Half way up Lybanus, blanched as snowy white
As Leila's teeth, and they will fitly crown
The beggars' four-fold dish for us to-night.
"'Beggars are happy! then let us be so;
We've buried care in wine's red-glowing sea.
There let him soaking lie—he was our foe;
Joy laughs above his grave—and so will we!'"
It was from that love of contrast, then, was it, which is a part of all luxury, that the fable of the Quatre Mendiants was made to serve like the olives at dessert. Perhaps the fillip which walnuts give to wine suggested it. It was a modern French rendering of the skull made to do duty as a drinking-cup. It is a part of the five kernels of corn at a Pilgrim dinner, without that high conscientiousness of New England. It is a part, perhaps, of the more melancholy refrain, "Be merry, be merry, for to-morrow ye die!" It is that warmth is warmer when we remember cold; it is that food is good when we remember the starving; it is that bringing in of the pleasant vision of the four beggars under the tree, as a picture perhaps; at any rate there it is, moral at your pleasure.
The desserts of the middle ages were heavy and cumbrous affairs, and had no special character. There would be a good deal of Cellini cup and Limoges plate, and Palissy dish, and golden chased goblet about it, no doubt. How glad the collectors of to-day would be to get them! And we picture the heavy indigestible cakes, and poisonous bonbons. The taste must have been questionable if we can believe Ben Jonson, who tells of the beribboned dwarf jester who, at a Lord Mayor's dinner, took a flying header into a dish of custard, to the infinite sorrow of ladies' dresses; he followed, probably, that dish in which the dwarf Sir Geoffrey Hudson was concealed, and they both are after Tom Thumb, who was fishing about in a cup of posset a thousand years ago.
The dessert is allowed by all French writers to be of Italian origin; and we read of the maîtres d'hotel, before the Italian dessert arrived, probably introduced by Catherine de Medici and the Guises, that they gloried in mountains of fruit, and sticky hills of sweetmeats. The elegance was clumsy and ostentatious; there was no poetry in it. Paul Veronese's picture of the "Marriage of Cana" will give some idea of the primeval French dessert. The later fashion was of those trees and gardens and puppets abused by Horace Walpole; but Frenchmen delighted in seas of glass, flower-beds formed of coloured sand, and little sugar men and women promenading in enamelled bowling-greens. We get some idea of the magnificent fêtes of Louis XIV. at Versailles from the glowing descriptions of Molière.