whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavor, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretense, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manu

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 fires in every 5 direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the districts. The insurance offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared

script here is a little tedious) both father 10 that the very science of architec

and son fairly sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had despatched all that remained of the litter.

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbors would 15 certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of improving upon the good meat which God had sent them. Nevertheless, strange stories got about. It was ob- 20 served that Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night-time. As often as the 25 sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length 30 they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced 35 in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, 40 and they all handled it, and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest 45 charge which judge had ever given, -to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all present - without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they 50 brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty.

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision; and, when the court was dis- 55 missed, went privily, and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or

ture 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 con-
suming a whole house to dress it.
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, con-
cludes the manuscript, do the most use-
ful, and seemingly the most obvious arts.
make their way among mankind.

Then

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 porkersthings 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 immunditiae, 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, praeludium, of a grunt.

or

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 flavor 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 quintesIsence of the child-pig's yet pure food -the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna or, rather, fat and lean (if no it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or common substance.

barter her consistently for a
chop.

-

mutton

Piglet me speak his praise is no less provocative of the appetite, than he 5 is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices.

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unraveled without hazard, he is - good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little it is means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbors' fare.

Behold him, while he is doing 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 20 age, he hath wept out his pretty eyes radiant jellies-shooting stars

See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth! wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the gross- 25 ness 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 con- 30 versation - from these sins he is happily snatched away ·

Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,
Death came with timely care-

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 proper satisfactions, as in mine own. Presents,' I often say, '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 35 is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavors, to extradomiciliate, 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.

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 40 sepulcher in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure and for such a tomb might be content to die.

He is the best of sapors. Pineapple is great. She is indeed almost too tran- 45 scendent a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tenderconscienced person would do well to pause too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips 50 that approach her -like lovers' kisses, she biteth she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish - but she stoppeth at the palate - she meddleth not with the appe- 55 tite and the coarsest hunger might

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 plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was 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, school-boy-like, 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 soothing
of self-satisfaction; but before I had got
to the end of the bridge, my better feel-
ings 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 10
of the pleasure my aunt would be taking
in thinking that II 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 sent it to the 20
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 im-
pertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-
of-place hypocrisy of goodness, and above 25
all I wished never to see the face again of
that insidious, good-for-nothing, old gray
impostor.

15

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender vic- 30 tims. We read of pigs whipt 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 35

light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It 5 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 bread crumbs, 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 weakling - a flower. (1822)

SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)

Scott's birthplace was Edinburgh. His father, a solicitor of creditable standing, had been the first of his family to adopt a town life, and Scott early evinced an innate attraction toward those ancestors who for centuries had linked their history with the stirring life of the Border. 'You will find me a rattle-skulled, half-lawyer, half-sportsman, through whose head a regiment of horse has been exercising since he was five years old,' he once wrote to a stranger. Lameness derived from a fever kept him inactive as a child and he was dreamy and fond of reading. As he grew up he entered robustly into outdoor sports; but his choicest pastime was cruising about the country-side after relics of folklore. Passing through the High-School and the College in Edinburgh, he studied law and, in 1792, became an advocate. His taste for country residence led him to settle on the Esk at Lasswade after his marriage in 1798, and from here as Sheriff of Selkirkshire, he removed to Ashestiel on the Tweed, in 1804. His Border Minstrelsy had appeared in 1802, and now his poems, Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), Lady of the Lake (1810), and others in quick sequence began to supplement his profession as a means of livelihood. In 1812 he succeeded to a salary of £1300 as clerk of session, and he proceeded to materialize his dream of a feudal estate by purchasing, as nucleus, a hundred acres of rough land five miles down the Tweed at Abbotsford. Thither he removed with twenty-five cartloads of the veriest trash in nature, besides dogs, pigs, ponies, poultry, cows, calves'; be gives an amusing and significant account of the procession of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances, made a very conspicuous show. A family of turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some preux chevalier of ancient border fame; and the very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets.' From Abbotsford came the series of historical novels, beginning with Waverly (1814) and closing with Castle Dangerous (1831,- twenty-nine novels in half as many years. The quantity of energy which Scott poured into these works of fiction, to say nothing of his Edition of Swift and Life of Napoleon, while discharging his official duties and engaging in all the activities of a country-gentleman, is almost inconceivable. In addition, the work of his last years was done in sharp adversity. Soon after his marriage he had entered into a secret partnership with James and John Ballantyne, publishers of Edinburgh, and this business had been complicated with that of Constable and Co. His partners were feeble managers; only the extraordinary success of the novels had tided over a crisis for several years. It is estimated that Scott's writings earned him, during his lifetime, nearly a million dollars; but his outlay at Abbotsford and in other directions had been excessively lavish, and greatly increased after he was knighted in 1820. The crash came in 1825; Constable, the Ballantynes, and Scott went down together. From the age of fifty-five to sixty, in spite of breaking health and failing imagination, he wrought doggedly with his pen to pay off £117,000 of debt. When the end came nearly half the debt remained; but this was extinguished by his copyrights after his death. In any event, Scott's character would have lived as one signally illustrious and lovable; his last years conferred upon it the quality of heroism. The real sweep and variety of his genius is denoted in his novels. His poetry is, nevertheless, animated and stirring, and well exemplifies his power of delineating, with bold, free strokes, scenic background and enterprising action.

FROM MARMION, CANTO VI
Not far advanced was morning day
When Marmion did his troop array
To Surrey's camp to ride;
He had safe-conduct for his band
Beneath the royal seal and hand,
And Douglas gave a guide.
The ancient earl with stately grace

Would Clara on her palfrey place,
And whispered in an undertone,

'Let the hawk stoop, his prey is flown.' 10
The train from out the castle drew,
But Marmion stopped to bid adieu:
'Though something I might plain,' he

said,

'Of cold respect to stranger guest,
Sent hither by your king's behest,

15