Table traits, with something on them

by Dr. Doran

St. Laurence would have joked at this, as he did at his own grilling. After he had lain for some time extended on his gridiron, he calmly said to the executioner, “Will you have the kindness to turn me, as I am quite done on the under side?” The executioner, a trifle astonished, did as he was required, and soon after, the Saint, again speaking, said, “I shall be obliged if you’ll take me up, as I am now fit for eating.” This story reminds me of the remark made by an Irishman, when first told that St. Patrick had crossed the ocean on a millstone:—“I can’t contradict it! He was a lucky fellow!”

We are told of St. Bernard, who used to walk before dinner on the banks of the Lake of Lausanne, that on hearing two of his monks speak of the beauty of the lake, he declared that no such lake existed, or he had been too much absorbed ever to have noticed it. So the Trappists used to glory in not knowing where or how they dined, or recollecting anything about it! All this shows less wisdom at table than was exhibited by the royal St. Louis, who, when a certain friar began to discuss doctrinal subjects with the pullets, stopped him with the remark that “all things had their time, and joking was good sauce with chickens!”

St. Laurence Justinian, the first patriarch of Venice, was far less indulgent than the royal saint of France. He was so little so, that when his thirsty monks sometimes asked for a little wine, declaring that their throats felt as dry as the high road in summer, he used quite as drily to remark, that if they could not bear parched throats now, what would they do in the fires of purgatory? St. John the Dwarf, Anchoret of Scete, cared as little for wine as St. Laurence, but he was fond of fruit, and he obtained a supply from a strange source. An old hermit bade him plant his walking-staff in the ground, and he not only did so, but he watered it regularly for three years, when it bore pippins, sweeter than those that grew at Ribstone up to the time of the death of the late baronet. Before this miraculously-bearing stick the little man used to read prayers as devoutly as Sir Hollyoak Goodrick, the present Ribstone baronet, does to the villagers in his own parish church, and for the same reason each had much to be thankful for. It must be confessed that John the Dwarf had more taste than his namesake of Cupertino, who not only ate nothing but vegetables, but ate no vegetables that any other human being could be induced to swallow. It was such garbage as only pigs would condescend to. Arcades ambo—nasty creatures both!

St. Francis of Assisium exhibited something more of true humility at his table, with a touch of the false metal notwithstanding. He ate nothing dressed by fire, unless he were very ill, and even then he covered it with ashes, or dipped it in cold water. His common daily food was dry bread strewn with ashes; but this founder of the Friars’ Minors had the good sense not to condemn his followers to the rigorous diet he observed himself; and “Brother Ass,” as he familiarly called that self, was in his own opinion worthy of no better fare.

There was a founder of another community who exhibited more singularity than St. Francis, who, despite some mistakes, was a man of whom none other dare speak but with respect,—St. Ammon, founder of the hermitages of Nitria. At the age of twenty-two this young Egyptian noble married a fair girl of Memphis; and instead of a nuptial banquet, he treated his bride to a reading of a particularly edifying chapter from St. Paul, after which he withdrew to solitary meditation. During eighteen years he occupied himself in training balsam-trees all day, after which he returned home to a supper of fruit and herbs; then came that terrible reiteration of advice from St. Paul, followed by a separate solitary comment on the part of this exemplary pair. At the end of the time above specified, he retired altogether from domestic life, and settled alone on Mount Nitria, and his biographers naïvely remark, this was “with his wife’s consent.” This saint was of such a “complexion” of virtue, that one day, on accidentally catching sight of an uncovered portion of his own body, he was so shocked that he fainted away. If he had only read “Erasmus Wilson, on the Skin,” he would have learned to look oftener at his own, and would have been a cleaner man, a better husband, a more grateful feeder, and an improved Christian.

But St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, probably exceeded all other originators of communities in the “fierceness,” so to speak, of his dietetic laws; he never spared himself, nor his disciples. A Carthusian is never permitted to eat meat under any pretence whatever. In addition to this, they fast eight months in the year, and I suppose they starve in Lent, for during that season they are forbidden to eat what is called “white meats,” that is, eggs, milk, butter, and cheese. Dry bread with water is their Lenten fare; and a peculiar law connected with them is, that they can never change into another order, because they would thereby profit a little in the way of better living; but a brother of any other order may become a Carthusian, as thereby he increases his mortifications and diminishes his diet. Of course from these remarks the Carthusians of the “Charterhouse” are excepted. If the thin spirit of St. Bruno ever scents the juicy viands that adorn the well-spread table there, it probably melts into thin air by the very force of disgust or ghastly envy.

The table kept by St. Bridget, when she married Ulpho, prince of Nericia, in Sweden, was a very modest one for so princely a pair, but what was spared thereby was given to the poor. Bridget and Ulpho, she sweet sixteen, he two years more, read every evening the soothing chapter from St. Paul, which formed the favourite study of St. Ammon and his wife; but, as it would appear, with indifferent success. “They enrolled themselves,” say their various biographers, “in the Third Order of St. Francis, and lived in their own house as if it had been a regular and austere monastery.” The biographers immediately add without comment,—“They afterwards had eight children: four boys and four girls;” and as the same paragraph goes on to state that “all these children were favoured with the blessings of divine grace,” it may be fairly concluded that a domestic observation of a monastic regularity and austerity, is a course that will purchase blessings and olive-branches.

The case of St. Gomer and his wife, the Lady Gwinmary, may perhaps be cited as an exception. But this Gwinmary was an exacting lady at all times, and when St. Gomer betook himself from her to live in the desert on bitterness and biscuits, he fared as sumptuously and lived far more quietly than he had done at home. He was one of the most placid of saints, and it is a positive libel upon him for the French Admiralty to have given his name to one of the most thundering steamers in the service. Its broadsides far more nearly resemble the tongue of Gwinmary than the tones of Gomer.

In charming contrast with this truculent Gwinmary do we meet and greet the gentle St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The record of her good deeds would fill a volume, but out of them I have only to select an exquisite table trait—to register which is also to eulogize it. I do not allude to her habitual temperance, to her dry bread and thimble-full of wine, when she sat at meat with kings and queens, her equals in birth; nor to her small feasts with her two maids, in the absence of her consort, Louis the Landgrave; but I allude—and listen, O ye Benedicts, with grateful rapture—to the fact “that the kitchen she kept out of her own private purse, not to be the least charge to her husband.” If celibate priests, who can hardly be supposed capable of appreciating such a fact, canonized so rare a lady, all married men who love banquets but dislike the butchers’ bills, will cry “Well done!” and recommend their wives to read the instructive life of Elizabeth of Hungary.

Who would expect to hear good of a Borgia?—St. Francis Borgia was virtuous enough to save his family name from entire infamy. Of no other man or woman of his house could it be said that they gave up suppers, in order to have more time for prayers. It was not Alexander VI., the papal glory of his house and the shame of mankind, that would have been content with one meal a day, and that meal—a mess of leeks, or some pulse, with a piece of bread, and a cup of water. At the same time, Francis Borgia kept a table becoming a man of his rank, for the gratification of his guests of high degree. There, while they ate their venison, and quaffed their lachrymæ Christi, he nibbled his leeks, and sipped his water, “and conversed facetiously with them, though at table his discourse generally turned on piety.” It was very like a Borgia to make piety facetious, but if fun in holiness be of the ingredients necessary to the making of a saint, Sidney Smith has as good a right as Borgia to be on the roll of the beati. Our reverend “joker of jokes,” indeed, would not have smiled at the cook who put wormwood instead of mint into his broth; and I doubt if Peter Plimley ever thought of doing what Francis Borgia did,—namely, chewing his pills, and swallowing physic slowly, as works of meritorious mortification, bearing compound interest to the profit of the practitioner. St. Wilfrid, who taught the half-starved South Saxons to catch the fish that swam at their feet, and thereby live, seems to me to have performed a far more meritorious work than if he had passed his life in gnawing leeks or masticating pills. Our native saint, a good man at table, was often better employed than St. Theresa, who is so eulogized because when serving at table, or carrying the dinner from the kitchen, “she was often seen suddenly absorbed in God, with the utensils or instruments of her business in her hands.” The hungry and expectant monks might have quoted against the rapt maid, the assertion of the royal sage, that there is a time to eat, as well as to fast and pray. But St. Theresa, with all her good qualities, was as obstinate as the Polish saint Hedwiga, who not only abstained from meat till abstinence had nearly proved suicidal, but who refused to save her life by eating any, until the Pope’s legate had issued a very peremptory precept to that effect. St. Peter of Alcantara lost all taste by his nearly total-abstinence principle, and when some one gave him warm water with vinegar in it, he thought it was his usual dinner of bean broth! That actively good saint, Charles Borromeo, was only wisely moderate. “His austerities were discreet,” is the phrase of one of his biographers; and his abstemiousness made his health rather than marred it. This was so well known, that they who dieted themselves in order to recover or preserve health, were said to have adopted the remedy of Doctor Borromeo. St. Francis Xavier had something of the discretion of Charles Borromeo,—and of the modesty too, for he dressed his own dinners, even when he was apostolic legate; and that St. Clement of Alexandria belonged to the same class of sagely temperate men, is proved by his maintaining that a little wine taken at evening, after the labours of the day, was good for the body, and cheering for the spirits. So the sainted Archbishop of York had no repugnance to a slice of roast goose, for, as he truly remarked, so good a thing was not designed especially for sinners. And this recalls to my mind a comment, similar in spirit, made by St. Thomas à Becket. A monk once saw him eating the wing of a pheasant with much relish, and the pharisaical fellow thereon affected to be scandalized, saying that he thought Thomas was more of a mortified man. “Thou art but a ninny,” said the Archbishop; “knowest thou not that a man may be a glutton upon horse-beans; while another may enjoy with refinement even the wing of a pheasant, and have nature’s aid to digest what Heaven’s bounty gave?”