a gray-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of day that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, school-boy-like, I made him a present of-the whole cake! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of selfsatisfaction; but before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger, that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I-I myself, and not another-would eat her nice cake-and what should I say to her the next time I saw her how naughty I was to part with her pretty present-and the odor of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last-and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and outof-place hypocrisy of goodness, and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old gray impostor.

Our ancestors were nice in their methods of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline2 is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhuman

1 Lamb's Aunt Hetty, mentioned in The Decay of Beggars.

The didactic practice of training the mind by engaging in hair-splitting distinctions. 3 making tender and sweet

ity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether, supposing that the flavor of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremam2) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death?" I forget the decision.

His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But, banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue

your

whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are-but consider, he is a weakling-a flower.

OLD CHINA 1823

I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any great house, I inquire for the china-closet, and next for the picture gallery. I cannot defend the order of preference, but by saying that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to; but I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination.

I had no repugnance then-why should I now have?-to those little, lawless, azuretinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective-a china tea-cup.

I like to see my old friends-whom distance cannot diminish-figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still-for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, has made to spring up beneath their sandals. I love the men with women's faces, and Lamb was never

1 A Jesuit college in France. a student there.

2 by whipping to death

3 roast whole after stuffing 4 strong onions

the women, if possible, with still more womanish expressions.

Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver-two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And here the same lady, or another-for likeness is identity on tea-cupsis stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead-a furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream!

Farther on-if far or near can be predicated of their world-see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays.1

Here a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive-so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay.

I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson2 (which we are old fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon), some of these speciosa miracula3 upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent purchase) which we were now for the first time using; and could not help remarking, how favorable circumstances had been to us of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort-when a passing sentiment seemed to over-shade the brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in Bridget.

"I wish the good old times would come again," she said, "when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was a middle state;"-so she was pleased to ramble on,-"in which I am sure we were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, O! how much ado I had to get you to consent in those times!) we were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for and against, and think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon, that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it.

"Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your

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friends cried shame upon you, it grew so thread-bare-and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent5 garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late-and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures-and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome-and when you presented it to me-and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating you called it)—and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till day-break-was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in that over-worn suit-your old corbeau1for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen-or sixteen shillings was it?-a great affair we thought it then-which you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases

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now.

"When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, which we christened the Lady Blanch; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money-and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture-was there no pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you?

"Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, when we had a holyday-holydays, and all other fun, are gone, now we are rich-and the little hand-basket in which I used to deposit our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad-and how you would pry about at noon-tide for some decent

house, where we might go in, and produce our store-only paying for the ale that you must call for-and speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a table-cloth-and wish for such another honest hostess, as Izaak Walton has described1 many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went a-fishingand sometimes they would prove obliging enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us-but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall? Now, when we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way-and go into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense-which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a precarious wel

come.

"You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit.2 Do you remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw The Battle of Hexham, and The Surrender of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in The Children in the Wood--when we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery-where you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me-and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me and the pleasure was the better for a little shame-and when the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or with Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say that the gallery was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially-that the relish of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going-that the company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on, on the stage-because a word lost would have been a chasm, which it was impossible for them to fill up. With such reflections we consoled our pride thenand I appeal to you, whether, as a woman, met generally with less attention and accommodation than I have done since in more expensive situations in the house? The getting in indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad enough,but there was still a law of civility to women

1In The Complete Angler.

The best portion of the theatre.

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recognized to quite as great an extent as we ever found in the other passages-and how a little difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat, and the play, afterwards! Now we can only pay our money, and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then-but sight, and all, I think, is gone with our poverty.

"There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they became quite commonin the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear to have them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we were to treat ourselves now-that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat-when two people living together, as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury, which both like; while each apologizes, and is willing to take both halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of themselves in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make much of others. But now-what I mean by the word-we never do make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons as we were, just above poverty.

"I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet-and much ado we used to have every Thirty-first Night of December to account for our exceedings-many a long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we had spent so much-or that we had not spent so much-or that it was impossible we should spend so much next yearand still we found our slender capital decreasing-but then, betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without that for the future-and the hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were never poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with 'lusty brimmers" (as you used to quote it out of hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton, as you called him),2 we used to welcome in the 'coming guest."3 Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of the old

1 Charles Cotton, The New Year, 50.

See Lamb's New Year's Eve, in which Cotton's poem is quoted.

Pope, The Odyssey, 15, 84.

year-no flattering promises about the new year doing better for us."

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half-Madonna-ish chit of a lady in that very blue summer-house."'

POOR RELATIONS

1823

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Bridget is so sparing of her speech, on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt 5 it. I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor hundred pounds a year. "It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened, and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain of. The resisting power-those natural dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten-with us are long since passed away. Competence to age is supplementary youth; a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride, where we formerly walked: live better, and lie softerand shall be wise to do so-than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those days returncould you and I once more walk our thirty miles a day-could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I be young to see them-could the good old oneshilling gallery days return-they are dreams, my cousin, now-but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fire-side, sitting on this luxurious sofa-be once more struggling up those inconvenient stair-cases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers-could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours-and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which always followed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us-I know not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew R-1 is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed- 55 tester,2 over the head of that pretty insipid (1777-1836), the 1. Nathan Meyer Rothschild founder of the English branch of the great European banking firm of the Rothschilds. bed canopy

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-a

He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you "That is Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and respect, that demands, and at the same time, seems to despair of entertainment. He entereth smiling, and-embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and-draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner time-when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company-but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children are accommodated at a side table. He never cometh upon open days, when your wife says with some complacency, "My dear, perhaps Mr. will drop in today." He remembereth birthdays and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot being small-yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a slice against his first resolution. He sticketh by the port -yet will be prevailed upon to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press 1A reference to the custom of the Egyptians of having a coffin containing a representation of a dead body carried through the banquet ball at the close of the feast to remind the guests of their necessary end, and to suggest that they should drink and be merry. See Herodotus's Historia, 2, 78.

Agathocles, tvrant of Sicily (317-289 B. C.). hated the sight of a pot because it reminded him that he was the son of a potter.

See Esther, 3:1-2; 5:11-13. See Luke, 16:20. 5 See I Kings, 13:24.

7 See Ecclesiastes, 10:1.

9 See Luke, 10:42.

See Exodus, 8:3-4. See Matthew, 7:3-5. 10 See Proverbs, 26:1

11 See Spenser's The Faerie Queene, I. 3, 30, 4 This phrase was the motto of Hunt's The In dicator.