[1] "Pour l'amour de Dieu, un sou pour acheter un petit pain. J'ai si faim!" "Comment!" responded the cloyed sensualist, in search of an appetite, who was thus accosted; "tu as faim, petit drôle! Tu es bien heureux!" The readers of Pope will also remember his lines on the man who "Called 'happy dog' the beggar at his door, And envied thirst and hunger to the poor."
Don't talk to me of taste, Ofellus continues--
"Will it give you a notion If this pike in the Tiber was caught, or the ocean? If it used 'twixt the bridges to glide and to quiver, Or was tossed to and fro at the mouth of the river?"
Just as our epicures profess to distinguish, by flavour a salmon fresh, run from the sea from one that has been degenerating for four-and-twenty hours in the fresh water of the river--with this difference, however, that, unlike the salmon with us, the above-bridge pike was considered at Rome to be more delicate than his sea-bred and leaner brother.
Ofellus next proceeds to ridicule the taste which prizes what is set before it for mere size or rarity or cost. It is this, he contends, and not any excellence in the things themselves, which makes people load their tables with the sturgeon or the stork. Fashion, not flavour, prescribes the rule; indeed, the more perverted her ways, the more sure they are to be followed.
"So were any one now to assure us a treat In cormorants roasted, as tender and sweet, The young men of Rome are so prone to what's wrong, They'd eat cormorants all to a man, before long."
But, continues Ofellus, though I would have you frugal, I would not have you mean--
"One vicious extreme it is idle to shun, If into its opposite straightway you run;"
illustrating his proposition by one of those graphic sketches which give a distinctive life to Horace's Satires.
"There is Avidienus, to whom, like a burr, Sticks the name he was righteously dubbed by, of 'Cur,' Eats beechmast and olives five years old, at least, And even when he's robed all in white for a feast On his marriage or birth day, or some other very High festival day, when one likes to be merry, What wine from the chill of his cellar emerges-- 'Tis a drop at the best--has the flavour of verjuice; While from a huge cruet his own sparing hand On his coleworts drops oil which no mortal can stand, So utterly loathsome and rancid in smell, it Defies his stale vinegar even to quell it."