463 PROSE HALIETTTICS. 



What must be sought, and dearly bought, 



Scari and swans, we prize ; 

 While skate and goose, in vulgar use. 



Men utterly despise.* 



Vast quantities of skate are consumed everywhere, 

 particularly in France ; yet it is a fish that seldom finds 

 its way to great tables. That people of daiaty diners 

 and nation of cooks serve it but in two ways — either 

 fried in black butter, or else boUed, with white. M. 

 Soyer, in his five hundred pages of closely -printed gour- 

 mandise, adds, we observe, nothing new, nor bestows 

 upon the great Ray family a single comment of his own. 

 Yet in spite of this aristocratic and artistic obloquy, 

 many who are not aristos are much indebted to skate, 

 particularly to some species, for a daily supply of good 

 and wholesome aliment. The pastinaca batis, or com- 

 mon skate {off a fiiU-grown specimen of which fifty per- 

 sons may easily dine), the homelyn, the thornback, and 

 the oxyrinchus, a very large species, which brings over 

 Frenchmen in shoals to Plymouth, to purchase and carry 

 away ia wet sand for friends across the water, are aU as 

 meritorious fish as most of those brought into our mar- 

 kets; not indeed for invalids, sensualists, or epicures, 

 but for clean tongues, healthy stomachs, and palates un- 

 vitiated by excess. 



Good cookery here does much, and the Sardinians, 

 who repudiate the oxyrinchus in their own country, where 

 it abounds, eat it with gusto in Paris, where it is ia 

 high esteem and excellently dressed. Had Dorion, the 

 Greek epicure, tasted it at the ' Rocher de Cancale,' or 

 'Trois Freres Provengaux,' he could hardly have report- 

 ed, on being asked his opinion of its merits, that it ' ate 

 like a boiled dish-clout.' 



Notwithstanding the silence of Apicius, the narke was 



* Petronius. 



