56 PROSE HALIEUTICS. 



and hospitality with comments sufficiently contemptuous. 

 The extravagance of one Cassiodorus^ who sold his slave 

 in the morning that he might sup on a mursena, which 

 ran away with the whole purchase-money, is the subject 

 of a pleasant epigram of Martial: — 



No fish, insatiate! fills that maw of thine: 

 'Tis not on fish, but man ! on man you dine !* 



Great was the dread of diners-out lest there should not 

 be a sufficient supply of obsonia at table, and even the size 

 of a sturgeon did not always allay anxiety on that score. 

 Cicero informs us, that when one of these ministerial 

 bonnes bouches was presented to Scipio, whilst he was in 

 the very act of inviting guests to partake of it, their mu- 

 tual friend Pontius, sidling up, whispered into his ear, but 

 loud enough for him to hear, ' Mind what you're about, 

 Scipio, your fish will not hold out for those you have 

 already invited. 'Tis but a small sturgeon that: acipen- 

 ser hie paucorum hominum est.' It would be endless 

 to tell of the expedients adopted by Romans, parasites 

 or mistresses, to secure fish from their respective vic- 

 tims, but as some of the most amusing anecdotes of this 

 sort are of cinque-cento antiquity, we shaU give two of 

 them the preference. 



Leo X. would condescend occasionally to practical 

 jokes, and once, for the sake of enlivening a party of 

 friends at the expense of a notorious glutton, one Mari- 

 narius, invited him, in this waggish mood, to a lamprey 

 feast ; giving orders meanwhile to the cook not to buy 

 lampreys, but to stew down some thick coils of rope in a 



* Exolamare Hcet, non est hoc, improhe, non est 



Fiscis, homo est, hominem, Cassiodore, voras. — Mart. 

 Whence, probably, the distich of the old Scotch song in ' Caller 

 Herring,' and Sir W. Scott's striking adaptation of it in ' The An- 

 tiquary.' For other epigrams by the same author, on the same 

 subject, vide Mullet. 



