234 THE COOKERY OF THE PHEASANT 



diet and the localities in which he has been reared. 

 We have remarked that every disquisition on cookery 

 goes back to the Romans — if not to the times of 

 their Trojan ancestors and to the Homeric feasts 

 before the walls of Ilium. We had almost forgotten 

 that remarkable people, the terror of the young 

 gentlerrien at Dr. Blimber's academy. But we are 

 irresistibly led to moralise on the vanity of mortal 

 aspirations, when we think of the fond delusions 

 of Apicius, LucuUus, or Vitellius as they feasted on the 

 belated game which was served at their superabundant 

 boards. Some of these imperial epicures were gluttons 

 rather than gourmands, and had no sort of pretension 

 to be gour?neis. They were perpetually grasping at 

 shadows, and confounding ostentation with luxury. 

 They valued a dish for its cost and rarity, and rewarded 

 a cook with a farm for some mad freak of original 

 extravagance. Fancy pretending to enjoy Whitstable 

 natives on the Seven Hills before refrigerating cham- 

 bers were invented ! What could be more grotesquely 

 absurd than silencing five hundred melodious song- 

 sters to furnish an imperial cntr'ee of nightingale 

 tongues ! The culinary system which ended with the 

 fall of the Empire was essentially vicious. There 

 were no pheasant coverts in the Campagna, and the 

 cheerful crow of the cock of the low country woods 



