ay, with an exclamation of "Lord Jesus!" and involved
the whole table in havoc, ruin, and confusion.

Before Pickle could accomplish his escape, he was sauced with the syrup
of the dormouse pie, which went to pieces in the general wreck; and as
for the Italian count, he was overwhelmed by the sow's stomach, which,
bursting in the fall, discharged its contents upon his leg and thigh,
and scalded him so miserably, that he shrieked with anguish, and grinned
with a most ghastly and horrible aspect.

The baron, who sat secure without the vortex of this tumult, was not at
all displeased at seeing his companions involved in such a calamity as
that which he had already shared; but the doctor was confounded with
shame and vexation. After having prescribed an application of oil to
the count's leg, he expressed his sorrow for the misadventure, which he
openly ascribed to want of taste and prudence in the painter, who did
not think proper to return, and make an apology in person; and protested
that there was nothing in the fowls which could give offence to a
sensible nose, the stuffing being a mixture of pepper, lovage, and
assafoetida, and the sauce consisting of wine and herring-pickle, which
he had used instead of the celebrated garum of the Romans; that famous
pickle having been prepared sometimes of the scombri, which were a
sort of tunny-fish, and sometimes of the silurus, or shad-fish: nay, he
observed that there was a third kind, called garum haemation, made of
the guts, gills, and blood of the thynnus.

The physician, finding it would be impracticable to re-establish the
order of the banquet, by presenting again the dishes which had been
discomposed, ordered everything to be removed, a clean cloth to be laid,
and the dessert to be brought in. Meanwhile, he regretted his incapacity
to give them a specimen of the aliens, or fish meals of the ancients,
such as the jus diabaton, the conger-eel, which, in Galen's opinion, is
hard of digestion; the cornuta, or gurnard, described by Pliny in his
Natural History, who says, the horns of many of them were a foot and
a half in length, the mullet and lamprey, that were in the highest
estimation of old, of which last Julius Caesar borrowed six thousand for
one triumphal supper. He observed that the manner of dressing them was
described by Horace, in the account he gives of the entertainment to
which Maecenas was invited by the epicure Nasidienus:--

Affertur squillas inter muraena n