Just as our epicures profess to distinguish, by flavour a salmon fresh, run from the sea from one that has been degenerating for four-and-twenty hours in the fresh water of the river—with this difference, however, that, unlike the salmon with us, the above-bridge pike was considered at Rome to be more delicate than his sea-bred and leaner brother.
Ofellus next proceeds to ridicule the taste which prizes what is set before it for mere size or rarity or cost. It is this, he contends, and not any excellence in the things themselves, which makes people load their tables with the sturgeon or the stork. Fashion, not flavour, prescribes the rule; indeed, the more perverted her ways, the more sure they are to be followed.
"So were any one now to assure us a treat
In cormorants roasted, as tender and sweet,
The young men of Rome are so prone to what's wrong,
They'd eat cormorants all to a man, before long."
But, continues Ofellus, though I would have you frugal, I would not have you mean—
"One vicious extreme it is idle to shun,
If into its opposite straightway you run;"
illustrating his proposition by one of those graphic sketches which give a distinctive life to Horace's Satires.
"There is Avidienus, to whom, like a burr,
Sticks the name he was righteously dubbed by, of 'Cur,'
Eats beechmast and olives five years old, at least,
And even when he's robed all in white for a feast
On his marriage or birth day, or some other very
High festival day, when one likes to be merry,
What wine from the chill of his cellar emerges—
'Tis a drop at the best—has the flavour of verjuice;
While from a huge cruet his own sparing hand
On his coleworts drops oil which no mortal can stand,
So utterly loathsome and rancid in smell, it
Defies his stale vinegar even to quell it."
Let what you have he simple, the best of its kind, whatever that may be, and served in the best style. And now learn, continues the rustic sage,
"In what way and how greatly you'll gain
By using a diet both sparing and plain.
First, your health will be good; for you readily can
Believe how much mischief is done to a man
By a great mass of dishes,—remembering that
Plain fare of old times, and how lightly it sat.
But the moment you mingle up boiled with roast meat,
And shellfish with thrushes, what tasted so sweet
Will be turned into bile, and ferment, not digest, in
Your stomach exciting a tumult intestine.
Mark, from a bewildering dinner how pale
Every man rises up! Nor is this all they ail,
For the body, weighed down by its last night's excesses,
To its own wretched level the mind, too, depresses,
And to earth chains that spark of the essence divine;
While he, that's content on plain viands to dine,
Sleeps off his fatigues without effort, then gay
As a lark rises up to the tasks of the day.
Yet he on occasion will find himself able
To enjoy without hurt a more liberal table,
Say, on festival days, that come round with the year,
Or when his strength's low, and cries out for good cheer,
Or when, as years gather, his age must be nursed
With more delicate care than he wanted at first.
But for you, when ill health or old age shall befall,
Where's the luxury left, the relief within call,
Which has not been forestalled in the days of your prime,
When you scoffed, in your strength, at the inroads of time?
"'Keep your boar till it's rank!' said our sires; which arose,
I am confident, not from their having no nose,
But more from the notion that some of their best
Should be kept in reserve for the chance of a guest:
And though, ere he came, it grew stale on the shelf,
This was better than eating all up by one's self.
Oh, would I had only on earth found a place
In the days of that noble heroic old race!"
So much as a question of mere health and good feeling. But now our moralist appeals to higher considerations:—