g embarked for Ephesus, for the
purpose of eating fish, his favourite food, he arrived at the market,
and found all the stalls empty. There was a wedding in the town, and all
the fish had been bespoken. He hastens to embrace the new-married
couple, and singing an epithalamium, the dithyrambic epicure enchanted
the company. The bridegroom was delighted by the honour of the presence
of such a poet, and earnestly requested he would come on the morrow. "I
will come, young friend, if there is no fish at the market!"--It was
this Philoxenus, who, at the table of Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily,
having near him a small barbel, and observing a large one near the
prince, took the little one, and held it to his ear. Dionysius inquired
the reason. "At present," replied the ingenious epicure, "I am so
occupied by my Galatea," (a poem in honour of the mistress of the
tyrant,) "that I wished to inquire of this little fish, whether he could
give me some information about Nereus; but he is silent, and I imagine
they have taken him up too young: I have no doubt that old one, opposite
to you, would perfectly satisfy me." Dionysius rewarded the pleasant
conceit with the large barbel.

ANCIENT AND MODERN SATURNALIA.

The Stagyrite discovered that our nature delights in imitation, and
perhaps in nothing more than in representing personages different from
ourselves in mockery of them; in fact, there is a passion for masquerade
in human nature. Children discover this propensity; and the populace,
who are the children of society, through all ages have been humoured by
their governors with festivals and recreations, which are made up of
this malicious transformation of persons and things; and the humble
orders of society have been privileged by the higher, to please
themselves by burlesquing and ridiculing the great, at short seasons, as
some consolation for the rest of the year.

The Saturnalia of the Romans is a remarkable instance of this
characteristic of mankind. Macrobius could not trace the origin of this
institution, and seems to derive it from the Grecians; so that it might
have arisen in some rude period of antiquity, and among another people.
This conjecture seems supported by a passage in Gibbon's
Miscellanies,[127] who discovers traces of this institution among the
more ancient nations; and Huet imagined that he saw in the jubilee of
the Hebrews some similar usages. It is to be regretted, that Gibbon does
not afford us a