PHEASANTS OF OLD 
341 
Ah, what avails his glossy varying dyes, 
His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes. 
His vivid green, his shining plumes unfold, 
His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold ! " 
Wherever pheasants are found — ^and they are found in all the temperate 
regions of Asia and Europe — they commend themselves to the lovers 
of good cheer. In England they have long been of good repute as a 
gastronomic delicacy. They figure in the banquet imagined by the 
fine old Devonshire poet, William Brovpne : — 
" Pheasant and partridge into jelly turned. 
Grated with gold, seven times refined and burned ; " 
And Ben Jonson makes his Sir Epicure Mammon 
say:— 
" My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons. 
Knots, godwits, lampreys." 
In that great feast made by Archbishop Neville, 
two hundred pheasants smoked upon the board. It 
was not until 1250, however, that they were known 
in Europe; and we may well condole with the shades 
of our ancestors who had gone over to the majority 
before this memorable event, and never known the 
flavour of roast pheasant. We find it difficult, how- 
ever, to believe in this ignorance, when we remem- 
ber that the bird was a necessary concomitant of a 
Roman banquet ; and that Heliogabalus fed his lions 
upon pheasants' flesh. .A.iid as early as 1210, a 
