and conditions which marked the dawn of the art in England, and its slow transition to a luxurious excess, would be in strictness necessary; but I am tempted to refer the reader to an admirable series of papers which appeared on this subject in Barker's "Domestic Architecture," and were collected in 1861, under the title of "Our English Home: its Early History and Progress." In this little volume the author, who does not give his name, has drawn together in a succinct compass the collateral information which will help to render the following pages more luminous and interesting. An essay might be written on the appointments of the table only, their introduction, development, and multiplication.

The history and antiquities of the Culinary Art among the Greeks are handled with his usual care and skill by M.J.A. St. John in his "Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece," 1842; and in the Biblia or Hebrew Scriptures we get an indirect insight into the method of cooking from the forms of sacrifice.

The earliest legend which remains to us of Hellenic gastronomy is associated with cannibalism. It is the story of Pelops—an episode almost pre-Homeric, where a certain rudimentary knowledge of dressing flesh, and even of disguising its real nature, is implied in the tale, as it descends to us; and the next in order of times is perhaps the familiar passage in the Odyssey, recounting the adventures of Odysseus and his companions in the cave of Polyphemus. Here, again, we are introduced to a rude society of cave-dwellers, who eat human flesh, if not as an habitual diet, yet not only without reluctance, but with relish and enjoyment.

The Phagetica of Ennius, of which fragments remain, seems to be the most ancient treatise of the kind in Roman literature. It is supposed to relate an account of edible fishes; but in a complete state the work may very well have amounted to a general Manual on the subject. In relation even to Homer, the Phagetica is comparatively modern, following the Odyssey at a distance of some six centuries; and in the interval it is extremely likely that anthropophagy had become rarer among the Greeks, and that if they still continued to be cooking animals, they were relinquishing the practice of cooking one another.

Mr. Ferguson, again, has built on Athenaeus and other authorities a highly valuable paper on "The Formation of the Palate," and the late Mr. Coote, in the forty-first volume of "Archaeologia," has a second on the "Cuisine Bourgeoise" of ancient Rome. These two essays, with the "Fairfax Inventories" communicated to the forty-eighth volume of the "Archaeologia" by Mr. Peacock, cover much of the ground which had been scarcely traversed before by any scientific English inquirer. The importance of an insight into the culinary economy of the Romans lies in the obligations under which the more western nations of Europe are to it for nearly all that they at first knew upon the subject. The Romans, on their part, were borrowers in this, as in other, sciences from Greece, where the arts of cookery and medicine were associated, and were studied by physicians of the greatest eminence; and to Greece these mysteries found their way from Oriental sources. But the school of cookery which the Romans introduced into Britain was gradually superseded in large measure by one more agreeable to the climate and physical demands of the people; and the free use of animal food, which was probably never a leading feature in the diet of the Italians as a community, and may be treated as an incidence of imperial luxury, proved not merely innocuous, but actually beneficial to a more northerly race.

So little is to be collected—in the shape of direct testimony, next to nothing—of the domestic life of the Britons—that it is only by conjecture that one arrives at the conclusion that the original diet of our countrymen consisted of vegetables, wild fruit, the honey of wild bees—which is still extensively used in this country,—a coarse sort of bread, and milk. The latter was evidently treated as a very precious article of consumption, and its value was enhanced by the absence of oil and the apparent want of butter. Mr. Ferguson supposes, from some remains of newly-born calves, that our ancestors sacrificed the young of the cow rather than submit to a loss of the milk; but it was, on the contrary, an early superstition, and may be, on obvious grounds, a fact, that the presence of the young increased the yield in the mother, and that the removal of the calf was detrimental. The Italian invaders augmented and enriched the fare, without, perhaps, materially altering its character; and the first decided reformation in the mode of living here was doubtless achieved by the Saxon and Danish settlers; for those in the south, who had migrated hither from the Low Countries, ate little flesh, and indeed, as to certain animals, cherished, according to Caesar, religious scruples against it.

It was to the hunting tribes, who came to us from regions even bleaker and more exacting than our own, that the southern counties owed the taste for venison and a call for some nourishment more sustaining than farinaceous substances, green stuff and milk, as well as a gradual dissipation of the prejudice against the hare, the goose, and the hen as articles of food, which the "Commentaries" record. It is characteristic of the nature of our nationality, however, that while the Anglo-Saxons and their successors refused to confine themselves to the fare which was more or less adequate to the purposes of archaic pastoral life in this island, they by no means renounced their partiality for farm and garden produce, but by a fusion of culinary tastes and experiences akin to fusion of race and blood, laid the basis of the splendid cuisine of the Plantagenet and Tudor periods. Our cookery is, like our tongue, an amalgam.

But the Roman historian saw little or nothing of our country except those portions which lay along or near the southern coast; the rest of his narrative was founded on hearsay; and he admits that the people in the interior—those beyond the range of his personal knowledge, more particularly the northern tribes and the Scots—were flesh-eaters, by which he probably intends, not consumers of cattle, but of the venison, game, and fish which abounded in their forests and rivers. The various parts of this country were in Caesar's day, and very long after, more distinct from each other for all purposes of communication and intercourse than we are now from Spain or from Switzerland; and the foreign influences which affected the South Britons made no mark on those petty states which lay at a distance, and whose diet was governed by purely local conditions. The dwellers northward were by nature hunters and fishermen, and became only by Act of Parliament poachers, smugglers, and illicit distillers; the province of the male portion of the family was to find food for the rest; and a pair of spurs laid on an empty trencher was well understood by the goodman as a token that the larder was empty and replenishable.

There are new books on all subjects, of which it is comparatively easy within a moderate compass to afford an intelligible, perhaps even a sufficient, account. But there are others which I, for my part, hesitate to touch, and which do not seem to be amenable to the law of selection. "Studies in Nidderland," by Mr. Joseph Lucas, is one of these. It was a labour of love, and it is full of records of singular survivals to our time of archaisms of all descriptions, culinary and gardening utensils not forgotten. There is one point, which I may perhaps advert to, and it is the square of wood with a handle, which the folk in that part of Yorkshire employed, in lieu of the ladle, for stirring, and the stone ovens for baking, which, the author tells us, occur also in a part of Surrey. But the volume should be read as a whole. We have of such too few.

Under the name of a Roman epicure, Coelius Apicius, has come down to us what may be accepted as the most ancient European "Book