it must be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favour of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in ROAST PIG.

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate - princeps obsoniorum.1 I speak not of your grown porkers things between pig and pork - those hobbydehoys - but a young and tender suckling under a moon old-guiltless as yet of the sty with no original speck of the amor immunditiæ,2 the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest—his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble and a grumble -the mild forerunner, or præludium, of a grunt.

He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled - but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument!

but

There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance with the adhesive oleaginous O call it not fat· an indefinable sweetness growing up to it - the tender blossoming of fat - fat cropped in the bud - taken in the shootin the first innocence - the cream and quintessence of the childpig's yet pure food the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so), so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or common substance.

Behold him, while he is doing — it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string! Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age, he hath wept out his pretty eyes-radiant jellies - shooting

stars

See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth! wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, sloven, an obsti

1 Chief of delicacies.

2 Love of filth.

nate, disagreeable animal-wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation from these sins he is happily snatched away

Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,

Death came with timely care-1

his memory is odoriferous - no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages - he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure and for such a tomb might be content to die.

He is the best of Sapors.2 Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendent — a delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tender-conscienced person would do well to pause too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach her - like lovers' kisses, she biteth - she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish — but she stoppeth at the palate — she meddleth not with the appetite - and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton chop.

Piglet me speak his praise is no less provocative of the appetite than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and weakling refuseth not his mild juices.

Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unraveled without hazard, he is good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbours' fare.

I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those "tame villatic fowl"), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must 1 From Coleridge's "Epitaph on an Infant."

2 Flavors.

be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give everything." I make I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavours, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house, slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what), a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate It argues an insensibility.

I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plumcake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was over London Bridge) a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of day that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, school-boy-like, I made him a present of the whole cake! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of selfsatisfaction; but before I had got to the end of the bridge my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger, that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I—I myself, and not another would eat her nice cake - and what should I say to her the next time I saw her how naughty I was to part with her pretty present - and the odour of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy of goodness, and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old grey impostor.

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a

philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto

I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's,1and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death?" I forget the decision.

His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But, banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are- but consider, he is a weakling - a flower.

PREFACE

BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA

1823

[First published, in slightly different form, in the London Magazine for January, 1823, shortly after the publication of the collected Essays of Elia, when Lamb apparently intended to discontinue the essays. The present form of the essay is that used as a Preface to the volume of Last Essays of Elia, 1833. Lamb here sketches his own character in a manner reminiscent of Sterne's account of himself as Yorick in Tristram Shandy.]

THIS poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to

nature.

To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the

1 A Jesuit college, here introduced only because of the reputation of the Jesuit theo logians in the discussion of subtle questions of morality

thing, if there ever was much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.

I am now at liberty to confess that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you a sort of unlicked, incondite things villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than such; and better it is, that a writer should be natural in a selfpleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; as in a former Essay (to save many instances) where under the first

person (his favourite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connections-in direct opposition to his own early history.1 If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another making himself many, or reducing many unto himself then is the skilful novelist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all; who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who, doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly?

My late friend was in many respects a singular character. These who did not like him, hated him; and some who once liked him afterwards became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would e'en out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would pass for a freethinker; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood him; and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure-irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. He would interrupt the 1 See page 56, above.