Which by misdiet daily greater grew;
Such one was Gluttony, the second of that crew."
But is he a glutton? and has he not been outrageously reviled by Spenser as well as by the poets in general? Is it fair to accept the dogmas and predications concerning his status, his vulgarity, and his voracity that have been bequeathed him from time immemorial? Is he not a gourmet rather than a gourmand? Does he not infinitely prefer the smallest truffle of Périgord to the hugest pumpkin of the fat prairies of the West? Not only inordinately fond of the truffle, without which a pâté de foie gras were a flower without perfume, he is the great hunter of this highly prized esculent, recognising with Autolycus that a good nose is requisite to smell out work for the other senses. Yet even then he is thanklessly treated by man, who, instead of remunerating him with an occasional tuber, grudgingly tosses him a few kernels of corn. The despised razorback of the South, in like manner, steadfastly performs his mission of waging war upon the rattlesnake without ever having been chosen as the emblem of a State.
To the epicure he must ever bring to mind the perfumed product of the sunny provinces of Guienne and Dauphiné, the artists of Alsace, and the Wurstmachereis of Germany. His fondness for the truffle, as instanced in the wild boar, far exceeds that of the hare, the squirrel, and the deer; and although the basset-hound and sheep-dog are also of service in locating the tuber, the pig not only points it, but deftly uproots it for the greedy hand of man. The pig seeks it by instinct; the dog, through long and patient training. The pig's education is accomplished in a few lessons by obtaining his confidence and appealing to his epicurean taste. A boiled potato accompanied with a few truffle peelings is placed in a mound of sand, after finding which the animal is rewarded by a few chestnuts, acorns, or kernels of maize—and the rest is left to his infallible memory. In fact, the discovery of the truffle is due to the animal under consideration. "His long snout," says La Reynière, "perceived the odour of this treasure at a depth of several metres. Up to this time, without a doubt, it had been reserved for the table of some evil genius jealous of the happiness of man; by his cunning he concealed it from the researches of the scientist, and some fairy, a friend of the human race, charged the pig, whose keen scent the goblin had forgotten to forefend, to mine the buried marvel and bring it to the light of day. However this may be, the first pig that discovered the truffle had excellent taste; there is no bel esprit to-day who is not eager to imitate him."[31]
The boar's head, likewise, how suggestive of good cheer! It at once takes one back to the great baronial dining-halls, the Knights of the Round Table, and the feasts and wassails of eld. It suggests the joyous festivals of harvest-home and Yule, with the chief table on the dais and the tables for retainers and servants, when the family and attendants assembled amid the blaze of the great hearth-fire and the music of the harpers and minstrels.
Again, consider his lovely appetite, exquisite digestion, and imperturbable slumbers that many a millionaire would gladly part with half his riches to obtain. The papillæ of his tongue are never furred by dyspepsia, flatulence, gout, or the spleen. Proverbially on the best of terms with his stomach, he needs no podophyllin, bicarbonates, or Hunyadi. Sudden variations of temperature affect him not, while all latitudes are equally conducive to his longevity. Ennui is to him unknown, and life is never a burden, unless it be the trifling burden of the weight he carries. He sleeps and eats and digests, and in his own way solves the problem of content that is still unsolved by man.
His blithesome Porkship! his graces steal into the heart insensibly if one be a minute philosopher. No cock-crowing or turkey-gobbling, no lowing of kine or bleating of flocks, no screaming of hawks or cawing of crows may vie as an expression of the rural landscape with his complacent grunt of satisfaction and "high-piping Pehlevi" of triumph. A vibrant chord of melody when snouted and bristled disputants crowd and jostle around the trough or squeal and scramble within the pen, it yet requires a more potent mediumship to draw forth in its fullest measure the piercing treble of the porcine lyre. Rather let us hear it, arrectis auribus, rising sonorously along the highway or drifting adown some reverberant lane, with the dog as the plectrum of the ham-strings. Thomson, less gracious but more observant than Lamb, recognised his accomplishments as a lyrist, and in a stanza in "The Castle of Indolence," a complement to the stanza cited from "The Faerie Queene," thus apostrophises his power of song:
"Ev'n so through Brentford town, a town of mud,
An herd of bristly swine is pricked along;
The filthy beasts that never chew the cud