22 THE OYSTER. 



place that turtle-soup now does at our great City feeds, 

 imagination may busy itself if it likes with the calcu- 

 lation. All we know is, that oysters then fetched very 

 long prices at Eome, as the author of the '' Tabella 

 Cibaria" has not failed to tell us ; and then, as now, the 

 high price of any luxury of the table was sure to make 

 a liberal supply of it necessary, when a man like Crassus 

 entertained half the city as his guests, to rivet his popu- 

 larity. 



But the Eomans had a weakness for the " breedy 

 creatures," as our dear old friend Chiistopher North 

 calls them in his inimitable " jS'octes." In the time of 

 Kero, some sixty years later, the consumption of oysters 

 in the " Imperial City" was nearly as great as it now is 

 in the " World's Metropolis ;" and there is a statement, 

 which I recollect to have read somewhere, that during 

 the reign of Domitian, the last of the twelve Caesars, a 

 greater number of millions of bushels were annually 

 consumed at Rome than I should care to swear to. 

 These oysters, however, were but Mediterranean pro- 

 du^ce — the small fry of Circe, and the smaller Lucrinians; 

 and this um^easonable demand upon them quite exhausted 

 the beds in that great fly-catcher's reign; and it was not 

 till under the wise administration of Agricola in Britain, 

 when the Eomans got their far-famed Eutupians from 

 the shores of Kent, fi^om Eichborough and the Eeculvers 

 — the Rutupi Portus of the '' Itinerary," of which the 

 latter, the Regullium, near "Whitstable, in the mouth of 

 the Thames, was the northern boundary — that Juvenal 

 praised them as he does ; and he was right : for in the 

 whole world there are no oysters like them ; and of aU 



