e informs the curious reader that there was also "a turtle
sent as a Present to the Company, and dressed in a very high _Gout_
after the West Indian Manner." Old cookery-books, such as the misquoted
work of Mrs. Glasse, Dr. Kitchener's _Cook's Oracle_, and the anonymous
but admirable _Culina_, all concur in their testimony to the enormous
amount of animal food which went to make an ordinary meal, and the
amazing variety of irreconcilable ingredients which were combined in a
single dish. Lord Beaconsfield, whose knowledge of this recondite branch
of English literature was curiously minute, thus describes--no doubt
from authentic sources--a family dinner at the end of the eighteenth
century:--

"The ample tureen of _potage royal_ had a boned duck swimming in its
centre. At the other end of the table scowled in death the grim
countenance of a huge roast pike, flanked on one side by a leg of mutton
_a la daube_, and on the other by the tempting delicacies of Bombarded
Veal. To these succeeded that masterpiece of the culinary art a grand
Battalia Pie, in which the bodies of chickens, pigeons, and rabbits were
embalmed in spices, cocks' combs, and savoury balls, and well bedewed
with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs in
which our grandfathers delighted, and which was technically termed a
Lear. A Florentine tourte or tansy, an old English custard, a more
refined blamango, and a riband jelly of many colours offered a pleasant
relief after these vaster inventions, and the repast closed with a dish
of oyster-loaves and a pomepetone of larks."

As the old order yielded place to the new, this enormous profusion of
rich food became by degrees less fashionable, though its terrible
traditions endured, through the days of Soyer and Francatelli, almost to
our own time. But gradually refinement began to supersede profusion.
Simultaneously all forms of luxury spread from the aristocracy to the
plutocracy; while the middle and lower classes attained a degree of
solid comfort which would a few years before have been impossible. Under
Pitt's administration wealth increased rapidly. Great fortunes were
amassed through the improvement of agricultural methods and the
application of machinery to manufacture. The Indian Nabobs, as they were
called, became a recognized and powerful element in society, and their
habits of "Asiatic luxury" are represented by Chatham, Burke, Voltaire,
and Home Tooke as producing a marked e