

ONIONS AND LEEKS. 139 



Lucan, in speaking of Cleopatra's banquet to 

 Csesar, asserts that 



" For dainties Egypt every land explores, 

 Nor spares those very gods her zeal adores." 



Probably they surmised that the extreme liking 

 exhibited by this people for the onion might have 

 lead to its deification; and Hasselquist (with a sin- 

 gular license of imagination), describes the Egyp- 

 tians even of his day, with a sort of Scandinavian 

 spiritualism, devoutly wishing that onions might 

 form one of the viands of the world to come ! This 

 value for the onion-tribe as an article of food would 

 appear almost like a natural instinct in certain coun- 

 tries and climates, however strange the fact may 

 appear to us, evidencing, that though we may like 

 neither the one nor the other, yet that 



" Different people have different ' pinions, 

 Some like leeks, and some like o [i] nions !" 



The above-named traveller refers with quite an 

 Israelitish longing* to the onions of Egypt ; for 

 whoever, he says, has tasted of them, " must ac- 

 knowledge that none can be better in any part of 

 the universe/' The importance of the onion, as an 

 article of consumption in ancient Egypt, is attested 

 not only by the passage in Numbers to which we 

 have referred : " We remember the fish that we did 



eat in Egypt freely and the leeks, and the 



onions, and the garlic;" but also by the information 

 so carefully given to us by Herodotus of the quan- 



* See Numbers, xi. 5. 



