dinners and suppers from one's own kitchen? How many Gothamites would dare ask a friend to take pot-luck with them at an hour's notice, and how many friends would dare to accept such an invitation? Here it is nothing uncommon, which is enough to account for society being more sociable.

"What,' says some indignant moralist, 'do you mean to hold up French society as a pattern to us virtuous republicans?'

A

'By no means, my friend, not as a general rule; only in this particular. But if any man seriously thinks that the immorality of the French is owing to their knowing how to cook good dinners, and eat them when cooked, why then, in the words of THUCYDIDES, 'I felicitate him on his simplicity, but do not commend his cleverness.' You might with as much reason attribute it to their temperance certain amount of physiological case might be made out for that paradox. A more plausible objection may be started. I may be reminded that the English, who are the greatest people in the world, excepting, of course, the Americans, and the finest and healthiest-looking people in the world, not excepting even the Americans, are far behind several European nations in all arts pertaining to cookery. The objection looks formidable. But let us 'discriminate the difference,' as a logical friend of mine used to say before entering into any discussion. Let us look at the question from all its points of view. The English are gross and careless feeders just as they are capacious and indiscriminate drinkers. Their moist climate and the great quantity of openair exercise they take, enable them to consume, without injury, a great amount of heavy viands and strong potables. But the diet that an Englishman can thrive on in his own country, would be ruinous to an American, or even to an Englishman in America. The liquids which the former can imbibe like water would set the latter on fire; the solids which nourish the one would indigest (to coin a Gallicism) the other. It is very doubtful if our climate allows as much exercise as that of England, and quite certain that it does not encourage as much. Our people, therefore, require a better system of cookery than the English. All the refinements of the table, it is said, are mere creatures of an artificial state of society. Very true; so are all refinements and improvements in dress, in domestic architecture, in all the comforts of material civilization as distinguished from intellectual cultivation. Is that a reason for despising them? A celebrated novelist has drawn an amusing picture of ADAM and EVE's perplexity and discomfort when transported to a well-spread modern dinner-table; but would they not be equally perplexed at any tailor's or dressmaker's, or, for that matter, inside of any modern house? If the example of our first parents is a precedent for going back to a fruit and cold-water diet, it will equally justify us in adopting their very

primitive toilette, or in 'camping out' instead of sleeping on comfortable beds under a weather-tight roof.

'No doubt there is a certain amount of fashion and custom in table-æsthetics, as there is in almost every thing, from crime to mathematics; and these fashions and customs, change from time to time. In DEAN SWIFT'S day (as we learn from his Polite Conversation) the English used to eat soup in the middle of the dinner which moves THACKERAY'S wonder exceedingly. 'What sort of society could it have been?' he asks with natural astonishment. And yet fish, which, according to THACKERAY'S countrymen and ours, comes the very next to soup, has not yet had its place perfectly defined on continental tables. The French used to eat it after the entrées and just before the roast, although most of them have now adopted the Anglo-Saxon order. But perhaps THACKERAY would be somewhat surprised if he were told that in a part of his own county, at the present day, soup is eaten after meat, namely, at the Pensioner's table of Trinity College, Cambridge, where probably THACKERAY ate it so himself in his undergraduate days. The reason assigned to me for this practice was, that the meat being put upon the table at the beginning of dinner would grow cold if not eaten first, while the soup, being an extra, might be ordered hot from the kitchen at any stage of the repast. It is not every custom that can give so good a reason for itself.

'But THACKERAY was right in his question. It is strictly philosophical to begin a dinner with soup, as it obviates the necessity for drinking, which many, perhaps most persons, feel at the commencement of a meal. The preliminary whet of oysters, like the chasse after the coffee, must be considered an over-refinement of luxury only suited to great occasions, and not to the dinner of every-day life.

eating one thing at does it not commend

'And similarly, I believe that most of the rules of a scientific and aesthetic dinner may be explained and defended as bona in se, and not arising from any caprice of fashion. Thus, to take a fundamental principle the division into courses a time instead of every thing in a heap itself to the educated man's finer feelings instinctively? There is much barbarism anent this matter in our country; not merely in the frontier regions of it, either. One of my first experiences in NewEngland, when a lad of sixteen, was dining out, and having seven kinds of meat and vegetables clapped upon my plate at once. Probably my hosts thought it rather a proof of their civilization. I recollect once talking to the 'gentleman' who interpreted for some travelling Indian chiefs. He said that these sons of the forest had many habits different from those of civilized people; for instance, they only took one kind of food on their plate at once when dining. Poor man! he little guessed that his barbarous charges resembled,

in this respect, the most refined inhabitants of the French captial, who would have put him down for any thing but a civilized man if they had seen him eat.

'For my part, I thoroughly believe that the dinner-cooking and dinner-giving arts have arrived at a state much nearer the perfection of reason and common-sense than many other arts of modern society; much nearer than that of dress, for instance. What, I wonder, will some future and wiser generation think of our ladies' low-necked ball-dresses, whether as regards decency, comfort, or symmetry? What of the street-sweeping skirts? What will it think of that acme of inaptitudes, the common domestic masculine hat? You may hear men wishing to live to or through some great epoch; till the next French Revolution but three; or till MACAULAY has finished his history, or till the conversion of the South-Sea Islanders. I should like to live to see the conversion of the civilized world from the absurdity of the present civilized hat.

-

'Some of the varieties in the table-æsthetics of different countries may be easily accounted for by the different capacities and temperaments of nations. Thus, the genial Anglo-Saxon custom of post-prandial sederunts would be perilous to the Gaul, who is so light-headed as to be unequal to combining the usual consumption of wine on such occasions with the equilibrium necessary for the drawing-room afterward. So, too, in the distribution of wines during dinner. Anglo-Saxons begin with champagne after the soup, or at latest after the fish, reserving the claret for the close of the banquet; in France it is not uncommon to drink the best Bordeaux in the earlier stages of the dinner, and only open a bottle of champagne just before the dessert. Each custom is in accordance with the character of the people that follows it. The Anglo-Saxon, grave and phlegmatic, is excited to a proper spirit and liveliness by the early introduction of the champagne, which would make the Frenchman too gay before the close of the dinner; he goes on upon his own natural spirits and the quieter red wines, till, when tired of talking and eating, a glass or two of the sparkling beverage winds him up and sets him going again.

'One thing I never could account for the German habit of eating sweet puddings before the roast. Most dietetic barbarisms can be explained. When the Down-Easter or Backwoods-man heaps from six to sixteen different viands on his plate at once, it exemplifies his promiscuous acquisitiveness and indiscriminating haste. But the German mind is orderly and logical; how could it have admitted the solecism of the misplaced puddings?

'Although self debarred at the outset from dwelling on the economic side of the subject, I cannot help remarking how much of the animal and vegetable world is wasted in various countries through culinary ignorance. The English use buckwheat only to feed pheasants

being utterly unaware what excellent pan-cakes it affords. Some European nations are equally ignorant of the pumpkin's utility for human sustenance. We Americans make a very inferior pie of it, tasting something like wet ginger-bread a dish the offspring of necessity in the infancy of New-England when the unfortunate inhabitants had nothing else to make pies of, and which, with their usual cycnanserifying propensity that is to say, their habit of making swans out of geese they have imposed upon the Union at large, as something not only eatable, but palatable. The French have put the vegetable to its right use: they make a most delicious soup of it.

'I fancy, too, that many ripe figs must be wasted in our Southern States. Now the Southern French have a way of preserving theirs. Dismiss from your mind, I beg of you, all ideas of the Eastern, drum-packed, flat-pressed, mite-nourishing commodity. No, these figs (they are large green ones, like the best Italian) are round and swelling, slightly candied on the outside, yet not so as to disguise entirely their native emerald hue; all fresh and luscious inside with all their original juices a delight of children, and not to be despised by parents. The sellers of comestibles call them golden figs (fiques d'or,) and they well merit the appellation.

'Perhaps some of your unsophisticated country readers may imagine that I am going to enlarge on the value of the frog as an article of food, for it is one of our popular delusions (derived from the English, who have long since outgrown it) that this amphibious animal is a usual and favorite Parisian plat. I fancy you would be as likely to see a vol-au-vent de grenouille at a French restaurant as a colt-steak or rattlesnake fricassee at one of our hotels. Yet truth compels me to say that I once heard a Frenchman (he was an officer and a gentleman, and belonged to the aristocratic faubourg St. Germain) boast of having eaten a dish which throws all possible frogs into the shade; to wit, a fox' He said it tasted like game, only more so! I suspect, however, that he was joking. We had been talking of unusual meats, and I mentioned having eaten peacock and swan. He probably thought I was quizzing him, and wanted to cap my story.

And now this indefinite letter has rambled on far enough. Vale vive que KNICK., which means, may you live a thousand years, and always have a good cook. 'CARL BENSON.'

A TALE ABOUT THE PRINCESS.

American Review, July 1848.

CARL BENSON'S LIBRARY. Present: CARL AND FRED PETERS.

PETERS. And so Carl, while I have been in the thickest of the stirring times abroad, and seen one monarchy topple after another, you have been quietly reading at home. And that gray-covered book is poetry of course. **

BENSON. It is TENNYSON'S PRINCESS.

PETERS. Oh, Tennyson! Yes, I remember you always had a great admiration for him not but what he is justly entitled to a good standing among the secondary poets.

BENSON. Perhaps you would be surprised to hear Tennyson spoken of as a greater poet than Byron. PETERS. Ay, that should I.

BENSON. And yet such is at present the opinion of a very large number of the best educated men in England.

PETERS. Indeed! I knew that of late years Wordsworth had become the fashionable poet of his literary countrymen, but did not suspect that they had now set up a new idol in his place.

BENSON. The process in natural enough. Men grow sated with passion and excitement; they rush for relief to quiet meditation. The popular taste passes from poetry which defies theory and morality to poetry which is all theory and morality. In time the proper medium between and union of the two begins to be seen and appreciated. The literary world has its oscillations of this sort as well as the political.

PETERS. This then you are disposed to consider Tennyson's great merit, that he is a uniter and harmonizer of the two opposite schools, the Byronic and the Wordsworthian?

Fred talks Yorkshire, but writes as pure English as any of us, so that it is only doing him justice to translate his remarks into the ordinary dialect.