IV: Dinner With 

 Diversions 



IN setting forth a banquet, it was no small part 

 of the Elizabethan magnificence to furnish 

 diversion with the feast. Enough was never as 

 good to those exuberant people who accounted 

 poor the pleasures that came singly, and who held 

 as paupers' fare, whether it was peacock-pie or 

 swan, roasted ox or venison, the bounty which 

 left the outer vision still unoccupied. Yoimg in 

 spirit, they ate as they lived, with a child's lusty 

 appetite and half -attention ; their appetite in the 

 very moment of enjoyment, racing on to further 

 quest. So it was that any proper host provided 

 pomp and revel, masque and pageantry, not to 



[8i] 



