514 PROSE HALrETJTICS. 



winds; my face, in spite of former experience of such 

 liabilities, lengthens, and my lower jaw, as loth to com- 

 municate to myself within what is sure to foUow, drops 

 at the well-ascertained prospect of a meagre, bloodless 

 repast/ 



To persons so pledged and engrossed in the immediate 

 business of the feast, it would never have occurred to 

 collect details for the benefit of a distant posterity, and 

 our curiosity must have remained accordingly without 

 food to satisfy it, but for a certain sect of philosophers 

 called ' deipnosophists,^ or supper-sages, who used to 

 make it part of the business of the entertainment to dis- 

 cuss every dish as it was placed before them, and farther, 

 to introduce into their colloquies all such topics as were 

 immediately connected with or suggested by the ban- 

 quet. From the very erudite researches of these dilettanti 

 diners-out, many curious facts (the knowledge of which 

 would otherwise have perished) have come down to us ; 

 and their savoury miscellany affords also so many lively 

 bits of description, and dazzling glimpses of different 

 feasts, as to enable the reader, by the light of their col- 

 lated and joint coruscations, to form some idea of the 

 synthetic splendour of a Greek banquet, just as, from 

 broken columns and fragments of frieze, we conceive of 

 the integral grandeur of a temple which has long since 

 fallen to pieces, and left no other traces of its quondam 

 magnificence and glory. 



The first thing likely to impress the most careless 

 peruser of the pages of Atheneeus is the exceedingly bad 

 use which the ancient world too often made of its good 

 cheer, turning the pleasures of the table into the foidest 

 excesses, and so overloading and goading the stomach, 

 that at length it succumbed, like a weary pack-horse, 

 and sank prematurely under a burden it could no longer 

 carry. From this debasing vice of gluttony few, with 

 the means of indulging it at hand, had the virtue to re- 



