upon as all but necessaries--cakes, puddings, made dishes,
confectionery, preserves, sweet biscuits, jellies, cooked fruits, tarts,
and so forth--were then practically quite impossible. Fancy attempting
nowadays to live a single day without sugar; no tea, no coffee, no jam,
no pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one goes to bed; the
bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that was really the abject
condition of all the civilised world up to the middle of the middle
ages. Horace's punch was sugarless and lemonless; the gentle Virgil
never tasted the congenial cup of afternoon tea; and Socrates went from
his cradle to his grave without ever knowing the flavour of peppermint
bull's eyes. How the children managed to spend their Saturday _as_, or
their weekly _obolus_, is a profound mystery. To be sure, people had
honey; but honey is rare, dear, and scanty; it can never have filled one
quarter the place that sugar fills in our modern affections. Try for a
moment to realise drinking honey with one's whisky-and-water, or doing
the year's preserving with a pot of best Narbonne, and you get at once a
common measure of the difference between the two as practical
sweeteners. Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beet-root in abundance,
while sugar-maples and palm-trees of various sorts afford a considerable
supply to remoter countries. But the childhood of the little Greeks and
Romans must have been absolutely unlighted by a single ray of joy from
chocolate creams or Everton toffee.

The consequence of this excessive production of sweets in modern times
is, of course, that we have begun to distrust the indications afforded
us by the sense of taste in this particular as to the wholesomeness of
various objects. We can mix sugar with anything we like, whether it had
sugar in it to begin with or otherwise; and by sweetening and flavouring
we can give a false palatableness to even the worst and most
indigestible rubbish, such as plaster-of-Paris, largely sold under the
name of sugared almonds to the ingenuous youth of two hemispheres. But
in untouched nature the test rarely or never fails. As long as fruits
are unripe and unfit for human food, they are green and sour; as soon as
they ripen they become soft and sweet, and usually acquire some bright
colour as a sort of advertisement of their edibility. In the main, bar
the accidents of civilisation, whatever is sweet is good to eat--nay
more, is meant to be eaten; it is onl