The table kept by St. Publius for his monks was not of a liberal character. He allowed them nothing but pulse and herbs, coarse bread, and water. Nothing else! He prohibited wine, milk, cheese, grapes, and even vinegar—which every sour brother might have distilled from his own ichor. From Easter to Whitsuntide was accounted a holiday time, and during that festive period, the brotherhood were allowed to grow hilarious, if they could, upon a gill of oil a-piece. St. Paula, “the widow,” subjected her nuns to the same lively fare, and she moreover fiercely denounced all ideas of personal neatness and cleanliness, as an uncleanness of the mind. She accounted herself wise in so doing, but her nuns might fairly have put to her the question asked by Mizen, in the Fair Quaker of Deal:—“Do’st thou think that nastiness gives thee a title to knowledge?”
St. John Chrysostom was as severe as Paula, and it would not have cost Olympias much to defray, as she insisted upon doing, the expenses of his table. The table which the saint kept for guests was, however, hospitably and delicately laden—and perhaps this was an inconsistency in a man who censured what he also encouraged.
They who have made a saint of Charlemagne, aver that he broke his fast but once a day, and that after sunset. I cannot believe this of a man who dealt so largely in the eggs laid by his hens, and in vegetables raised in his garden. Nor do I believe that St. Sulpicius Severus would have written so capital a biography of St. Martin, had he lived, as it is said, on herbs, boiled with a little vinegar for seasoning. Surely, we have heard of the “kitchen” of gentlemen like Sulpicius, and if his condensed Scripture History be as dry as the bread he ate during the task, his letters to Claudia seem to have been written on more generous food. Not that he was immoderate. He kept one cook, a very “plain cook” indeed, as Sulpicius describes him, when he despatched the boy to Bishop Paulinus with a letter which commences with a startling bit of episcopal history, namely, that “all the cooks in the kitchen of Paulinus had left him without warning, because the prelate was getting too careless about good living.” Some commentators say that the letter was a joke; but the reply to it is extant, and therein it may be seen how Paulinus did not look upon it as a joke.
Southey, in his “St. Romuald,” mirthful as the story is, has not exceeded the truth, or rather has not departed from the narrative told by the good man’s biographers:—
“Then, Sir, to see how he would mortify
The flesh! If any one had dainty fare,
Good man, he would come there;
And look at all the delicate things, and cry,
O Belly! Belly!
You would be gormandizing now, I know;