The

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision: and when the court was dismissed, went privily and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his lordship's town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fire in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. insurance-offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might

be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious, arts make their way among mankind

Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favour of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in Roast pig.

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate princeps obsoniorum.

I speak not of your grown porkers— things 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 immunditia, 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 flavour 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 resistance-with 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 lean, but a kind of animal manna-or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result or common substance.

food

-the lean, no

Behold him, while he is "doing "—it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string!-Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age! he hath wept out his pretty eyes-radiant jellies-shooting stars.

D

See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth-wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany

maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal-wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation-from these sins he is happily snatched away—

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,

Death came with timely care

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. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendent