158 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
shallow moulds, then heavily salted for a month, or more, while 
still in the moulds. It is traversed by abundant air-bubbles, 
and open passages, whilst flavoured by the dried herb Melilot, 
or sweet yellow Clover (admirable against nose-bleeding). 
Sage Cheese is coloured with bruised Sage leaves, or in Scotland 
with lovage leaves, also with marigold leaves, and parsley. 
““ Marbled with sage the hardening cheese she pressed.” 
Gay. 
Sydney Smith, when writing to Robert Murchison, the 
geologist (December, 1841), said: “Heaven send I may 
understand your book, but my knowledge of the science is too 
slender for that advantage,—a knowledge which just enables 
me to distinguish between the caseous and the cretaceous 
formations ; or, as the vulgar have it, to “ know chalk from 
cheese”; (the real meaning of which is to have ready possession 
of one’s wits; to know a poor, spurious article from a good, or 
genuine one). Groaning Cheese, as we read in Bourne’s Popular 
Antiquities, takes a part in the blithement, or entertainment, 
provided after the birth, or at the christening, of an infant. 
“Tt is customary at Oxford to cut what we in the north call the 
Groaning Cheese in the middle, when the babe is born, and to 
so proceed with the cutting as by degrees to form with it a large 
kind of ring, through which the child is passed on the christening 
day.” “As thin as Banbury Cheese” was a favourite simile 
with our ancestors: “Our lands and glebes are clipped and 
pared to become as thin as Banbury Cheese.” 
A Welsh Rabbit, which is practically Cheese-toast, is popularly 
so named after a jocular fashion, much the same as a “ Norfolk 
capon,” or red herring, or “Glasgow magistrate.” Similarly 
an Essex lion is a calf, a Field Lane duck is a baked sheep’s head, 
and potatoes are Irish plums, or Irish apricots. “ Rosted 
Cheese,” wrote Dr. Tobias Venner (Via Recta ad vitam longam, 
1620), “‘is more meete to entise a mouse or rat into a trap than 
to be received into the bodie, for it corrupteth the meats in the 
stomacke, breedeth adust cholericke humours, and sendeth 
up from the stomacke putrid vapours, and noysome fumes which 
greatly offend the head, and corrupt the breath.” ‘“‘ To conclude, 
(he adds), “the much eating of Cheese is onely convenient for 
rustick people, and such as have very strong stomackes, and that 
also use great exercise.” So much for the old author! Per contra 
