Marble, cedar, rosewood, gold, and gems make a finer edifice than
thatch and ordinary timber and stones. So South-Down mutton and Devonian
beef fattened on the blue-grass pastures of the West, and the
magnificent prize vegetables and rich appetizing fruits, equal to
anything grown in the famed gardens of Alcinoues or the Hesperides, which
are displayed at our annual autumnal fairs as evidences of our
scientific horticulture and fructiculture, adorn the frame into which
they are incorporated by mastication and digestion, as rosewood and
marble and cedar and gold adorn a house or temple.

The subject of eating and drinking is a serious one. The stomach is the
great motive power of society. It is the true sharpener of human
ingenuity, _curis acuens mortalia corda_. Cookery is the first of arts.
Chemistry is a mere subordinate science, whose chief value is that it
enables man to impart greater relish and gust to his viands. The
greatest poets, such as Homer, Milton, and Scott, treat the subject of
eating and drinking with much seriousness, minuteness of detail, and
lusciousness of description. Homer's heroes are all good
cooks,--swift-footed Achilles, much-enduring Ulysses, and the rest of
them. Read Milton's appetizing description of the feast which the
Tempter set before the fasting Saviour:--

"Our Saviour, lifting up his eyes, beheld
In ample space, under the broadest shade,
A table richly spread in regal mode,
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort
And savor: beasts of chase or fowl of game
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
Gris-amber steamed; all fish from sea or shore,
Freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin,
And exquisitest name, for which was drained
Pontus and Lucrine bay and Afric coast;
And at a stately sideboard, by the wine
That fragrant smell diffused in order stood
Tall stripling youths, rich clad, of fairer hue
Than Ganymed or Hylas."

It is evident that the sublime Milton had a keen relish for a good
dinner. Keats's description of that delicious moonlight spread by
Porphyro, in the room of his fair Madeline, asleep, on St. Agnes' eve,
"in lap of legends old," is another delicate morsel of Apician poetry.
"Those lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon and sugared dainties" from
Samarcand to cedared Lebanon, show that Keats had not got over his
boyish taste for sweet things, and reached the maturity and gravity of
appetite which di