Snail-eating.—Perhaps you will permit me to remark, in reference to the communication of C. W. B., that snails are taken medicinally occasionally, and are supposed to be extremely strengthening. I have known them eagerly sought after for the meal of a consumptive patient. As a matter of taste, too, they are by
some considered quite epicurean. A gentleman whom I used to know, was in the constant habit as he passed through the fields, of picking up the white slugs that lay in his way, and swallowing them with more relish than he would have done had they been oysters.
That snails make a no inconsiderable item in the bill of fare of gypsies, and other wanderers, I proved while at Oxford, some time ago; for passing up Shotover Hill, in the parish of Headington, I unexpectedly came upon a camp of gypsies who were seated round a wood fire enjoying their Sunday's dinner: this consisted of a considerable number of large snails roasted on the embers, and potatoes similarly cooked. On inquiry, I was told by those who were enjoying their repast, that they were extremely good, and were much liked by people of their class, who made a constant practice of eating them. I need hardly say that I received a most hospitable invitation to join in the feast, which I certainly declined.
L. J.
Queries.
HENRY SMITH.
In Marsden's History of the Early Puritans (a work recently published, which will well repay perusal) there occurs (pp. 178, 179.) the following notice of Henry Smith:—
"Henry Smith was a person of good family, and well connected; but having some scruples, he declined preferment, and aspired to nothing higher than the weekly Lectureship of St. Clement Danes. On a complaint made by Bishop Aylmer, Whitgift suspended him, and silenced for a while probably the most eloquent preacher in Europe. His contemporaries named him the Chrysostom of England. His church was crowded to excess; and amongst his hearers, persons of the highest rank, and those of the most cultivated and fastidious judgment, were content to stand in the throng of citizens. His sermons and treatises were soon to be found in the hands of every person of taste and piety: they passed through numberless editions. Some of them were carried abroad, and translated into Latin. They were still admired and read at the close of nearly a century, when Fuller collected and republished them. Probably the prose writing of this, the richest period of genuine English literature, contains nothing finer than some of his sermons. They are free, to an astonishing degree, from the besetting vices of his age—vulgarity, and quaintness, and affected learning; and he was one of the first English preachers who, without submitting to the trammels of a pedantic logic, conveyed in language nervous, pure, and beautiful, the most convincing arguments in the most lucid order, and made them the ground-work of fervent and impassioned addresses to the conscience."
Would it not be desirable, as well in a literary as a theological point of view, that any extant sermons of so renowned a divine should be made accessible to general readers? At present they are too rare and expensive to be largely useful. A brief Narrative of the Life and Death of Mr. Henry Smith (as it is for substance related by Mr. Thomas Fuller in his Church History), which is prefixed to an old edition (1643) of his sermons in my possession, concludes in these words:—