e dessert, hippocras was
served, as they have liqueurs to this day on the Continent both after
dinner and after the mid-day breakfast.

The writer of "Piers of Fulham" lived to see this fashion of
introducing a third meal, and that again split into two for
luxury's sake; for his metrical biographer tells us, that he refused
rear-suppers, from a fear of surfeiting.

I collect that in the time of Henry VIII. the supper was a
well-established institution, and that the abuse of postponing it to
a too advanced hour had crept in; for the writer of a poem of this
period especially counsels his readers _not to sup late_.

Rear-suppers were not only held in private establishments, but in
taverns; and in the early interlude of the "Four Elements," given in
my edition of Dodsley, and originally published about 1519, a very
graphic and edifying scene occurs of a party of roisterers ordering
and enjoying an entertainment of this kind. About seventy years later,
Robert Greene, the playwright, fell a victim to a surfeit of pickled
herrings and Rhenish wine, at some merry gathering of his intimates
falling under this denomination. Who will venture to deny that the
first person who kept unreasonable hours was an author and a poet?
Even Shakespeare is not exempt from the suspicion of having hastened
his end by indulgence with one or two friends in a gay carouse of this
kind.

The author of the "Description of England" enlightens us somewhat on
the sort of kitchen which the middle class and yeomanry of his time
deemed fit and sufficient. The merchant or private gentleman had
usually from one to three dishes on the table when there were no
visitors, and from four to six when there was company. What the
yeoman's every-day diet was Harrison does not express; but at
Christmas he had brawn, pudding and souse, with mustard; beef, mutton,
and pork; shred pies, goose, pig, capon, turkey, veal, cheese, apples,
etc., with good drink, and a blazing fire in the hall. The farmer's
bill of fare varied according to the season: in Lent, red herrings and
salt fish; at Easter, veal and bacon; at Martinmas, salted beef; at
Midsummer, fresh beef, peas, and salad; at Michaelmas, fresh herrings
and fat mutton; at All Saints', pork and peas and fish; and at
Christmas, the same dainties as our yeoman, with good cheer and
pastime.

The modern luncheon or nuncheon was the archaic _prandium_, or
under-meat, displaced by the breakfast, and modified in its cha