of the present day is all that can be desired; warm, sufficient, and commodious, it is suited as well for the poor as the rich; and if grace be sacrificed to utility in many portions of our attire, we may yet rejoice that our men dress like men, and our women like women, neither aping, as of yore, the follies of each other's dress; and, moreover, a superabundant extravagance, except in variety, being almost as impossible as it would be foolish and vulgar.

HERE are only two bad things in this worldsaid Hannah More-sin and bile! But these evils are the occasion of all others; nay, accord

ing to the theory of certain savans, the first was the result of the second. "C'est la soupe qui fait le soldat;" that is to say, a man very much depends upon what you feed him with. Certain French philosophers are persuaded that, instead of soldat, we should use another word-saint. It is the dinner that makes a man good or bad. Thus far, in a rude, but unmistakable way, we place before our readers the strongest deduction which can be made of the effects of cookery bile is produced by bad cookery and indigestible meats; virtue is the result of good, nourishing, and light dinners. Rather materialistic this; but you hear the talk every day; and juries and medical witnesses are becoming convinced that crime depends as much upon or arises from a diseased state of the body as it does from a diseased mind; in fact, you are not able to have one healthy unless the other is. The mind must regulate what the body demands. says somewhere, "Mens peccat, non corpus, et unde consi

Livy

lium abfuit culpa est." "Every one who has reached the middle of life must have had occasion to observe how much his comfort and powers of exertion depend upon the state of his stomach;" so says Dr. Mayo. Now what are we to do to keep this stomach in order, this animal instinct which governs us? Some philosophers despise the stomach, but we cannot get on without it: our limbs may fall off one by one, our taste decay, our senses leave us, our mind be wrecked; but King Stomach lives, and will live, supreme! and how many are there of us who cry " Long live the King," and who offer daily and excessive taxes to his Majesty !

Since the invention of cookery (the assertion may seem sweeping, but it is true) we have all eaten too much; at least all the richer and middle classes have done so, in whose families there is always an abundance of good cheer. "The English," asserted an old traveller, "always make their first sacrifice to their belly-gods;" and really he said what is quite true. Even in the Saxon period, nay, before it, with the Romans, we were great eaters. Primrose Hill was called Mons Coquinarius, the Mountain of the Cooks; and the word Cockney, say some, should be Cokeney, old cookman, in fact. What Londoners have done all the island has done. We never had a lack of good cheer here. Chaucer writes of the Frankelein

"Withouté bake mete never was his hous,

Of fleissch, and fissch; and that so plenteous,
It snewed in his hous of mete and drynk,
Of all dainties that men couldé thinke.”

And the rest of his goodly company were the same: from the host to the widow; from the pretty little nun, who was fond of singing psalms in a wee voice through her nose, to the fat old nun's priest; from the portly abbot to the rich miller and poor squire; all seem to have been able to do their share at any table in the land. They were, in fact, the ordinary

eating English.

Nowadays we have the same healthy appetites. Business may trouble us, politics worry us, and money-matters drive us mad; but we all eat, and eat heartily. If we meet to hear music at the Crystal Palace, it ends in a feast. If we run out of town, we must finish by eating. Do we welcome a hero, we give him a dinner. Do we commence a charity, a feast inaugurates it; and the golden crumbs that drop, in the shape of subscription-guineas, from the table of Dives feed Lazarus and his family for many a long day. Nay, when a committee was formed to relieve the famine in Ireland, Englishmen, with their hearts full of pity, set seriously to work to relieve the unfortunate, and to eat. It will at least be interesting for each one of us to see how much he or she consumes in an ordinary lifetime: we say he or she advisedly, for the British female has a very healthy appetite; and those delicate young ladies who dine upon a lark's wing and sup upon a wafer are happily very rare indeed.

Presuming a man has his four meals a day regularly, he eats one thousand four hundred and sixty meals in one year. It is not too much to say that the majority of us could subsist very well on half that number. During sixty-five years he

will have consumed a flock of 350 sheep, and those for dinner alone. He may throw in another fifty for luncheons and suppers. Presuming he adds to his mutton a reasonable allowance of potatoes and bread, and a pint of liquid, not counting tea, above thirty tons of liquids and solids will have passed through his stomach and have been permeated by gastric juices. M. Soyer rose almost to sublimity when he contemplated the enormous amount, and in his Modern Housewife drew the picture of an epicure in his tenth year contemplating the future sustenance of his life and the luxuries which he will hereafter devour. Milton's serious picture of Adam in a prophetic vision contemplating all the wars, miseries, murders, thefts, plagues, troubles, of the future man, and all the thieves, robbers, captains, soldiers, and murderers, who would proceed from his loins, is the only parallel picture which we know of. "Fancy," wrote M. Soyer, 66 a youth in his tenth year, on the top of Primrose Hill, surrounded by the recherché provision claimed by the rank and wealth of a gourmand. He would be surrounded and gazed at by the following animals, which would eventually be his victims :30 oxen, 200 sheep, 100 calves, 200 lambs, 50 pigs, 1200 fowls, 300 turkeys, 150 geese, 400 ducklings, 263 pigeons, 1400 partridges, pheasants, and grouse, 450 plovers, ruffs, and reeves, 800 quails, 500 hares and rabbits, 40 deer, 120 guineafowl, and 360 wild fowl. In the way of fish, 120 turbot, 140 salmon, 120 cod, 260 trout, 400 mackerel, 800 soles and flounders, 200 eels, 150 haddocks, 400 red mullet, 400 herrings, 4000 smelt, 100,000 whitebait, 30,000 oysters, 20 turtles, 1500