310 OYSTERS, AND ALL ABOUT THEM. 



pale chablis to wash it down, no newly-cut, well-buttered 

 brown bread, did that solitary anonymous man inaugurate 

 the first oyster banquet." (3) And ever since men have 

 gone on eating oysters. Emperors and poets, princes and 

 priests, pontiffs and statesmen, orators and painters, have 

 feasted on the favoured bivalve. 



Well, as I have said, looking at it from our point of. 

 view, he ivas a bold man. But Dr. Johnston gives us the 

 story of a Greek whose disposition quite equalled, if it did 

 not excel in courage, that of our first oyster-eater : 



"Of all fish-eaters, 



None, sure, excelled the lyric bard Philoxenus. 

 'Twas a prodigious twist ! At Syracuse 

 Fate threw him on the fish called ' many-feet.' (c) 

 He purchased it and drest it : and the whole, 

 Bate me the head, formed but a single swallow." 



And, after this, who can wonder that " a crudity ensued," 

 and that the visit of "the doctor" was deemed advisable. 



But to return to our oyster-eater. The picture drawn 

 in the legend is quite up to the standard (as far as its 

 brevity will admit) of " Hero worship ' in the abstract, 

 but although I admit that the anonymous prehistoric gen- 

 tleman in question fully deserves a novel in his honour, 

 I think old Fuller's version of the matter comes nearer the 

 truth. 



(b) " The Ocean World," p. 379, and quoted from "The Harvest 

 of the Sea ;" but in my edition of the latter work (the third) there is 

 no such passage. 



(c) So was it called in ancient times. It is a kind of Octopus (O. 

 vulgaris), for which the common name is the " poulpe. " Animals of 

 this kind, classed among oysters as molluscs, from the softness of their 

 bodies, and therefore related to the oyster as the species to the genus, 

 are sometimes found on the British shores. 



