surance 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 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 favor 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 immunditiæ, 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! 157 There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, 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-oh, 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 food-the lean, no 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. 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 stars. -shooting 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; His memory is odoriferous; no clown curseth while his stomach half rejecteth the rank bacon, no coal-heaver bolteth him in reeking sausages; he hath a fair sepulcher in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure, and for such a tomb might be content to die. I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and "Presents," I often say, proper satisfactions, as in mine own. "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barndoor chickens (those "tame villatic fowl"), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give everything." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavors, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house, slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what), a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate. It argues an insensibility. I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking On my way to school (it was plum-cake, fresh from the oven. over London bridge), a gray-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt, at this time of day, that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, schoolboylike, I made him a present of the whole cake! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet 159 soothing of self-satisfaction; but before I had got to the end of the bridge my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I-I myself and not another would eat her nice cake, and what should I say to her the next time I saw her, how naughty I was to part with her pretty present! -and the odor of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she had sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last - and I blamed my impertinent spirit of almsgiving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness; and above all, I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old gray impostor. Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipped to death, with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have toward intenerating and dulcifying a substance naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto. I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides. "Whether, supposing that the flavor of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per, flagellationem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death?" I forget the decision. His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few breadcrumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are- but consider, he is a weaklinga flower. - CHARLES LAMB. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER PART I IT is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. "By thy long gray beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din." He holds him with his skinny hand, An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast and detaineth one. |