74 PEOSE HAIilETJTICS. 



countries north and south have alike acknowledged their 

 merits, and popes and czars swell the long list of their 

 patrons. 



As no bottle of alec or garum has hitherto turned up 

 in the excavations of Pompeii, we cannot speak authori- 

 tatively, nor institute a comparison between these pro- 

 ductions of the Burgesses of antiquity with our own. 

 Fish however we can compare, and the result goes to 

 prove that any cockney with two shilliiigs and sixpence 

 in his pocket, may regale over the stairs of Hungerford 

 Market, at Blackwall or Richmond, on delicacies which 

 the senate and people of Rome were utter strangers. 

 Indeed, it is no inconsiderable set-off agaiast the disad- 

 vantages of living so far from the sun, that the supplies 

 of northern fish-markets are iacontestably and greatly 

 superior to those of any Italian or Sicilian pescheria: 

 superior, 1st, because in those kinds which are common 

 to our great ocean, and their ' great sea,^ our own are 

 better flavoured; because, 2ndly, even the finer sorts, 

 which belong exclusively to the Mediterranean, are for the 

 most part poor; and 3rdly, and above all, because there 

 is an almost total want in its waters of species which we 

 consider, and advisedly, as our best. Were superiority 

 to be determined by mere beauty and variety of colour- 

 ing, the market of Billingsgate could not enter into 

 competition for a moment with the smallest fishing-town 

 in the south, where the fish are for the most part 

 coasters, and derive their gorgeous hues from the same 

 bucciaa and coquillage, whence the Tyrians got their 

 superb dyes. But as the gayest plumage is by no means 

 indicative of the bird best adapted for the table; so 

 brilliancy of scales affords no criterion by which to 

 judge of the culinary excellence of fish, the beauty of 

 whose skitt ia this instance contrasts siagularly with 

 the qualities of the flesh, which is generally poor and 

 iasipid, and sometimes unwholesome and even delete- 



