ind. There is a deeply rooted conviction in her
inmost soul that all vegetables, which are not potatoes or cabbages,
partake of the nature of evil. As to eating vegetables apart from meat,
it was once as hard to get English domestics to let you do that, as to
get a Cretan cook to serve woodcock with the trail. "_Kopros_ is not a
thing to be eaten," says the Cretan, according to a traveller; and the
natural heart of the English race regards vegetables, when eaten as a
_plat_ apart, with equal disfavour. Probably the market gardener's
ignorance and conservatism are partly in fault. Cabbage he knows, and
potatoes he knows, but what are pennyroyal and chervil? He has
cauliflower for you, but never says, "Here is rue for you, and rosemary
for you." Cooks do not give him botany lessons, and a Scottish cook,
deprived of bay-leaf, has been known to make an experiment in the use of
what she called "Roderick Randoms," members of the vegetable kingdom
which proved to be rhododendron. As for pennyroyal, most people have
only heard of it through Mr. Bonn's crib to Aristophanes.

When it comes to fish, it is allowed that we are not an insular people
for nothing. There are other forms of good living that Paris knows not
of, so to speak, at first hand, native to England. Turtle soup, turbot
and lobster sauce, a haunch of venison, and a grouse, are, we may say
without chauvinism, a "truly royal repast." But we incur the contempt of
foreigners once more in the matter of wines. To like sherry, the coarse
and fiery, is a matter of habit, which would teach us to love betel-root,
and rejoice in the very peculiar drink of the South Sea islanders. Some
purists include champagne in the same condemnation--the champagne, that
is, of this degenerate day. When the Russians drank up the contents of
the widow Clicquot's cellars, they found a sweet natural wine, to which
they have constantly adhered. But Western Europe, all the Europe which,
as M. Comte puts it, "synergizes" after light and positivism, has tended
towards champagnes more or less dry. The English serve this "grog
mousseux" as a necessity for social liveliness, and have not come back to
the sweet wine which was only meant to be drunk with sweets. A
_Quarterly_ reviewer is very severe in his condemnation of a practice
which will only yield to the stress of some European convulsion in
politics and society. These matters are like certain large reforms, they
either come to p