pression of the _s_, comes the French word for a collation
or luncheon, viz. _gouter_] Speaking of his uncle, Pliny the Younger
says--"Post solem plerumque lavabatur; deinde gustabat; dormiebat minimum;
mox, quasi alio die, studebat in coenae tempus". "After taking the air he
bathed; after that he broke his fast on a bit of biscuit, and took a
very slight _siesta_: which done, as if awaking to a new day, he set in
regularly to his studies, and pursued them to dinner-time." _Gustabat_
here meant that nondescript meal which arose at Rome when _jentaculum_ and
_prandium_ were fused into one, and that only a _taste_ or mouthful of
biscuit, as we shall show farther on.

Possibly, however, most excellent reader, like some epicurean traveller,
who, in crossing the Alps, finds himself weather-bound at St. Bernard's
on Ash-Wednesday, you surmise a remedy: you descry some opening from "the
loopholes of retreat," through which a few delicacies might be insinuated
to spread verdure on this arid desert of biscuit. Casuistry can do much. A
dead hand at casuistry has often proved more than a match for Lent with all
his quarantines. But sorry we are to say that, in this case, no relief is
hinted at in any ancient author. A grape or two, (not a bunch of grapes,)
a raisin or two, a date, an olive--these are the whole amount of relief[6]
which the chancery of the Roman kitchen granted in such cases. All things
here hang together, and prove each other; the time, the place, the mode,
the thing. Well might man eat standing, or eat in public, such a trifle
as this. Go home to such a breakfast as this! You would as soon think of
ordering a cloth to be laid in order to eat a peach, or of asking a friend
to join you in an orange. No man makes "two bites of a cherry." So let
us pass on to the other stages of the day. Only in taking leave of this
morning stage, throw your eyes back with us, Christian reader, upon this
truly heathen meal, fit for idolatrous dogs like your Greeks and your
Romans; survey, through the vista of ages, that thrice-cursed biscuit, with
half a fig, perhaps, by way of garnish, and a huge hammer by its side, to
secure the certainty of mastication, by previous comminution. Then turn
your eyes to a Christian breakfast--hot rolls, eggs, coffee, beef; but
down, down, rebellious visions: we need say no more! You, reader, like
ourselves, will breathe a malediction on the classical era, and thank your
stars for making you a Romantici