d like a ploughman's
luncheon, in his hand. But this robust supply would have served him in
fact for the day. He never tasted anything more before dinner, and at
dinner he ate almost as sparingly as Squire Tovell's niece from the
boarding-school,--

--"Who cut the sanguine flesh in frustums fine,
And marvelled much to see the creatures dine."

[Footnote 109: See Croker's _Boswell_ (edit. 1831), vol.
iii p. 38.]

The only dishes he was at all fond of were the old-fashioned ones to
which he had been accustomed in the days of Saunders Fairford; and
which really are excellent dishes,--such, in truth, as Scotland
borrowed from France before Catherine de' Medici brought in her
Italian _virtuosi_ to revolutionize the kitchen like the court. Of
most of these, I believe, he has in the course of his novels found
some opportunity to record his esteem. But, above all, who can forget
that his King Jamie, amidst the splendors of Whitehall, thinks himself
an ill-used monarch unless his first course includes _cocky-leeky_?

It is a fact, which some philosophers may think worth setting down,
that Scott's organization, as to more than one of the senses, was the
reverse of exquisite. He had very little of what musicians call an
ear; his smell was hardly more delicate. I have seen him stare about,
quite unconscious of the cause, when his whole company betrayed their
uneasiness at the approach of an overkept haunch of venison; and
neither by the nose nor the palate could he distinguish corked wine
from sound. He could never tell Madeira from sherry,--nay, an Oriental
friend having sent him a butt of _sheeraz_, when he {p.253}
remembered the circumstance some time afterwards, and called for a
bottle to have Sir John Malcolm's opinion of its quality, it turned
out that his butler, mistaking the label, had already served up half
the bin as _sherry_. Port he considered as physic: he never willingly
swallowed more than one glass of it, and was sure to anathematize a
second, if offered, by repeating John Home's epigram:--

"Bold and erect the Caledonian stood,
Old was his mutton, and his claret good;
Let him drink port, the English statesman cried--
He drank the poison, and his spirit died."

In truth, he liked no wines except sparkling champagne and claret; but
even as to this last he was no connoisseur; and sincerely preferred a
tumbler of whiskey-toddy to the most precious "liquid ruby" that ever