of drunkards. It is
the first that we have heard of them.

He was not a bad judge of what was palatable, and prescribes as an
agreeable and wholesome meal a couple of poached eggs with a little
salt and vinegar, and a few corns of pepper, some bread and butter,
and a draught of pure claret. He gives a receipt--the earliest I have
seen in print--for making metheglin or hydromel. He does not object
to furmety or junket, or indeed to custards, if they are eaten at
the proper seasons, and in the middle or at the end of meals. But he
dislikes mushrooms, and advises you to wash out your mouth, and rub
your teeth and gums with a dry cloth, after drinking milk.

The potato, however, he praises as nutritious and pleasant to the
taste, yet, as Gerarde the herbalist also says, flatulent. Venner
refers to a mode of sopping them in wine as existing in his time. They
were sometimes roasted in the embers, and there were other ways of
dressing them. John Forster, of Hanlop, in Bucks, wrote a pamphlet in
1664 to shew that the more extended cultivation of this root would be
a great national benefit.

Venner, who practised in the spring and autumn at Bath as a physician,
had no relish for the poorer classes, who did not fare well at the
hands of their superiors in any sense in the excellent old days. But
he liked the Quality, in which he embraced the Universities, and he
tenders them, among other little hints, the information that green
ginger was good for the memory, and conserve of roses (not the salad
of roses immortalised by Apuleius) was a capital posset against
bed-time. "A conserve of rosemary and sage," says he, "to be often
used by students, especially mornings fasting, doth greatly delight
the brain."

The military ascendency of Spain did not fail to influence the
culinary civilisation of those countries to which it temporarily
extended its rule; and in a Venetian work entitled "Epulario, or the
Italian Banquet," printed in 1549, we recognise the Spanish tone which
had in the sixteenth century communicated itself to the cookery of the
Peninsula, shewing that Charles V. and his son carried at least one
art with them as an indemnity for the havoc which they committed.

The nursery rhyme of "Sing a song of sixpence" receives a singular and
diverting illustration from the pages of this "Epulario," where occurs
a receipt "to make Pies that the Birds may be alive in them, and fly
out when it is cut up." Some of the other more sa