all into a glass bottle no bigger than my thumb.' What answer could be made? The prince nodded, and the article passed.

To turn for a moment to England-the state of cookery under Charles II. is sufficiently indicated by the names of Chiffinch and Chaubert, to whose taste and skill the author of Waverley has borne ample testimony by his description of the dinner prepared for Smith, Ganlesse, and Peveril of the Peak, at the little Derbyshire inn:

us.

'We could bring no chauffettes with any convenience; and even Chaubert is nothing, unless his dishes are tasted in the very moment of projection. Come, uncover, and let us see what he has done for Hum! ha! ay-squab pigeons-wild-fowl-young chickensvenison cutlets-and a space in the centre, wet, alas! by a gentle tear from Chaubert's eye, where should have been the soupe aur écrivisses. The zeal of that poor fellow is ill repaid by his paltry ten louis per month.'-Peveril, vol. ii. p. 165.

Under Queen Anne again, the gouty queen of gourmands, who had Lister, one of the editors of the Apicius, for her pet physician, and who in fact achieved the highest honour of gastronomy by giving her name to a pudding, cookery certainly did not suffer from any lack of encouragement; but soon after the accession of the Brunswicks a fashion was introduced, which we cannot but think adverse to the true and proper object of the art.

'The last branch of our fashion,' says Horace Walpole, 'into which the close observation of nature has been introduced, is our desserts. Jellies, biscuits, sugar-plums, and creams, have long since given way to harlequins, gondoliers, Turks, Chinese, and shepperdesses of Saxon china. But these, unconnected, and only seeming to wander among groves of curled paper and silk flowers, were soon discovered to be too insipid and unmeaning. By degrees, meadows of cattle, of the same brittle materials, spread themselves over the table; cottages rose in sugar, and temples in barley-sugar; pigmy Neptunes in cars of cockle-shells, triumphed over oceans of looking-glass, or seas of silver-tissue. Women of the first quality came home from Chenevix's, laden with dolls and babies, not for their children, but their housekeeper. At last, even these puerile puppet-shows are sinking into disuse, and more manly ways of concluding our repasts are established. Gigantic figures succeed to pigmies; and it is known that a celebrated confectioner (Lord Albemarle's) complained, that after having prepared a middle dish of gods and goddesses, eighteen feet high, his lord would not cause the ceiling of his parlour to be demolished to facilitate their entrée. "Imaginez vous," said he, 66 que milord n'a pas voulu faire ôter le plafond!"

The Intendant of Gascony,' adds Walpole, on the late birth of the Duke of Burgundy, amongst many other magnificent festivities, treated the noblesse of the province with a dinner and a dessert, the latter of which concluded with a representation, by wax figures

moved by clock-work, of the whole labour of the dauphiness and the happy birth of an heir to the monarchy.'-Lord Orford's Works, vol. i. p. 149.

Fortunately there were men of taste on both sides of the Channel, who made art minister to other purposes than vanity, and amongst these the Regent Duke of Orleans most signally distinguished himself. His petits soupers conferred a celebrity on the scene of them, which it still preserves, sufficiently to justify the reply of the Frenchman, who, on being asked by a stranger in a remote part of Europe if he could tell him the direction of Paris, made answer, Monsieur, ce chemin-là vous conduira au Palais Royal.' There is a vague tradition that the chef of the Regent was preeminent in a dinde aux truffes. Louis XV., amidst all his other luxuries, was not unmindful of that which, it has been sagaciously observed, harmonizes with all other pleasures, and remains to console us for their loss. It is generally understood that fables volantes were invented under his eye.

At the petits soupérs of Choisy (says the most graceful and tasteful of poets) were first introduced those admirable pieces of mechanism, a table and a side-board, which descended and rose again, covered with viands and wines. And thus the most luxurious court in Europe, after all its boasted refinements, was glad to return at last, by this singular contrivance, to the quiet and privacy of humble life.'Rogers's Poems, p. 135-note.

Louis XVI. is said to have been somewhat neglectful of his table, which may have been one amongst the many causes of his fall; for, as Johnson very properly observes, a man who is careless about his table will generally be found careless in other matters. In the case of Louis XVI. such carelessness was utterly inexcusable, as, for a time at least, the great Ude was a member of his establishment. Louis XVIII. (whom we mention now to obviate the necessity of returning to the dynasty) was a gastronome of the first water, and had the Duc d'Escar for his grand maître d'hotel; a man whose fortunes were hardly on a par with his deserts. He died inconsolable at not having given his name to a single dish, after devoting his whole life to the culinary art. When his best friends wished to wound him mortally, they had only to mention the Veau à la Béchamel. Gentlemen,' he would exclaim, say no more about it, or fancy me the author and inventor of the dish. This French Revolution was necessary-that, in the general break up, poor Béchamel should be decorated with this glory. Entre nous, he was wholly innocent of any invention whatever. But such is the way of the world!--he goes straight to posterity, and your most humble servant will end by leaving no token of remembrance behind him,'

The

The Revolution bid fair at its commencement to bring back a long night of barbarism upon art; and the destruction of the preexisting races of amphitryons and diners-out was actually and most efficiently accomplished by it. We allude not merely to the nobi lity, with their appendages the chevaliers and abbés, but to the financiers, who employed their ill-got fortunes so gloriously as almost to make gastronomic philosophers forgetful of their origin. What a host of pleasing associations arise at the bare mention of a dish à la financière! They were replaced, however, though slowly, by the inevitable consequences of the events that proved fatal to them. The upstart chiefs of the republic, the plundering marshals and parvenus nobles of Napoleon, proved no bad substitutes in this way for the financiers, though they tried in vain to ape the gallant bearing, as well as the arms and titles, of the old feudal nobility. Amongst the most successful of this mushroom generation was Cambacéres, second consul under the republic and arch-chancellor under the empire, who never suffered the cares of government to distract his attention from the great object of life.' On one occasion, for example, being detained in consultation with Napoleon beyond the appointed hour of dinner,-it is said that the fate of the Duc d'Enghien was the topic under discussion,-he begged pardon for suspending the conference, but it was absolutely necessary for him to despatch a special messenger immediately; then seizing a pen, he wrote this billet to his cook: Sauvez les entremets-les entrées sont perdues.' He risked, however, much less than may be supposed; for the well-known anecdote of the Geneva trout goes far to show that his table was in reality an important state-engine of Napoleon, to which all minor considerations were to succumb.

As some compensation, again, for the injurious influence of the revolution in its first stages upon cookery, it is right to mention that it contributed to emancipate the cuisine from prejudice, and added largely to its resources. Pièces de résistance, says Lady Morgan on Carème's authority, came in with the National Convention,-potatoes were dressed au naturel in the Reign of Terror, and it was under the Directory that tea-drinking commenced in France. But both her ladyship and Carème are clearly in error when they say that one house alone (les Frères Robert) preserved the sacred fire of the French kitchen through the shock. The error of this supposition will appear from the following sketch of far the most important change effected by the revolution,—a change bearing the strongest possible affinity to that which the spread of knowledge has effected in literature.

The time has been when a patron was almost as indispensable to an author as a publisher: Spenser waiting in Southampton's

ante-room

ante-room was a favourable illustration of the class; and so long as this state of things lasted, their independence of character, their position in society, their capacity for exertion, their style of thinking, were broken, lowered, contracted, and cramped. Circumstances, which it is beside the present purpose to dwell upon, have widened the field of enterprise, and led literary men to depend almost exclusively on the public for patronage, to the great manifest advantage of all parties. Precisely the same sort of change was effected in the state and prospects of French cookery by the revolution; which rapidly accelerated, if it did not altogether originate, the establishment of what now constitute the most distinctive excellence of Paris, its restaurants.

Boswell represents Johnson as expatiating on the felicity of England in her Mitres,' Turks' Heads, &c., and triumphing over the French for not having the tavern-life in any perfection. The English of the present day, who have been accustomed to consider domesticity as their national virtue, and the habit of living in public as the grand characteristic of the French, will read the parallel with astonishment; but it was perfectly well-founded at the time. The first restaurateur in Paris was Champ d'Oiseau, Rue des Poulies, who commenced business in 1770. In 1789 the number of restaurateurs had increased to a hundred; in 1804 (the date of the first appearance of the Almanach des Gourmands), to five or six hundred; and it now considerably exceeds a thousand. Three distinct causes are mentioned in the Almanach as having co-operated in the production and multiplication of these establishments. First, the rage for English fashions which prevailed amongst the French during the ten or fifteen years immediately preceding the revolution, 'for the English,' said the writer, as is well known, almost always take their meals in taverns.' Secondly, the sudden inundation of undomiciled legislators, who, finishing by giving the ton, drew by their example all Paris to the cabaret.' We are all aware that a somewhat similar inundation has been brought upon London by the Reform Bill; but it is to be hoped that our new representatives will not also finish by setting the ton,' and drawing all London to such pothouses as are at present frequented by the English tagrag and the Irish Tail. Thirdly, the breaking up of the domestic establishments of the rich secular and clerical nobility, whose cooks were thus driven to the public for support. Robert, for instance, one of the earliest and best of the profession, was ci-devant chef of the ci-devant Archbishop of Aix. A fourth cause has been suggested, on which we lay no particular stress: it has been thought that the new patriotic millionaires, who had enriched themselves by the plunder of the church and the nobility, were fearful, in those ticklish times, of letting the full extent of their opulence be known;

and

and thus, instead of setting up an establishment, preferred gratifying their Epicurean inclinations at an eating-house.* Be this as it may, at the commencement of the nineteenth century the culinary genius of France had become permanently fixed in the restaurants, and when the allied monarchs arrived in Paris in 1814, they were absolutely compelled to contract with a restaurateur (Véry) for the supply of their table, at the moderate sum of 3000 francs a day, exclusive of wine.

We despair of doing justice to a tithe of the distinguished personages who have grown rich and famous in the public practice of their art in France, but we must endeavour to signalise a few of them, and we shall excite no envy by mentioning such names as Rechaud, Merillion, Robert, Beauvilliers, Méot, Rose, Legacque, Léda, Brigaut, Naudet, Tailleur, Véry, Henneveu, and Baleine, because all and each of them are now generally regarded as historical. Of these, the three first have been ingeniously characterised as the Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Rubens of cookery; and Beauvilliers was placed by acclamation at the head of the classical school, so called by way of contradistinction to the romantic school, of which the famous Carème is considered as the chief. Here again the philosophic observer will not fail to mark a close analogy between cookery and literature.†

Beauvilliers was a remarkable man in many ways, and we are fortunately enabled to furnish a few materials for his future biographer. He commenced the practice of his profession about 1782, in the Rue Richelieu, No. 20, which we record for the instruction of those who love to trace the historic sites of a metropolis. His reputation grew slowly, and did not arrive at its full height until the beginning of the present century, but it was never known to retrograde, and in 1814 and 1815 he fairly rivalled Véry in the favour of nos amis les ennemis.' He made himself personally acquainted with all the marshals and generals of taste, without regard to country, and spoke so much of the language of each as was necessary for his own peculiar sort of intercourse. His memory, also, is reported to have been such, that, after a lapse

*It was not unusual amongst the English adventurers who had enriched themselves by the plunder of India, in the golden days of Paul Benfield and Lord Clive, to make a mystery of their wealth. 'What does mean (said a country gentleman) by buying that farm, which is at least five miles distant from his principal estate ?''He means to join them at the proper season,' replied an old Indian, who proved right

Dugald Stewart was struck by the analogy between cookery, poetry, and the fine arts, as appears from the following passage:- Agreeably to this view of the subject, sweet may be said to be intrinsically pleasing, and bitter to be relatively pleasing; which both are, in many cases, equally essential to those effects, which, in the art of cookery, correspond to that composite beauty which it is the object of the painter and of the poet to create!'-Philosophical Essays.

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