, and was the savouriest part, you may believe, of the
entertainment.

Golden lads and lasses must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust--

James White is extinct, and with him these suppers have long ceased.
He carried away with him half the fun of the world when he died--of my
world at least. His old clients look for him among the pens; and,
missing him, reproach the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the
glory of Smithfield departed for ever.

_Lamb._

A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M.[26] was
obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy
thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living
animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. [Footnote 26: Thomas
Manning.] This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great
Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he
designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the
Cook's holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of
roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother)
was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swine-herd,
Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was,
to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his
eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with
fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into
a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration
over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes.
Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a
building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine
litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished.
China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East from the
remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in utmost consternation,
as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his
father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and
the labour of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the
pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and
wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely
sufferers, an odour assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he
had before experienced. What could it proceed from?--not from the
burnt cottage--he had smelt that smell before-