oysters, those mute inglorious Hampdens, that
century alter century grew delicious, yet died
neglected and unheeded by struggling man.

A great world of puddings, creams, pâtés,
tartlets, and jellies lies before us, and we have
to pick our way through it, stopping here and
there to nibble and to browse. Shades of
dead pâtissiers, spirits of extinct confiseurs,
rise round us in savoury steams, and evoke
for us the ghosts of past gastronomic pleasures;
recal those stewed apricots at Memphis; those
maids of honour at the pleasant dinner at the
Star and Garter, when the red October sun was
glowing over the foggy Thames, and the
champagne was simmering up the little well shafts of
our wine cups. Let us recal the iced meringues
of the Palais Royal, the purple blooded
damson tarts of our appreciative school days,
the apricot tarts of our maturer years, the salads
de fraises au marasquin of our still riper judgment.

The French, gayer and lighter handed at the
confectioner's oven than ourselves, moulding
pastry almost as well as we do steel and iron,
have always been fond of the playthings of
the kitchen; the tartlets, the custards, the
frothy nothings that are fashioned out of the
evanescent union of whipped cream and spun
sugar. Their politeness, their brag, their
accomplishments, their love of the external,
all lead to such dainties, which the true epicure,
who has well dined insists on somewhat
contemptuously despising. It was
observed when the allies were in France and
carried off fifty million francs in tumbrils from
the Rue Vivienne, and, what was worse, six
hundred thousand bottles of the best champagne
from poor M. Moet's cellars at Epernay, that
the love of pastry in Paris derived a new
development from the vexatious visit. Madame
Felix, in the Passage des Panoramas, is said
to have sold between twelve and fifteen thousand
pâtés in a day. Tom Moore, always as
steady a gourmet as he was a tuft hunter, used
to visit the Passage after a déjeuner à la
fourchette at the Café Hardy, where he
describes sumptuously the coffee sealed up
with

    A neat glass of Parfait amour, which one sips,
   Just as if bottled velvet tipp'd over one's lips.

The gay Irish Anacreon then proceeds to
sketch Madame Felix in his pleasant butterfly
way:

   If some who're Lotharios in feeding should wish
   Just to flirt with a luncheon (a devilish bad trick),
   As it takes off the bloom of one's appetite, Dick,
   To the Passage des—(what d'ye call it?)—des Panoramas
   We quicken our pace, and there heartily cram as
   Seducing young pâtés, as ever could cozen
   One out of one's appetite, down by the dozen.

At that strange wild time, when the flaunting
painted beauties under the arcades of the
Palais Royal, and the gamblers on the floors
above, allured to that dangerous quarter
Cossacks of the Don, whose bare skin, as Haydon
observed, showed through the rents in their
chain mail, bullying Prussian officers looking
like truculent drill-sergeants, bright blonde
moustachioed young Austrian officers, stalwart
rather too contemptuous Englishmen, subtle
Russians, half savage Circassians, and quite
savage Bashkirs—this motley crowd of blue,
white, and scarlet, plumed with feathers and
epauletted with gold and silver lace, jingled,
clashed, swore, threatened, clattered, sung, and
cursed, all day in and out of the pastry shops of
Paris, so that before the detested foreign bayonets
defiled out of France, waggon-loads of
tarts and cheesecakes must have disappeared
before the ravening jaws of those strangely
mingled soldiers. The visit of the Allies to
Paris was, in fact, the apotheosis of pastry and
the coronation time of the fricassée. That visit,
resultless in many respects, bore at least this
remarkable fruit, that it diffused a taste for
French cooking, French pastry, and French
wines throughout nearly the whole of civilised
Europe.

Dreikopf very thoughtfully observes, that the
wisest men that ever lived have been unable to
decide on the comparative merits of pies and
puddings. Mr. Hayward, who has carefully
digested the subject, gives the palm to puddings,
as affording more scope for the inventive
genius of the cook, but thinks them too often
underdone. Plum pudding requires care not to
be raw, or as dangerously heavy as an eighteen-
pound shot. Who that has travelled in the
East (a journey in which expatriation at pleasant
Christmas time is indispensable) does not
remember the agonising plum porridge that
your chuckling dragoman served up with
innocent triumph, saying "Here is de booding,
what you want, eh, my gentlemens? ver good,
eh? what say my gentlemens?" and that, too,
after you had regaled on a thin, leathery, caught-up
fowl and a joint of old goat, and were intending
to make up by a pleasant reminiscence
of home and younger days? Lord Byron, once
spent a whole morning, in Italy, weighing out
materials for a national pudding to celebrate
his own birthday. He felt there was danger,
he tried to guard against fate, but in vain. The
result was a smoking tureen of raisin soup.
Byron was much quizzed about this, and used to
bear it with the childish petulance of a vain and
wayward tempered man. Plum pudding is a
dish of great antiquity, but it requires the
digestion of warriors after a tournament to
eat much of it with impunity. Let no
member of the Temperance Society (the
society is, we are told, dyspeptic to a man,
and rather inclined to excess in solid food,
nature repressed on one side always breaking
out on the other) partake of plum pudding, for
a chasse après is imperative, and the ordinary
digestion, refused this comfort, always has a
habit of revenging itself cruelly, nightmares
trample on you all that night, and your soft
feather-bed turns into a burning prairie, or to
Damiens' couch of steel.

It is said that George the Third, methodical