302 THE COOKERY OF VENISON 



metrical glorification of vert and venison, interspersed 

 with snatches of ballads which were the songs of the 

 bowmen of the Greenwood. Peacock was a dreamer 

 and fantastical novelist : but he had sound ideas on 

 the subject of cookery, and has conceived in his 

 ' Dr. Opimian ' the type of the orthodox and high- 

 living divine of the Establishment, who held, with 

 Johnson, that the man who did not mind his belly 

 was worse than an infidel. No one of his admirers 

 is likely to forget his sage remarks on Palestine soup 

 and the jowl of the salmon. Peacock was a poetical 

 dreamer, and George Borrow, on the other hand, was 

 an eminently practical man and a devoted missionary. 

 The author of ' The Bible in Spain,' not only took 

 his life in his hand habitually, but condemned himself 

 to asceticism. Travelling in Spain through the civil 

 strife between Carlists and Christines, he would 

 generally have been intensely grateful for the cow- 

 heels that Sancho marked for his own. We admire 

 Borrow's single-minded devotion all the more, that 

 the natural man delighted in good and substantial 

 cheer. The round of beef that Lavengro dined on at 

 the Western coaching inn will live with the leg of 

 mutton and mealy potatoes of the Wiltshire farm 

 painted by Richard Jefferies with the realistic pictur- 

 esqueness of Rembrandt's joint in the Louvre. When 



