If the dining-out poets were poor, it was much the same with the philosophers. The proudest walks of philosophy were trodden by Demosthenes, the blacksmith. Socrates was the ill-featured, but original-minded, son of a mason and midwife. Epicurus was only rich in a valueless boast of being descended from Ajax; and Isocrates, whose father manufactured the musical ancestry from which are descended the modern families of piano-forte and fiddle, was also one of the immortal race of intellectual giants.... Of other writers we may remark, that Quintus Curtius, whose “Alexander the Great” is the first historical romance that ever was written, and contains the best description of a Babylonian banquet that ever was painted in words, was of an ignoble family. Celsus was, at least, not a Roman citizen, though resident at Rome; and Plutarch was just “respectable,” and nothing more;—though to be worthy of respect, as the term implies, is as high rank as a man need sigh for.
But though art and science, though the Nine Sisters who made Parnassus vocal, were thus worshipped by the slave and his cousin the beggar, wealth was by no means a synonymous term for either sloth or incapacity. The opulent Lucretius, who believed nothing; the two Plinies, the soul of one of whom, “with a difference,” entered into Horace Walpole, and who wrote about his slave Zozimus, as Walpole does of his favourite servants; the tender and chivalrous Tibullus,—a Latin Sir Philip Sidney; the profligate Sophocles; Æschylus, the bottle-drainer; and the lofty Euripides: all these mounted Pegasus with golden spurs, and gave glorious dinners to guests with whom they could contend in the battle of brains. Some, like Martial, got their mouths filled with the sugar-candy of imperial recompence. Cæsar, the Commentator, was the descendant of the Sabine Kings, and the founder of an empire. In Plato we see the double condition of aristocrat and slave. From the latter condition he was rescued by his noble friends at the cost of three thousand drachmas; more fortunate in this than Diogenes, who, being friendless, was left to hug his irons, and teach his master’s sons to love virtue and liberty.
And the mention of the name of Plato reminds me of a more modern philosopher, who did not lack reverence for him,—I mean Bacon,—and Bacon naturally brings me from my digression to the subject of “Table Traits” in imaginary Utopias. This philosopher, in his “New Atlantis,” is even more infelicitous than More, both in the framing of his fiction, and the extracting from it of a moral. The table laws spoken of in Solomon’s house, have more of a jolly aspect than those drawn by Sir Thomas More. For instance, “I will not hold you long with recounting of our brewhouses, bakehouses, and kitchens, where are made divers drinks, breads, and meats, rare and of special effects. Wines we have of grapes, and drinks of other juice, of fruits, of grains, and of roots; and of mixtures with honey, sugar, manna, and fruits dried and decocted; also of the tears and woundings of trees, and of the pulp of canes: and these drinks are of several ages, some to the age at least of forty years. We have drinks also brewed of several herbs or roots, and spices, yea, with several fleshes and wine-meats, whereof some of the drinks are such as they are in effect meat and drink both. So that divers, especially in age, do desire to live with them, with little or no meat or bread; and, above all, we strive to have drinks of extreme thin parts, to insinuate into the body, and yet without all biting sharpness, or fretting; insomuch as some of them put upon the back of your hand will, with a little stay, pass through to the palm, and yet taste mild to the mouth. We have also waters which we ripen in that fashion as they become nourishing, so that they are, indeed, excellent drink, and many will use no other. Breads we have of several grains, roots, and kernels, yea, and some of flesh and fish dried, with divers kinds of leavenings and seasonings, so that some do extremely move appetites; some do nourish so as divers do live of them without any other meat, who live very long. So, for meats, we have some of them so beaten and made tender and mortified, yet without all corrupting, as a weak heat of the stomach will turn them into good chylus, as well as a strong heat would meat otherwise prepared. We have some meats, also, and breads and drinks which, taken by some, enable them to fast long after; and some other that will make the very flesh of men’s bodies sensibly more hard and tough, and their strength far greater than otherwise it would be.”
In this way could philosophy disport itself, and not with much attendant profit, beyond amusement. Before I conclude this section, I may notice a more graceful fiction touching banquets, than any thing to be met with among the philosophers. The inhabitants of the coast of Malabar believe that the double cocoas of the Moluccas, annually thrown on their shore by the waves, and joyfully welcomed by the expecting inhabitants, are the produce of a palm-tree growing in the fathomless recesses of the ocean; and that they arise from among coral-groves endowed with supernatural qualities and attributes. For a detailed account of this supposed phænomenon, and a very pretty illustration of the theory of seeds transported by winds and currents, I refer all curious inquirers to the “Annals of My Village,” by a Lady. In the mean time, I venture to put into verse, the supposed scene which occurs at the annual cocoa-banquet in Malabar:—
’Neath the waves of Mincoy grows a magical tree,
In the sunless retreat of a dark coral-grove,
Where slumber young sprites,—the gay elves of a sea
Flinging back the bright blue of its heaven above.
There they sip the sweet fruit of that palm-tree, and leave
Of its best and its ripest for maidens who stray,