on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favor of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in ROAST PIG.

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate-princeps obsoniorum.

I speak not of your grown porkers

things be

tween pig and pork-those hobbledehoys - but a young and tender suckling under a moon old guiltless as yet of the sty-with no original speck of the amor immunditiæ, the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest - his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble and a grumble the mild forerunner or præludium of a grunt.

He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled—but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument!

There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not overroasted, crackling, as it is well called the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistancewith the adhesive oleaginous - O call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it—the tender blossoming of fat-fat cropped in the bud taken in the shoot in the first innocence the cream and quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure food the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result or common substance.

Behold him while he is "doing" it seemeth

rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string! Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age! he hath wept out his pretty eyes radiant jellies shooting stars. — See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth!- wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal-wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation - from these sins he is happily snatched

away

"Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,
Death came with timely care

"1

his memory is odoriferous-no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon-no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages - he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure and for such a tomb might be content to die.

He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendenta delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tenderconscienced would do well to pause person - too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach her-like lovers' kisses, she biteth—she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the

1 From Coleridge's Epitaph on an Infant. It must have been with unusual glee that Lamb here borrowed half of his friend's quatrain. The epitaph had appeared in the very earliest volume to which he was himself a contributor the little volume of Coleridge's poems, published in 1796, by Joseph Cottle, of Bristol. The lines are there allotted a whole page to themselves.

fierceness and insanity of her relish — but she stoppeth at the palate—she meddleth not with the appetite and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton-chop.

Piglet me speak his praise — is no less provocative of the appetite than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices.

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbors' fare.

I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn door chickens (those "tame villatic fowl,") capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give everything." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavors to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what), a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate. It argues an insensibility.

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was over London Bridge) a gray-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt, at this time of day, that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, schoolboy-like, I made him a present of the whole cake! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction; but, before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I-I myself, and not another

would eat her nice cake - - and what should I say to her the next time I saw her- how naughty I was to part with her pretty present!-and the odor of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last - and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness; and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-fornothing, old gray impostor.

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacri

ficing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto.

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether, supposing that the flavor of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremam 1) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death?" I forget the decision.

Decidedly, a few

His sauce should be considered. bread crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are-but consider, he is a weaklinga flower.

1 [That is, by a tremendous thrashing.]