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 Lacedemonians who stood in the gap of Thermopylae, it assuredly was not a beef-steak club of which Leonidas was president. "The Athenians were too cultivated a people not to appreciate the value of periodical days of self-denial 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 Thermophoria; thence termed νηστεια. In 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 ακροάσθαι παντας· ως δε ο κωδων ο κατα την οψοπωλιαν εψόφησε καταλιποντες απελθειν επι το οψον. A custom to which Plutarch also refers in his Symposium of Plato, lib. iv. cap. 4. τους περι ιχθυοπωλιαν αναδιδοντας και του κωδωνος οξέως 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 1 See Translation in Bohn's Strabo, Vol. iii. p. 37. C when he introduces a vow relative to these days of penance 'Frigida si puerum quartana reliquerit illo In Tyberi stabit!' Serm. lib. ii. sat. 3. v. 290. 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. On this interesting point we find nothing in the laws of the twelve tables. However, a marked predilection for herbs, and such frugal fare, was distinctive 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 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, And as to fish, the fondness of the people of his day 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 1 Here Prout is in error. Scipio means a "walking-stick," and commemorates the filial piety of one of the gens Cornelia, who went about constantly supporting his tottering aged father.-O. Y. have had many a pretty kettle of fish to deliberate upon, they have shown 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 getting up fish-ponds is a fact which every schoolboy has learnt, as well as that occasionally the murano 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 local dish of Anguilles à la Marseillaise. "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 Maximinus was a living sepulchre, where whole hecatombs of butchers' meat were daily entombed ;1 and no modern keeper of a table d'hôte could 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 shows that, to reconstruct the mighty system of dominion established by the rugged republicans (the Fabii, the Lentuli, and the Pisoes), nothing but a bona 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. 1 It is said that in a single day he could devour forty pounds of meat and drink an amphora of wine. "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 enterprize 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, Doria, whose seamanship best thrived on meagre diet. Of Anne Chovy, who has given her name to another fish found in the Sardinian waters, no 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, heer (its German root) signifying an army. In England, is not a soldier synonymous with a lobster ? "In the progress of maritime industry along the shores of southern, and subsequently of northern Europe, we find a love for freedom to grow up with a fondness for fish. Enterprise and liberty flourished among the islands of the Archipelago. And when Naples was to be rescued from thraldom, it was the hardy race of watermen who plied in her beauteous bay, that rose at Freedom's call to effect her deliverance, when she basked for one short hour in its full sunshine under the gallant Masaniello. "As to the commercial grandeur, of which a constant demand for fish was the creating principle, to illustrate its importance, I need only refer to a remarkable expression of that deep politician, and exceedingly clever economist, Charles V., when, on a progress through a part of his dominions, on which the sun at that period never went down, he happened to pass through Amsterdam, in company with the Queen of Hungary: on that occasion, being complimented in the usual form by the burgomasters of his faithful city, he asked to see the mausoleum of John Bachalen, the famous herring-barreler; but when told that his grave, simple and unadorned, lay in his native island in the Zuydersee, What!' cried the illustrious visitor, 'is it thus that people of the Netherlands shew their gratitude to so great a man? Know ye not that the foundations of Amsterdam are laid on herring-bones?' Their majesties went on a pilgrimage to his tomb, as is related by Sir Hugh Willoughby in his Historie of Fishes.' my "It would be of immense advantage to these countries were we to return unanimously to the ancient practice, and restore to the full extent of their wise policy the laws of Elizabeth. The revival of Lent is the sole remedy for the national complaints on the decline of the shipping interest, the sole way to meet the outcry about corn-laws. Instead of Mr. Attwood's project for a change of currency, Mr. Wilmot Horton's panacea of emigration, and Miss Martineau's preventive check, re-enact Lent. But mark, I do not go so far as to say that by this means all and everything desirable can be accomplished, nor do I undertake by it to pay off the national debt-though the Lords of the Treasury might learn that, when the disciples were at a loss to meet the demand of tax-collectors in their day, they caught a fish, and found in its gills sufficient to satisfy the revenue. (St. Matthew, chap. xvii.) "Of all the varied resources of this great empire, the most important, in a national point of view, has long been the portion of capital afloat in the merchantmen, and the strength invested in the navy of Great Britain. True, the British thunder has too long slept under a sailor-king, and under so many galling national insults; and it were full time to say that it shall no longer sleep on in the grave where Sir James Graham has laid it. But my concern is principally for the alarming depression of our merchants' property in vessels, repeatedly proved in evidence |