Authorities there be who rank the _Broccio_ of Corsica above the _Suisse_, and credit it with delicious freshness and Virgilian flavour. To taste it among its wild hills, then, would be well worth the long journey to the island in the Mediterranean. In the meantime, however, none need quarrel with _Suisse_. Hardly a country or district in the world really that has not its own special cheese; he who would discover them all and catalogue them must needs write a treatise on geography.
But to eat cheese in its many varieties, with butter or salt or sugar, as the case may be, and to think its mission thus fulfilled, would be to underestimate its inexhaustible resources. Innumerable are the masterpieces the culinary artist will make of it. In an omelet you would pronounce it unsurpassable, so long as kind fate did not set before you the consummate _Fondue_. As a pudding you would declare it not to be approached, if sometimes crisp cheese straws were not served with dinner's last course. On an ocean voyage, Welsh-rabbit late at night will seem to you the marvel of marvels; on a railway journey a cheese sandwich at noon you will think still more miraculous--but let the sandwich be made of brown bread, and mix butter and mustard and anchovies with the cheese. The wonders that may be worked with Parmesan alone--whether in conjunction with _macaroni_, or soup, or cauliflower, or many a dish beside--would be eloquent text for a new chapter.
You may search from end to end of the vast Louvre; you may wander from room to room in England's National Gallery; you may travel to the Pitti, to the Ryks Museum, to the Prado; and no richer, more stirring arrangement of colour will you find than in that corner of your kitchen garden where June's strawberries grow ripe. From under the green of broad leaves the red fruit looks out and up to the sun in splendour unsurpassed by paint upon canvas. And the country, with lavish prodigality born of great plenty, takes pity upon the drear, drab town, and, packing this glory of colour in baskets and crates, despatches it to adorn greengrocer's window and costermonger's cart. "Strawberries all ripe, sixpence a pound," is the itinerant sign which now sends a thrill through Fleet Street and brings joy to the Strand.