Nor was this distinction in general one of place alone: in most of the
wealthy and noble houses of the period, it portended a corresponding
distinction in the quality of the food. Hence in the homely times in which
Ben Jonson has apostrophized Penshurst, it is mentioned as an honorable
instance of the hospitality of its owner, that

----'there each guest might eat,
Without his fear, and of the lord's own meat;
Where the same beer, board, and self-same wine,
That is his lordship's, shall be also mine.'

'A strange topic of praise,' remarks Gifford, 'to those who are
unacquainted with the practice of those times; but in fact the liberal
mode of hospitality here recorded was almost peculiar to this noble
person. The great dined at long tables, (they had no other in their vast
halls,) and permitted many guests to sit down with them; but the
gradations of rank and fortune were rigidly maintained, and the dishes
grew visibly coarser as they receded from the head of the table.' To sit
below the salt, is a phrase with which the romances of Scott have made us
familiar, and which originated, it seems, in the custom of placing a large
salt-cellar near the middle of the table, not more for convenience than
with reference to the distribution of the guests.

The same spirit which presided over the appointments of this stately hall
extended itself to the other apartments and remoter details of the
household. Every where there is the same reference to the power and even
the supervision of the lord, manifested in the long suites of rooms which
open upon each other, (the hall just mentioned is commanded by a small
window opening from a superior and adjacent apartment,) as if to give the
master at one glance a view of the number and a knowledge of the pursuits
of the inmates. The ideas of the architects of that age seem to have been
limited in their object, to realizing an image of the great feudal
principle of preeminence and protection on the one side, submissiveness
and reliance on the other. Hence designs and arrangements so little
consistent with the privacy and personal independence which we regard at
present as indispensable to every scheme of domestic accommodation. But
these artists were not limited alone by a defective conception of the
objects of their art; they were also embarrassed in its execution by the
unequal manner in which the different branches of it had been cultivated
and improved. It is doubtless a rem