Plutarch also refers in his Symposium of Plato, lib. iv. cap. 4. τους περι ιχθυοπωλιαν αναδίδοντας και του κωδωνος οξεως ακούοντας.

"That practices similar to our Lent existed among the Romans, may be gathered from various sources. In Ovid's Fasti (notwithstanding the title) I find nothing; but from the reliques of old sacerdotal memorials collected by Stephano Morcelli, it appears that Numa fitted himself by fasting for an interview with the mysterious inmate of Egeria's grotto. Livy tells us that the decemvirs, on the occurrence of certain prodigies, were instructed by a vote of the senate to consult the Sibylline books; and the result was the establishment of a fast in honour of Ceres, to be observed perpetually every five years. It is hard to tell whether Horace is in joke or in earnest when he introduces a vow relative to these days of pen

But we are left in the dark as to whether they observed their fasts by restricting themselves to lentils and vegetable diet, or whether fish was allowed. Strange to say, in this case we find nothing in the laws of the twelve tables. However, a marked predilection for herbs, and such frugal fare, was dis

tinctive of the old Romans, as the very names of the principal families sufficiently indicate. The Fabii, for instance, were so called from faba, a bean, on which simple aliment that indefatigable race of heroes subsisted for many generations. The noble line of the Lentuli derive their patronymic from a favourite kind of lentil, to which they were partial, and from which Lent itself is so called. The aristocratic Pisoes were similarly circumstanced; for their family appellation, rendered into English (for the use of the country gentlemen), will be found to signify a kind of vetches. Scipio was titled from cepe, an onion ;* and we may trace the surname and hereditary honours of the great Roman orator to the same horticultural source, for cicer in Latin means a sort of pea; and so on through the whole nomenclature.

"Hence the Roman satirist, ever alive to the follies of his age, can find nothing more ludicrous than the notion of the Egyptians, who entertained a religious repugnance to vegetable fare:

• Porrùm et cepe nefas violare et frangere morsu,

O sanctas gentes!'

Juv. Sat. 15.

And as to fish, the fondness of the people of his day

*Here Prout is in error. Scipio means a

66

walking-stick," and was applied to commemorate the filial piety of one of the gens Cornelia, who went about constantly supporting the tottering steps of his aged father.-O. Y.

for such food can be demonstrated from his fourth satire, where he dwells triumphantly on the capture of a splendid tunny in the waters of the Adriatic, and describes the assembling of a cabinet council in the

Downing Street" of Rome to determine how it should be properly cooked. It must be admitted that, since the Whigs came to office, although they have had many a pretty kettle of fish to deliberate upon, they have shewn nothing half so dignified or rational in their decisions as the imperial privy council of Domitian.

"The magnificence displayed by the masters of the world in the getting up of their fish-ponds is a point on which it would be superfluous to enlarge, every schoolboy having learnt that occasionally the murænæ were treated to the luxury of a slave or two, flung in alive for their nutriment. The celebrity which the maritime villas of Baiæ obtained for that fashionable watering-place, is a further argument in point; and we know that when the reprobate Verres was driven into exile by the brilliant declamation of Cicero, he consoled himself at Marseilles over a dish of sprats, with the reflection that at Rome such a delicacy could not be procured in such high perfection.

"Simplicity and good taste in diet gradually declining in the Roman empire, the gigantic frame of the colossus itself soon hastened to decay. It burst

of its own plethory. The example of the degenerate court had pervaded the provinces; and soon the whole body politic reeled, as after a surfeit of debauchery. Vitellius had gormandised with vulgar gluttony; the Emperor Maximin was a living sepulchre, where whole hecatombs of butchers' meat were daily entombed; and no modern keeper of a tabled'hôte would stand a succession of such guests as Heliogabalus. Gibbon, whose penetrating eye nothing has escaped in the causes of the Decline and Fall, notices this vile propensity to overfeeding; and shews that, to reconstruct the mighty system of dominion established by the rugged republicans, (the Fabii, the Lentuli, and the Pisoes,) nothing but a bonâ fide return to simple fare and homely pottage could be effectual. The hint was duly acted on. The Popes, frugal and abstemious, ascended the vacant throne of the Cæsars, and ordered Lent to be observed throughout the eastern and western world.

"The theory of fasting, and its practical application, did wonders in that emergency. It renovated the rotten constitution of Europe-it tamed the hungry hordes of desperate savages that rushed down with a war-whoop on the prostrate ruins of the empire-it taught them self-control, and gave them a masterdom over their barbarous propensities;—it did more, it originated civilisation and commerce.

"A few straggling fishermen built huts on the

flats of the Adriatic, for the convenience of resorting thither in Lent to procure their annual supply of fish. The demand for that article became so brisk and so extensive through the vast dominions of the Lombards in northern Italy, that from a temporary establishment it became a permanent colony in the lagunes. Working like the coral insect under the seas, with the same unconsciousness of the mighty result of their labours, these industrious men for a century kept on enlarging their nest upon the waters, till their enter prise became fully developed, and

'Venice sat in state, throned on a hundred isles!'

"The fasting necessities of France and Spain were ministered to by the rising republic of Genoa, whose origin I delight to trace from a small fishing-town to a mighty emporium of commerce, fit cradle to rock (in the infant Columbus) the destinies of a new world. Few of us have turned our attention to the fact, that our favourite fish, the John Dory, derives its name from the Genoese admiral, André Doria, whose bonne bouche it used to form, and whose seamanship best thrived on meagre diet. Of Anne Chovy, who has given her name to another fish found in the Sardinian waters, no authentic record remains; but she was doubtless a heroine. Indeed, to revert to the humble herring before you, its etymology shews it to be well adapted for warlike stomachs, heir (its German root)