These examples, however, must be understood as occurring mostly, if not exclusively, among the lower classes of the clergy. There was a time when “the Vicar and Moses” illustrated the sad doings of a similar class among ourselves.
The Greek clergy in the South of Europe present us with something no less curious of aspect. The hall-kitchen of the Greek Patriarch, at Constantinople, is crowded with inferior clergy, who take their meals there, and his All-Holiness himself is served with pipes and sweetmeats by nothing less than gentlemen in Deacon’s orders. Fancy our Lord Primate ringing his bell for cheroots for two! and having them brought in on a silver tray by the Curate of St. Margaret’s!
The Greek usages however are classical. The stranger who dines with the Patriarch has, previous to falling to, water poured over his hands as he holds them over a basin with a perforated cover, and the napkins for drying them are as delicate as rose-leaves. The guest reclines on a low couch, in ancient fashion, and his repast is placed on a low stool at his side. The same custom exists in the convents, but meat is seldom to be found there by a guest who arrives unexpectedly. The monks themselves never eat it at all. During half the year they have but one meal a day, and that consists of vegetables and bread. On the other days of the year they are permitted the more liberal, but sufficiently eremitic fare of cheese, eggs, fish, wine, and milk; but even on these gala days they are never allowed more than two meals. Poor fellows! the majority of them pass their remarkably well-spent time, when not at table, in tilling the ground or teaching wonderful feats to very accomplished tom-cats!
A Greek monk’s idea of an Englishman is that he is a plum-pudding eater. And no wonder, since the English are almost the exclusive purchasers of the currant-grapes which are cultivated all along the northern shores of the Peloponnesus, from Patra to Corinth. As the Chinese think that we take their tea that we may live, so the Greek monks conclude that we must buy their currants, or die! At the convent of Vestizza, the good fathers trouble their heads about nothing but the produce and price of their great staple crop. If you ask how many brethren there are in the convent, they will answer, “Three hundred; and what was the price of currants in England when you left?” Inquire if their books be in good order, and they will reply in the negative, adding an assurance that they do their utmost to produce the best currants in the country. And they will give you permission to see their church, if you will only promise to recommend their dwarf grapes to the English merchants who are catering for plum-pudding eaters at home. The grounds of other convents in the peninsula are famous for their nuts, in the exportation of which the brethren drive no inconsiderable trade.
These worthy people are said to be a trifle more enlightened and a degree less slothful than they were some thirty years ago. There was ample room and verge enough for improvement; for at the period mentioned, the Greek priests resisted the introduction of the potato into the kitchen-garden, for the very satisfactory reason that the pomme de terre was the very identical apple with which Satan beguiled Eve out of Paradise! Yes, these modern and orthodox saints very generally held that the devil tempted Eve with an “ash-leaf kidney!”
If we cross over to Abyssinia, we shall find that the priests and orthodox people there keep as poor tables, at least on fast-days, as the Greeks. Above eight months in the year are assigned by the Abyssinian Christians to abstinence! On these occasions an Abyssinian neither eats nor drinks till long after noon. On festival days, however, they make up for their moderation by unrestrained excess. Mr. Mansfield Perkyns, a traveller who has given us the most recent account of life in Abyssinia, tells us that, in honour of the festival of the Elevation of the Cross, he gave an early breakfast to some dozen guests, who were engaged to half-a-dozen other parties in the course of the same joyous day, and that these guests whetted their appetite for later meals by consuming at breakfast a fine fat cow, two large sheep, and endless gallons of mead! On these occasions the mead is pretty prolific of murder. The guests get dreadfully drunk in honour of the day, exactly as many highly civilized Christian people in happy England do on the yearly recurrence of “merry Christmas.” Indeed, a feast of the Elevation of the Cross without plenty of quarrelling and bloodshed would be as dull as Donnybrook fair now is without a row. But the Abyssinian Christian is as clever in establishing a casus belli as a Donnybrook Romanist. If the latter sees the fair is likely to end without a fight, he simply takes off his hat, draws a white line round it with chalk, and declaring that he will break the head of the first man who denies that such white line is silver lace, he has speedily abundance of active work before him. So a pious Abyssinian at an “Elevation” banquet, if he finds things dull, merely remarks to his dearest friend and next neighbour, “You are a good sort of man, but you are not so handsome as I am!” and thereupon out fly the knives of the parties and their respective friends, which they proceed to clean by plunging them into each other’s ribs!
The people are brought up on a food likely to encourage such pugnacious propensities. Mr. Perkyns, speaking of the slaughtering of oxen for the kitchen, says:—“Almost before the death-struggle is over, persons are ready to flay the carcase, and pieces of the raw meat are cut off, and served up before this operation is completed. In fact, as each part presents itself, it is cut off and eaten while yet warm and quivering. In this state it is considered, and justly so, to be very superior in taste to what it is when cold. Raw meat, if kept a little time, gets tough; whereas, if eaten fresh and warm, it is far tenderer than the most tender joint that has been hung a week in England. The taste is perhaps, in imagination, rather disagreeable at first, but far otherwise when one gets accustomed to it; and I can readily believe that raw meat would be preferred to cooked meat, by a man who from childhood had been accustomed to it.” Such fare, I may observe, may not be out of place at the table of a patriarch who lives in such a climate as that of Abyssinia, but we suspect that it would as much astonish a dinner party at an episcopal palace in England, as Mr. Perkyns himself would do were he to sit down to that dinner in his ordinary Abyssinian fashion of—a bald head covered with butter!
I have spoken in another chapter of a Brahmin who stuffed himself with sweetmeats until he was nearly suffocated, and who exclaimed, on being recommended to swallow a little water, that if he had had room for water he would have swallowed more sweetmeats! It is but justice, however, to these saintly gentlemen to confess that they can fast when there is anything to be gained by it. Among the Mahrattas, when a fast man attempts to cheat his creditors, a Brahmin is hired to sit the dhurna, and this is the process—a process, by the way, which Monsieur Dimanche tried on Don Juan, but unsuccessfully. The Brahmin goes to the house or tent of the debtor, sometimes attended by numerous followers, and he announces the dhurna, by which the debtor must not eat until he has discharged his liabilities. The clerical bailiff sits at his side and is bound to fast also, until the matter is arranged. He who holds out longest wins the day, and if the debtor be famished he will pay rather than die outright, for eat he dare not until his creditor be satisfied; besides, if he were to starve the Brahmin to death, the crime would be so heinous, that the debtor himself had better have departed to the world of shadows. It ensues that sitting dhurna is more successful in certain districts than it would be in Belgravia, even though the Archbishop of Canterbury himself were to take his seat in the middle of the square, with a declaration that he would neither move nor eat until every inhabitant in the parish had paid his Christmas bills. Poor man! he would have to sit as long as infelix Theseus.
The saints of our puritan days were great favourers of public fasts; but these fasts were less numerous after they had consolidated their power, than before. “In the beginning of the wars,” says Foulis, in his “History of the wicked Plots of the pretended Saints,” “a public monthly fast was appointed for the last Wednesday of every month, but no sooner had they got the king upon the scaffold, and the nation fully secured to the Rump interest, but they thought it needless to abuse and gall the people with a multitude of prayers and sermons,” and so, by a particular act of their worships (April 23, 1649), nulled the proclamation for the observation of the former; all which verifieth the old verses:—
“‘The devil was sick, the devil a monk would be.