A Call to Dinner.
When the starving peasantry of France were
bearing with inimitable fortitude their great
bereavement in the death of Louis le Grand, how
cheerfully must they have bowed their necks to
the easy yoke of Philip of Orleans, who set them
an example in eating which he had not the slightest
objection to their following. A monarch skilled
in the mysteries of the cuisine must wield the sceptre
all the more gently from his schooling in handling
the ladle. In royalty, the delicate manipulation
of an omelette soufflé is at once an evidence of
genius, and an assurance of a tender forbearance
in state policy. All good rulers have been good
livers, and if all bad ones have been the same
this merely proves that even the worst of men have
still something divine in them.
There is more in a good dinner than is disclosed
by the removal of the covers. Where the eye of
hunger perceives but a juicy roast, the eye of faith
detects a smoking God. A well-cooked joint is
redolent of religion, and a delicate pasty is crisp
with charity. The man who can light his after-dinner
Havana without feeling full to the neck
with all the cardinal virtues is either steeped in
iniquity or has dined badly. In either case he is
no true man. We stoutly contend that that worthy
personage Epicurus has been shamefully misrepresented
by abstemious, and hence envious and mendacious,
historians. Either his philosophy was the
most gentle, genial, and reverential of antique systems,
or he was not an Epicurean, and to call him
so is a deceitful flattery. We hold that it is morally
impossible for a man to dine daily upon the fat of
the land in courses, and yet deny a future state of
existence, beatific with beef, and ecstatic with all
edibles. Another falsity of history is that of
Heliogabalus—was it not?—dining off nightingales'
tongues. No true
gourmet would ever send this
warbler to the shambles so long as scarcer birds
might be obtained.
It is a fine natural instinct that teaches the
hungry and cadaverous to avoid the temples of
religion, and a short-sighted and misdirected zeal
that would gather them into the sanctuary. Religion
is for the oleaginous, the fat-bellied, chylesaturated
devotees of the table. Unless the
stomach be lined with good things, the parson may
say as many as he likes and his truths shall not be
swallowed nor his wisdom inly digested. Probably
the highest, ripest, and most acceptable form of
worship is that performed with a knife and fork;
and whosoever on the resurrection morning can
produce from amongst the lumber of his cast-off
flesh a thin-coated and elastic stomach, showing
evidences of daily stretchings done in the body,
will find it his readiest passport and best credential.
We believe that God will not hold him
guiltless who eats with his knife, but if the deadly
steel be always well laden with toothsome morsels,
divine justice will be tempered with mercy to that
man's soul. When the author of the “Lost Tales”
represented Sisyphus as capturing his guest, the
King of Terrors, and stuffing the old glutton with
meat and drink until he became “a jolly, rubicund,
tun-bellied Death,” he gave us a tale which needs
no
hœc fabula docet to point out the moral.
We verily believe that Shakspeare writ down
Fat Jack at his last gasp, as babbling, not o' green
fields, but o' green turtle, and that that starvling
Colley Cibber altered the text from sheer envy at a
good man's death. To die well we must live well,
is a familiar platitude. Morality is, of course, best
promoted by the good quality of our fare, but
quantitative excellence is by no means to be despised.
Cœteris paribus, the man who eats much is
a better Christian than the man who eats little, and
he who eats little will pursue a more uninterrupted
course of benevolence than he who eats nothing.
