I thus dwell on an otherwise uninteresting speculation, were I not about to draw a corollary, and shew how these secret influences became apparent at what is called the great epoch of the Reformation. The latent tendency to escape from fasting observances became then revealed, and what had lain dormant for ages was at once developed. The Tartar and Sclavonic breed of men flung off the yoke of Rome; while the Celtic races remained faithful to the successor of the Fisherman,' and kept Lent. 6 "The Hollanders, the Swedes, the Saxons, the Prussians, and in Germany those circles in which the Gothic blood ran heaviest and most stagnant, hailed Luther as a deliverer from salt fish. The fatted calf was killed, the bumper of ale went round, and Popery went to the dogs. Half Europe followed the impetus given to free opinions, and also the congenial impulse of the gastric juice; joining in reform, not because they loved Rome less, but because they loved substantial fare more. Meantime neighbours differed. The Dutch, dull and opaque as their own Scheldt, growled defiance at the Vatican when their food was to be controlled; the Belgians, being a shade nearer to the Celtic family, submitted to the fast. While Hamburg clung to its beef, and Westphalia preserved her hams, Munich and Bavaria adhered to the Pope and to sour crout with desperate fidelity. As to the Cossacks, and all that set of northern marauders, they never kept Lent at any time; and it would be arrant folly to expect that the horsemen of the river Don, and the Esquimaux of the polar latitudes, would think of restricting their ravenous propensities in a Christian fashion; the very system of cookery adopted by these terrible hordes would, I fear, have given Dr. Kitchiner a fit of cholera. The apparatus is graphically described by Samuel Butler: I will indulge you with part of the quotation: 'For, like their countrymen the Huns, All day on horses' backs they straddle, A strange process, no doubt; but not without some sort of precedent in classic records; for the Latin poet introduces young Iulus at a pic-nic, in the Eneid, exclaiming 'Heus! etiam mensas consumimus.' "In England, as the inhabitants are of a mixed descent, and as there has ever been a disrelish for any alteration in the habits and fire-side traditions of the country, the fish-days were remembered long after every Popish observance had become obsolete; and it was * "Under their bums."-Sic in orig. O. Y. 1 not until 1668 that butchers' meat finally established its ascendency in Lent, at the arrival of the Dutchman. We have seen the exertions of the Tudor dynasty under Elizabeth, and of the house of Stuart under James I. and Charles I., to keep up these fasts, which had flourished in the days of the Plantagenets, which the Heptarchy had revered, which Alfred and Canute had scrupulously observed, and which had come down positively recommended by the Venerable Bede. William III. gave a death-blow to Lent. Until then it had lingered among the threadbare curates of the country, extrema per illos excedens terris vestigia fecit, having been long before exiled from the gastronomic halls of both Universities. But its extinction was complete. Its ghost might still remain flitting through the land, without corporeal or ostensible form; and it vanished totally with the fated star of the Pretender. It was William who conferred the honour of knighthood on the loin of beef; and such was the progress of disaffection under Queen Anne, that the folks, to manifest their disregard for the Pope, agreed that a certain extremity of the goose should be denominated his nose! "The indomitable spirit of the Celtic Irish preserved Lent in this country unimpaired; an event of such importance to England, that I shall dwell on it by and by more fully. The Spaniards and Portuguese, although Gothic and Saracen blood has com mingled in the pure current of their Phoenician pedigree, clung to Lent with characteristic tenacity. The Gallic race, even in the days of Cæsar, were remarkably temperate, and are so to the present day. The French very justly abhor the gross, carcass-eating propensities of John Bull. But as to the keeping of Lent, in an ecclesiastical point of view, I cannot take on myself to vouch, since the ruffianly revolution, for their orthodoxy in that or any other religious matters. They are sadly deficient therein, though still delicate and refined in their cookery, like one of their own. artistes, whose epitaph is in Père la Chaise 'Ci gît qui dès l'âge le plus tendre Inventa la sauce Robert; Mais jamais il ne put apprendre "It was not so of old, when the pious monarchs of France dined publicly in Passion week on fasting fare, in order to recommend by their example the use of fish when the heir-apparent to the crown delighted to be called a dolphin-and when one of your own kings, being on a visit to France, got so fond of their lamprey patties, that he died of indigestion on his return. 66 Antiquity has left us no document to prove that the early Spartans kept certain days of abstinence; but their black broth, of which the ingredients have puzzled the learned, must have been a fitting substitute for the soupe maigre of our Lent, since it required a hard run on the banks of the Eurotas to make it somewhat palatable. At all events, their great lawgiver was an eminent ascetic, and applied himself much to restrict the diet of his hardy countrymen; and if it is certain that there existed a mystic bond of union among the 300 Lacedæmonians who stood in the gap of Thermopylæ, it assuredly was not a beefsteak club of which Leonidas was president. In "The Athenians were too cultivated a people not to appreciate the value of periodical days of selfdenial and abstemiousness. Accordingly, on the eve of certain festivals, they fed exclusively on figs and the honey of Mount Hymettus. Plutarch expressly tells us that a solemn fast preceded the celebration of the Thermophoriæ; thence termed motela. looking over the works of the great geographer Strabo (lib. xiv.), I find sufficient evidence of the respect paid to fish by the inhabitants of a distinguished Greek city, in which that erudite author says the arrival of the fishing-smacks in the harbour was announced joyfully by sounding the "tocsin ;" and that the musicians in the public piazza were left abruptly by the crowd, whenever the bell tolled for the sale of the herrings: κιθαρωδου επιδεικνυμένου τέως μεν ακροασθαι παντας• ως δε ο κωδων ο κατα την οψοπωλιαν εψόφησε καταλίποντες απελθειν επι το οψον. A custom to which |