ive of disease, must have bulk--must possess solidity--must not
be rapidly digestible, and must contain, in varied proportions, all the
staminal ingredients of nutriment."

Sir Henry Marsh, said one of the morning journals, did not attack M.
Soyer, but he demolished the soup kitchen as effectively as if he did.

As soon as M. Soyer's model soup depot was completed, he resolved to
open it for public inspection with a good deal of ceremony. On the 5th
of April, therefore, the opening day, the space in front of the Royal
Barracks presented a very animated scene; flags floated gaily in the
breeze; the rich dresses of ladies of birth and fashion contrasted
pleasingly with the costly and superb military uniforms among which they
moved; and M. Soyer was all politeness in explaining to his
distinguished visitors the arrangements and perfections of his soup
kitchen. In a famine-stricken land, the good taste of this exhibition
was doubtful enough: at any rate it was criticised with no sparing hand.

When I got a card of invitation, writes one, I thought I was to see M.
Soyer's peculiar appliances for making soup for the poor; but no--it was
a "gala day:" drums beating, flags flying. Then the writer grows
political, and says bitterly, that he "envied not the Union flag the
position it occupied as it flaunted in triumph from the chimney top of
the soup kitchen; it was its natural and most meet position; the rule of
which it is the emblem has brought our country to require soup
kitchens,--and no more fitting ornament could adorn their tops." All the
parade he could, he says, have borne, but what he considered
indefensible was the exhibition of some hundreds of Irish beggars "to
demonstrate what ravening hunger will make the image of God submit
to."[250] "His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant was there," wrote the
_Evening Packet_ (a Conservative journal); "the ladies Ponsonby and many
other fair and delicate creatures assembled; there were earls and
countesses, and lords and generals, and colonels and commissioners, and
clergymen and doctors; for, reader, it was a _gala day_,--a _grand
gala_." The provincial press dealt with the proceedings in the same
spirit.

Like many other great men, M. Soyer, in a short time, found that Ireland
was his "difficulty;" so he resolved, somewhat suddenly, it would
appear, to return to the more congenial atmosphere of the Reform Club.
His resolution was thus announced in one of the Dublin morning jou