University of Virginia Library

EATING.

—Shaks.

Very true: and if old Menenius did not succeed
in his application to the inflexible Roman to spare
his country, it was not for want of a correct knowledge
of the acerbity produced by an empty stomach,
and the mollifying effects of good victuals
upon the temper; at the same time it presents
strange and mortifying images to the mind of the
littleness of human nature, and the insignificant
causes which are not unfrequently the mainspring
of mighty events. “He had not dined,” reasons the
old man; and to the degree of flatulency and acidity
produced in Coriolanus's stomach by his not
having done so, Menenius ascribes his rejection of

the prayers of the grave senators and virgins to
save immortal Rome. It may be that he was right;
and perhaps the fate of the eternal city depended
materially upon as mean a thing as Tullus Aufidius's
cook! “So runs the world away.” But the
truth is, since the days of Adam, eating has never
been, for any length of time, out of fashion; and
though abstemiousness is allowed by many to be a
virtue, it is one that has been always more praised
than practised. For my own part, I think it is rather
an unamiable weakness—a phantom which
haunts the imagination of nervous people, valetudinarians,
and such as are continually scheming
how to spin out the thread of a miserable existence
after all their capabilities for pleasure and enjoyment
have passed away. Besides, it is strenuously
recommended by physicians, and is therefore to be
distrusted, for no man perseveringly labors against
his own interest. Moreover, if the looks and tables
of our worthy New-York M. D.'s are to be
taken as a criterion, it is quite evident that, however
they may enforce abstemiousness upon others,
“they never set it up to fright themselves.” This
is, to say the least, suspicious; and I for one conscientiously
believe, that if ever water-gruels, weak
broths, or vegetable diet comes into fashion, the
human species will soon fade away from the face
of the earth—that living skeletons will be no rarity,
and a man of one hundred pounds a monster of
corpulency—that the poor old world will fall into
an atrophy, and that some future Calvin Edson,
divested of his superfluous flesh, will personify
Campbell's “last man!”

In literature, eating has always cut a conspicuous
figure. The old dramatists are filled with soul,
or rather, stomach-felt descriptions of rich luscious
feasts; and though in those days a Ude or a
Kitchiner had not enlightened the world by his
wonderful discoveries, our ancestors were luxurious
rogues notwithstanding. Only see with what unction
Ben Jonson makes one of his characters sum
up now unheard-of dishes:

and Fielding and Smollett's heroes are good for
nothing without their dinner; they must have
solid meat and strong drink to invigorate and stimulate
them for either war or courtship. Feed
them well, or they disgrace themselves—make love
in a very awkward and insipid manner, and are
apt to have their courage called in question.

After this, came the terrific style of writing, of
which Mrs. Radcliffe was the head, and indeed,
almost the only one worth reading. Novels at this
time were so filled with trap-doors, dungeons, secret
stair-cases, winding galleries, subterraneous
passages, shrieks, and midnight assassinations,
that it is presumed these horrors entirely took
away the appetites of the persons concerned, for
no mention is made of eating, though from the frequent
allusions to “measures of wine” and “reviving
cordials,” there is every reason to believe that
the heroes and heroines were addicted to hard-drinking,
which habit is bad enough at any time,
but particularly hurtful when indulged without a
reasonable portion of food, as it speedily destroys
the coats of the stomach, and induces a long train
of dreadful disorders. Fair and amiable, therefore,
as these heroes and heroines unquestionably were,
they doubtless ultimately fell victims to the horrid
vice of intemperance, notwithstanding the strength
of their constitutions, which, it must be admitted,
was extraordinary. From all that ever I could
make out in these romances, the ladies, though
described as fair and fragile beings, whom a summer
wind would inevitably pulverize—a compound

of unimaginable perfections and spiritual essences
in white muslin—were able, according to the author,
to endure more hardships and privations than
a Highland drover, a North American Indian, or a
Swedish soldier in Charles the Twelfth's time, and,
like a Greenland bear, possessed wonderful capabilities
for supporting nature for a long period without
nutriment. In my unripe years, when devouring
the delectable pages of Anne of Swansea, or Francis
Latham, the gifted author of “Midnight Horrors,”
and the “Black Forest,” often have I marvelled
when the young lady, who was confined in an uninhabited
part of the castle, and had refused victuals
for several days, was going to take her dinner. I
used to reckon up how long it was since she had
eaten any thing, and draw conclusions from my
own feelings, and this it was that first staggered my
young faith in the truth of novels. When I had
made calculations that she must be nearly starved
to death, I found in the next chapter the old story
over again—“an aged domestic entered and placed
food before Almeira, from which she turned with
loathing, and lost in a sense of her unparalleled
situation, continued totally abstracted from all
around,” &c. Sometimes these heroines absolutely
lived for a month on the smell of a boiled chicken;
and when their prison doors were at last broken
open, and one expected they would be found to be
starved, squalid, miserable-looking wretches, it was
simply stated that they “never looked so lovely,
confinement having imparted a delicate and melancholy
tint to those cheeks which—” &c. As Hamlet
says, “there is more in this than natural, if
physicians could only find it out.” What an invaluable
wife would one of those ladies make for an
Irish peasant after his potato crop had failed.

Walter Scott, (heaven bless him!) among his
other worthy deeds, has revived the good old practice
of eating and drinking upon paper. His personages,
one and all, with the single exception of
the earl of Glenallen, in the Antiquary, who made
his dinner of vegetables and water! are capital
feeders; they all eat with a relish, and seem to like
what is set before them. There is something
hearty in this, and persons with good digestions
think the better of them for it. Like sensible people,
they all do justice to good cheer whenever they
meet with it; and really it is enough to give a person
an appetite to read the account of honest Dandie
Dinmont's attack on the round of cold beef,
Waverley's breakfast in Donald Bean Lean's cave,
or the description of the savoury stew prepared by
Meg Merrilies in the kairn of Derncleugh, of which
the worthy Dominie partakes. It is characteristic

of Shakspeare and Scott that they are fond of introducing
familiar occurrences like these amid their
most wild and romantic scenes, while feebler writers
are afraid to do so for fear of destroying the effect,
or rendering what is already tame or outrageous,
ludicrous.

Of late there is a kind of puppyism sprung up in
discoursing of eating, first generated by some of the
petit-maitre correspondents of the New Monthly
Magazine. They discourse about the pleasures of
the table in a style of superlative affectation, treat
all solid joints as relics of ancient barbarism, and
all who partake of them as vulgar and John Bullish,
learn the names of a dozen or two French
dishes, and make a parade of their love of, and
familiarity with, soups, slops, stews, and kickshaws,
as weak, insipid, and unsubstantial as themselves.
Puppyism in writing and dressing is bad enough,
but puppyism on so solemn and serious a subject
as eating, is carrying the jest a little too far.