Chapter VII (3)

The table kept by St. Publius for his monks was not of a liberal character. He allowed them nothing but pulse and herbs, coarse bread, and water. Nothing else! He prohibited wine, milk, cheese, grapes, and even vinegar--which every sour brother might have distilled from his own ichor. From Easter to Whitsuntide was accounted a holiday time, and during that festive period, the brotherhood were allowed to grow hilarious, if they could, upon a gill of oil a-piece. St. Paula, “the widow,” subjected her nuns to the same lively fare, and she moreover fiercely denounced all ideas of personal neatness and cleanliness, as an uncleanness of the mind. She accounted herself wise in so doing, but her nuns might fairly have put to her the question asked by Mizen, in the Fair Quaker of Deal:--“Do’st thou think that nastiness gives thee a title to knowledge?”

St. John Chrysostom was as severe as Paula, and it would not have cost Olympias much to defray, as she insisted upon doing, the expenses of his table. The table which the saint kept for guests was, however, hospitably and delicately laden--and perhaps this was an inconsistency in a man who censured what he also encouraged.

They who have made a saint of Charlemagne, aver that he broke his fast but once a day, and that after sunset. I cannot believe this of a man who dealt so largely in the eggs laid by his hens, and in vegetables raised in his garden. Nor do I believe that St. Sulpicius Severus would have written so capital a biography of St. Martin, had he lived, as it is said, on herbs, boiled with a little vinegar for seasoning. Surely, we have heard of the “kitchen” of gentlemen like Sulpicius, and if his condensed Scripture History be as dry as the bread he ate during the task, his letters to Claudia seem to have been written on more generous food. Not that he was immoderate. He kept one cook, a very “plain cook” indeed, as Sulpicius describes him, when he despatched the boy to Bishop Paulinus with a letter which commences with a startling bit of episcopal history, namely, that “_all_ the cooks in the kitchen of Paulinus had left him without warning, because the prelate was getting too careless about good living.” Some commentators say that the letter was a joke; but the reply to it is extant, and therein it may be seen how Paulinus did not look upon it as a joke.

Southey, in his “St. Romuald,” mirthful as the story is, has not exceeded the truth, or rather has not departed from the narrative told by the good man’s biographers:--

“Then, Sir, to see how he would mortify
The flesh! If any one had dainty fare,
Good man, he would come there;
And look at all the delicate things, and cry,
O Belly! Belly!
You would be gormandizing now, I know;
But it shall not be so!--
Home, to your bread and water. Home, I tell ye.”

And thus says Alban Butler of him:--“He never would admit of the least thing to give a savour to the herbs or meal-gruel on which he supported himself. If anything was brought him better dressed, he, for the greater self-denial, applied it to his nostrils, and said, ‘Oh Gluttony, Gluttony! thou shalt never taste this! Perpetual war is declared against thee!’” St. William of Maleval was of the same opinion when he cried because he ate his dry bread with a relish, and found that what he called “sensuality” was not inseparable from the coarsest food. St. Benedict of Anian, on the other hand, did not decline the use of a little wine, when it was given him; while St. Martinianus, again, lived upon biscuits and water, brought to him twice a-year--and very nasty fare it must have been towards the end of each six months. It must have been worse than that of St. Peter Damian, who prided himself on never drinking water fresh, and thought there was virtue in having it four-and-twenty hours old. St. Tarasius must have maintained a more decent table, for it is said of him that he used to take the dishes from it and give of them to the poor; and honour be to his name, because of his good sense and his charity! Our venerable acquaintance of the principality, St. David, was not half so wise, however well-intentioned; but St. Charles, Earl of Flanders, followed the better course, and not only lived moderately well, but acted better, by daily distributing seven hundred loaves to the poor. The Welsh saints, generally, kept as austere a table as St. David. There was, for instance, the cacophonous Winwaloe of Winwaloe, who kept his monks at starving point all the week, recalling them to life on Sundays by microscopic rations of hard cheese and shell-fish. His own fare was barley-bread strewn with ashes, and when Lent arrived, the quantity of ashes was doubled, in honour of the season! St. Thomas Aquinas was so abstracted that he never knew, at dinner, what he was eating, nor could remember, after it, if he had dined, which was likely enough. St. Frances, Widow, foundress of the Collations, was in more full possession of her wits; as, indeed, the lady saints were, generally. She had her little fancies indeed, which were “only charming Fanny’s way,” and her beverage at eve was dirty water, out of a human skull; but she had no mercy for lazy devotees, and invariably told sighing wives that they had active duties to perform, and that they had better keep out of monasteries, at least till they were widows. She was a good, humble woman; and, as a commentator says of the abstinence of St. Euphrasia, without humility these facts would be but facts of devils!

Another gleam of good sense shines upon us from the person of St. Benedict. He drank wine, and so did his monks of Vicovara, who liked his wine better than either the toast or sentiment with which he passed it round to them, and who tried to get rid of him by poisoning his glass; but the saint, full of inspired suspicion, made over it the sign of the cross, and away went the flask into fifty fragments. The taste of the good saint was known after he left Vicovara, and a pious soul once sent him a couple of bottles of wine by a faithless messenger, who delivered but one. “Mind what you are about,” said St. Benedict, “when you draw the other cork for yourself.” The knave was not abashed, but when he did secretly open the other bottle for the solace of his own thirsty throat, he found nothing therein but a lively serpent, which glided from him after casting at him a reproachful look!

If St. Benedict was right in the ordering of his table, why St. John of Egypt was wrong, for he never drank anything but stagnant water, nor ate anything cooked by fire; even his bread he complacently swallowed before it was baked;--and what his liver was like, it would puzzle any but a physician even to conjecture.

There was infinitely more sense in the table kept by an abbot of the compound Christian and Pagan title and name of St. Plato. He never ate anything but what had been raised or procured by the labour of his own hands; he was consequently never in debt with respect to his household expenses, and if all men so far followed the example of St. Plato, who was a better practical philosopher than his heathen namesake, what a happy world we should make of it! There would be fewer Christmas bills, and many more joyous dinners, not only at Christmas, but all the year round!

St. Plato deserves our respect; he would not live on alms. He was more useful in his generation than the men who, like St. Aphraates, were content to exist on the eleemosynary contributions of the faithful, or than those who, like Zozimus and his followers, wandered through the desert, trusting to chance and calling it providence. What, compared with our friend Plato, was that St. Droun, the so-called patron of shepherds, who during forty years taught them nothing, and lived on the barley-bread which they brought him in return for his instruction.

I have given one or two instances of the spare tables kept by a few of our ancient bishops; I may here add to them the name of St. Elphege, some time Bishop of Winchester, and subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury. The smell of roast meat was never known in his palace on any but “extraordinary occasions.” This, however, is a very indefinite term, and the table of this primate may have been one to make a cardinal give unctuous thanks for rich mercies, five days out of the seven. There was certainly gastronomic work to do in some of the ancient godly households, or St. James of Sclavonia would not have passed so many years in one, as he did, in the capacity of cook, “improving” the occasion, by drawing ideas of hell from his own fires, which were for ever roasting savoury joints, like those which strike the visitors with awe and appetite in the kitchens at Maynooth.

If in some houses there were busy kitchens, in others there were soft couches, whereon digestion might progress. Thus Adalbert, Bishop of Prague, was a Saint and Martyr; and it is said, that he had a most comfortable bed in his dormitory, but that he never slept upon it! Then, what was the bed for? It is added, that he fasted in private, with great severity,--but it is no more “of faith” to believe this, than it is that he slept every night on the floor, under, and not upon, his own excellent feather-bed; for what says the old refrain?--

“A notre coucher
Un lit, des draps blancs,
Une ----
digue daine, bon!
Voila la vie que ces moines font!”

But he may have been a profane fellow who wrote these rude rhymes; and we will no more implicitly trust him, than we will the prose historians of the doings and dealings of the saintly men.

It is not an unusual thing to find wine-bibbers mentioned among the members of holy communities; where wine was generally supposed to be a luxury never employed but for the service of the altar,--and perhaps of the sick. The venerable Bede tells a story of a “brother,” whom he had known, and whom he wishes to God he had never known, and who was given to worship the spigot. Bede does not give his name, but certifies that the too jolly friar lived ignobly in a noble monastery, where he was often reproved for his acts of drunkenness, and only tolerated because of his gifts,--not spiritual, but as a carpenter. He was a terrible tippler, but a hard workman to boot, and would, at any time, rather labour all day and all night at his bench than join the brethren in chapel. Indeed, when he did go, his thoughts were running on something else. He was like the profane Yorkshire farmer, who praised the institution of the Sabbath because it not only brought roast beef with it as a sacred observance, but it authorized him to attend in his pew at church, where, said he, “I puts up my legs and thinks o’ nothing!” Bede’s carpenter was characteristically punished for his bibbing; and the story was made much of, by way of monition to others. It was to this effect:--“He, falling sick, and being reduced to extremity, called the brethren, and with much lamentation, and like one damned, began to tell them that he saw hell open, and Satan at the bottom thereof, and also Caiaphas, with the others that slew our Lord, by him delivered up to avenging flames. ‘In whose neighbourhood,’ said he, ‘I see a place of eternal perdition prepared for me, miserable wretch that I am!’ The brothers, hearing these words, began seriously to exhort him that he should repent even then, while he was in the flesh. He answered in despair,--‘I have no time now to change my course of life, when I have myself seen my judgment passed.’ When he had uttered these words, he died, without having received the saving _viaticum_; and his body was buried in the remotest part of the monastery; nor did any one dare to say masses, sing psalms, or even to pray for him.” Which seems a very hard case; for if any one needed such service it was he; and the Church’s ability to extricate him could not be denied, when she was duly pre-paid for the service.

Curiously enough, St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustin, ranks among the wine-bibbers. Her pious parents left their children to be brought up by a servant-maid, who had more zeal than discretion, and who would allow none of the children to drink, were they ever so thirsty, except at meal-times, and then only a drop or two of water. “If you cannot restrain your desire to drink now,” she would say, “what will it be when you have wine at command?” Now, the effect of this speech was exactly like that of the confessor to the hostler, when he asked the latter, if he never greased the horses’ teeth in order to prevent them eating their corn. It gave the young Monica a new idea. She was accustomed to draw the wine for her father’s table, and she henceforth began to drink a portion each time that she went to the cellar with her pitcher. And I do not know that Mr. Millais, or any other of the pre-Raphaelite gentlemen, could have a better subject for a picture, than that representing the scene when the horrified nurse-maid beheld her young charge indulging in her cups in the parental wine-vault. The lecture she received worked her conversion, we are told; and she married, and became the mother of St. Augustin, who so far followed the maternal example that, in his earlier years, when, with his eyes upon heaven, his heart was with the good things of the earth, his commonest prayer used to be, “Lord, make me religious, _but not just yet_.”

The nurse-maid of Monica deserved to have been the wife,--and perhaps she was,--of St. Theodotus, the vintner of Ancyra. He was a teetotaller who kept a tavern, and who passed the live-long day in leaning over his counter and begging his customers not to drink! Well, men have been canonized for less useful service to their kind; and Theodotus was more worthily employed in keeping drunkards from his wine-casks, than St. Pius V. was when, every day before dinner, by way of mocking his appetite, he resorted to the public hospitals, and kissed the ulcers of the patients! Nay, biographers tell us that an English Protestant gentleman was _suddenly converted_ to Romanism, by observing the condescension and affection with which Pius kissed the ulcers on the feet of some poor men! The pope, if he and the convert dined together after this nasty ceremony, might have confessed that he had been sore put to it for an argument that should carry conviction to an English gentleman in search of a religion.

Let us contrast this pope in his pride with a cardinal in his fall. “When Wolsey,” says Mr. Hunter the antiquary, “was dismissed by his tyrannical master to his northern diocese, he passed many weeks at Scrooby. It is a pleasing picture which his faithful servant, Cavendish, gives of him at this period of his life:--‘Ministering many deeds of charity, and attending on Sundays at some parish church in the neighbourhood; hearing or saying mass himself, and causing some one of his chaplains to preach to the people; and that done, he would dine in some honest house of that town, where should be distributed to the poor a great alms, as well of meat and drink, as of money to supply the want of sufficient meat, if the number of the poor did so exceed of necessity.’” Wolsey was no saint certainly, but he was as honest a man as Pius, and a wiser when he fed the poor rather than kiss their ulcers.

But there is no accounting for taste; the Russian Boniface used to roll himself among thorns and nettles, in order to get an appetite, or to punish himself for indulging over much. St. Germanus, on the other hand, commenced every repast by putting ashes into his mouth;--the modern custom of beginning with oysters is certainly better both for taste and stomach. St. Walthen took wine, but then he put spiders in it. St. Dominic, too, was singular in his diet, and he sometimes spent his half-hour before dinner in one of the most curious positions that gentlemen could possibly fix upon. The Abbot of St. Vincent’s one day desired his company at dinner, but at the usual hour the saint was in church, and had forgotten the invitation. In the meantime the turkey and chine were spoiling, and the hungry abbot despatched a monk in quest of the loiterer; the messenger hurried to the church, where, to his very considerable astonishment, he beheld St. Dominic “ravished in an ecstasy,” whatever that may mean, “raised several cubits above the ground, and without motion.” The Saint, on being told that dinner was ready, graciously smiled at the intelligence, and gently descended to the ground.

St. Laurence would have joked at this, as he did at his own grilling. After he had lain for some time extended on his gridiron, he calmly said to the executioner, “Will you have the kindness to turn me, as I am quite done on the under side?” The executioner, a trifle astonished, did as he was required, and soon after, the Saint, again speaking, said, “I shall be obliged if you’ll take me up, as I am now fit for eating.” This story reminds me of the remark made by an Irishman, when first told that St. Patrick had crossed the ocean on a millstone:--“I can’t contradict it! He was a lucky fellow!”

We are told of St. Bernard, who used to walk before dinner on the banks of the Lake of Lausanne, that on hearing two of his monks speak of the beauty of the lake, he declared that no such lake existed, or he had been too much absorbed ever to have noticed it. So the Trappists used to glory in not knowing where or how they dined, or recollecting anything about it! All this shows less wisdom at table than was exhibited by the royal St. Louis, who, when a certain friar began to discuss doctrinal subjects with the pullets, stopped him with the remark that “all things had their time, and joking was good sauce with chickens!”

St. Laurence Justinian, the first patriarch of Venice, was far less indulgent than the royal saint of France. He was so little so, that when his thirsty monks sometimes asked for a little wine, declaring that their throats felt as dry as the high road in summer, he used quite as drily to remark, that if they could not bear parched throats now, what would they do in the fires of purgatory? St. John the Dwarf, Anchoret of Scete, cared as little for wine as St. Laurence, but he was fond of fruit, and he obtained a supply from a strange source. An old hermit bade him plant his walking-staff in the ground, and he not only did so, but he watered it regularly for three years, when it bore pippins, sweeter than those that grew at Ribstone up to the time of the death of the late baronet. Before this miraculously-bearing stick the little man used to read prayers as devoutly as Sir Hollyoak Goodrick, the present Ribstone baronet, does to the villagers in his own parish church, and for the same reason each had much to be thankful for. It must be confessed that John the Dwarf had more taste than his namesake of Cupertino, who not only ate nothing but vegetables, but ate no vegetables that any other human being could be induced to swallow. It was such garbage as only pigs would condescend to. _Arcades ambo_--nasty creatures both!

St. Francis of Assisium exhibited something more of true humility at his table, with a touch of the false metal notwithstanding. He ate nothing dressed by fire, unless he were very ill, and even then he covered it with ashes, or dipped it in cold water. His common daily food was dry bread strewn with ashes; but this founder of the Friars’ Minors had the good sense not to condemn his followers to the rigorous diet he observed himself; and “Brother Ass,” as he familiarly called that self, was in his own opinion worthy of no better fare.

There was a founder of another community who exhibited more singularity than St. Francis, who, despite some mistakes, was a man of whom none other dare speak but with respect,--St. Ammon, founder of the hermitages of Nitria. At the age of twenty-two this young Egyptian noble married a fair girl of Memphis; and instead of a nuptial banquet, he treated his bride to a reading of a particularly edifying chapter from St. Paul, after which he withdrew to solitary meditation. During eighteen years he occupied himself in training balsam-trees all day, after which he returned home to a supper of fruit and herbs; then came that terrible reiteration of advice from St. Paul, followed by a separate solitary comment on the part of this exemplary pair. At the end of the time above specified, he retired altogether from domestic life, and settled alone on Mount Nitria, and his biographers naïvely remark, this was “with his wife’s consent.” This saint was of such a “complexion” of virtue, that one day, on accidentally catching sight of an uncovered portion of his own body, he was so shocked that he fainted away. If he had only read “Erasmus Wilson, on the Skin,” he would have learned to look oftener at his own, and would have been a cleaner man, a better husband, a more grateful feeder, and an improved Christian.

But St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, probably exceeded all other originators of communities in the “fierceness,” so to speak, of his dietetic laws; he never spared himself, nor his disciples. A Carthusian is never permitted to eat meat under any pretence whatever. In addition to this, they fast eight months in the year, and I suppose they starve in Lent, for during that season they are forbidden to eat what is called “white meats,” that is, eggs, milk, butter, and cheese. Dry bread with water is their Lenten fare; and a peculiar law connected with them is, that they can never change into another order, because they would thereby profit a little in the way of better living; but a brother of any other order may become a Carthusian, as thereby he increases his mortifications and diminishes his diet. Of course from these remarks the Carthusians of the “Charterhouse” are excepted. If the thin spirit of St. Bruno ever scents the juicy viands that adorn the well-spread table _there_, it probably melts into thin air by the very force of disgust or ghastly envy.

The table kept by St. Bridget, when she married Ulpho, prince of Nericia, in Sweden, was a very modest one for so princely a pair, but what was spared thereby was given to the poor. Bridget and Ulpho, she sweet sixteen, he two years more, read every evening the soothing chapter from St. Paul, which formed the favourite study of St. Ammon and his wife; but, as it would appear, with indifferent success. “They enrolled themselves,” say their various biographers, “in the Third Order of St. Francis, and lived in their own house as if it had been a regular and austere monastery.” The biographers immediately add without comment,--“They afterwards had eight children: four boys and four girls;” and as the same paragraph goes on to state that “all these children were favoured with the blessings of divine grace,” it may be fairly concluded that a domestic observation of a monastic regularity and austerity, is a course that will purchase blessings and olive-branches.

The case of St. Gomer and his wife, the Lady Gwinmary, may perhaps be cited as an exception. But this Gwinmary was an exacting lady at all times, and when St. Gomer betook himself from her to live in the desert on bitterness and biscuits, he fared as sumptuously and lived far more quietly than he had done at home. He was one of the most placid of saints, and it is a positive libel upon him for the French Admiralty to have given his name to one of the most thundering steamers in the service. Its broadsides far more nearly resemble the tongue of Gwinmary than the tones of Gomer.

In charming contrast with this truculent Gwinmary do we meet and greet the gentle St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The record of her good deeds would fill a volume, but out of them I have only to select an exquisite table trait--to register which is also to eulogize it. I do not allude to her habitual temperance, to her dry bread and thimble-full of wine, when she sat at meat with kings and queens, her equals in birth; nor to her small feasts with her two maids, in the absence of her consort, Louis the Landgrave; but I allude--and listen, O ye Benedicts, with grateful rapture--to the fact “that the kitchen she kept out of her own private purse, not to be the least charge to her husband.” If celibate priests, who can hardly be supposed capable of appreciating such a fact, canonized so rare a lady, all married men who love banquets but dislike the butchers’ bills, will cry “Well done!” and recommend their wives to read the instructive life of Elizabeth of Hungary.

Who would expect to hear good of a Borgia?--St. Francis Borgia was virtuous enough to save his family name from entire infamy. Of no other man or woman of his house could it be said that they gave up suppers, in order to have more time for prayers. It was not Alexander VI., the papal glory of his house and the shame of mankind, that would have been content with one meal a day, and that meal--a mess of leeks, or some pulse, with a piece of bread, and a cup of water. At the same time, Francis Borgia kept a table becoming a man of his rank, for the gratification of his guests of high degree. There, while they ate their venison, and quaffed their _lachrymæ Christi_, he nibbled his leeks, and sipped his water, “and conversed facetiously with them, though at table his discourse generally turned on piety.” It was very like a Borgia to make piety facetious, but if fun in holiness be of the ingredients necessary to the making of a saint, Sidney Smith has as good a right as Borgia to be on the roll of the _beati_. Our reverend “joker of jokes,” indeed, would not have smiled at the cook who put wormwood instead of mint into his broth; and I doubt if Peter Plimley ever thought of doing what Francis Borgia did,--namely, chewing his pills, and swallowing physic slowly, as works of meritorious mortification, bearing compound interest to the profit of the practitioner. St. Wilfrid, who taught the half-starved South Saxons to catch the fish that swam at their feet, and thereby live, seems to me to have performed a far more meritorious work than if he had passed his life in gnawing leeks or masticating pills. Our native saint, a good man at table, was often better employed than St. Theresa, who is so eulogized because when serving at table, or carrying the dinner from the kitchen, “she was often seen suddenly absorbed in God, with the utensils or instruments of her business in her hands.” The hungry and expectant monks might have quoted against the rapt maid, the assertion of the royal sage, that there is a time to eat, as well as to fast and pray. But St. Theresa, with all her good qualities, was as obstinate as the Polish saint Hedwiga, who not only abstained from meat till abstinence had nearly proved suicidal, but who refused to save her life by eating any, until the Pope’s legate had issued a very peremptory precept to that effect. St. Peter of Alcantara lost all taste by his nearly total-abstinence principle, and when some one gave him warm water with vinegar in it, he thought it was his usual dinner of bean broth! That actively good saint, Charles Borromeo, was only wisely moderate. “His austerities were discreet,” is the phrase of one of his biographers; and his abstemiousness made his health rather than marred it. This was so well known, that they who dieted themselves in order to recover or preserve health, were said to have adopted the remedy of Doctor Borromeo. St. Francis Xavier had something of the discretion of Charles Borromeo,--and of the modesty too, for he dressed his own dinners, even when he was apostolic legate; and that St. Clement of Alexandria belonged to the same class of sagely temperate men, is proved by his maintaining that a little wine taken at evening, after the labours of the day, was good for the body, and cheering for the spirits. So the sainted Archbishop of York had no repugnance to a slice of roast goose, for, as he truly remarked, so good a thing was not designed especially for sinners. And this recalls to my mind a comment, similar in spirit, made by St. Thomas à Becket. A monk once saw him eating the wing of a pheasant with much relish, and the pharisaical fellow thereon affected to be scandalized, saying that he thought Thomas was more of a mortified man. “Thou art but a ninny,” said the Archbishop; “knowest thou not that a man may be a glutton upon horse-beans; while another may enjoy with refinement even the wing of a pheasant, and have nature’s aid to digest what Heaven’s bounty gave?”

This was good sense in the Archbishop, who perhaps had been reading Epicurus, before he sat down to his repast. However this may be, it is certain that the philosopher in question says something very like what Becket said to the friar. “Is man,” he asks, “made to disdain the gifts of nature? Is he placed on earth only to gather bitter fruits? For whom then are the flowers that the gods strew at the feet of mortals?... We please Providence when we yield to the divers inclinations which Providence suggests; our duties have reference to His laws; and our innocent desires are born of His inspirations.”

* * * * *

There are few things more common in the Lives of the Saints, than to find them, after spare banquets of their own, working penal miracles at the banquets of others. St. Eloy was gifted with terrible power in this way, and endless are the stories of revellers turned to stone by the might of his magic right arm. Other saints had equal power in turning the tables upon those who slighted them; and I will take this opportunity of narrating one instance, and will set my Muse in slippers, to detail what occurred at

THE BRIDAL AND BANQUET OF FERQUES.

Near the marble quarries of Ferques, adjacent to Landrecthun le Nord, in the Boulonnais, may be seen a circular range of stones, bearing a close resemblance in their shape, though little in their magnitude, to those at Stonehenge; as also to the Devil’s Needles, near Boroughbridge, and to the solitary block on the common at Harrogate. Learned people recognise the stones at Ferques by the appellation of the _Mallus_, a Druidical name for an altar; but the traditionary folks, wiser in their generation, acknowledge no other title for these remains of antiquity than _Neuches_, an old provincial word, the corruption, I suppose, of _Noces_, and signifying a bridal, including the banquet which followed it. According to them, the stones at Ferques stand there as a testimony of divine vengeance, inflicted on a fiddler and other individuals belonging to a wedding party who refused to kneel before the Host, as it was being borne along by a priest to a dying brother. Rabelais says, that a well-disposed and sensible man believes all that he is told; (“Un homme de bien, un homme de bon sens, croit toujours ce qu’on lui dit, et ce qu’il trouve par écrit;”) and _argal_, as the logical grave-digger in _Hamlet_ has it, this story of a bridal and banquet will be allowed to pass without question.

Though around the bleak district there is not a grove
That can boast of a shade, e’en in summer, for love,
Nor a walk by the side of a murmuring stream,
Where somnambulist lovers may talk as they dream;
Nor a valley retir’d, nor sweet mossy dell,
Where young hearts that are aching, their anguish may tell;
Nor a wood where a maiden deserted may sigh,
Or where youths, stripp’d of hope, may with decency die;--
Though all it can boast be a desolate heath,
Where ’twould puzzle young Cupid to find him a wreath,--
Yet e’en here the Idalian has furnish’d full work
For the hearts of the youths and the maidens of Ferques.

Of these there were two in the good days of old,
When the hard iron heel of the baron so bold
Ground those to the dust whom the mere chance of birth
Had deprived of the licence to lord it on earth.
The maid was as light and as shy as the fawn,
Her eyes dark as night, and her brow like the dawn;
And her lips, twice as rich and as red as the rose,
Were more warm than the sky at a summer eve’s close;
While a music fell from them made only to bless;
And her shape--nay! her shape I must leave you to guess.
’Twould require the power pictorial of Burke,
To record how sublime was this beauty of Ferques.

The swain was in manhood’s first op’ning bloom,
In doublet, slash’d hose, martial bonnet, and plume;
And he look’d, as he walk’d ’neath the moon’s silver light,
Half hero, half mortal;--half _bourgeois_, half knight.
If upward he gazed into heaven’s soft skies,
He saw nothing there half so soft as her eyes;
Or, at least, the young lover thus gallantly swore,
As he ran the long roll of his soft nonsense o’er,
And mincingly walk’d by the damosel’s side,--
The latter all fondness, the former all pride;--
With one arm round the maiden, one hand on his dirk,
Irresistibly fine look’d this gallant of Ferques.

These walkings, these gazings, the terrible sighing,
With death, or at least earnest threat’nings of dying;
These sinkings of spirit, these meltings away,
With the watchings by night and the dreamings by day,
What could such a mixture combustible bring,
But a state of incendiarism, like Swing?
When hearts are the haystack, and Love holds the torch,
’Tis odds but the haystack will soon get a scorch.
And what else could arise from those meetings at eve,
From those flaming assertions which maidens believe,
And those vows warmly breath’d ‘’twixt the gloam and the murk,’[2]
But a bridal and banquet to gladden all Ferques?

Love’s eddying current, I say it in sooth,
Ran, for this young couple, remarkably smooth;
For the fathers paternally look’d on each child,
While the mothers maternally wept as they smiled;
Fraternally too a whole bevy of brothers
Look’d on the alliance as fondly as mothers;
And, if the young bride had possess’d but a sister,
These lines would have told how she tenderly kiss’d her.
Suffice it to say, that there never was seen,
In valley, dale, hamlet, on moorland or green,
An assembly so joyous as met at the kirk,
To view and to envy the lovers of Ferques.

For, the youthful, the aged, the ugly, the fair,
The idle, the busy, grave and gay, all were there.
Maids with prayers on their lips, for the weal of the bride,
Some who long’d for her looks, some for _him_ by her side,
And, though last, yet most certain, by no means the least,
Stood his Rev’rence, who having been bid to the feast,
Look’d as jocund and joyous, and beaming with smiles,
As the fair Cytherean, when weaving her wiles.[3]
For where is the priest, be he Pagan, Hindoo,
Yellow Bonze from Japan, olive sage from Loo Choo,
A Franciscan Friar, an opium-drench’d Turk,
But loves a fair feast like this banquet at Ferques?

’Twould be tedious to tell, when the service was done,
How that of the gallants was warmly begun,
How, like the old suitors in Livy’s old story,
By ‘Cupiditate’ (his words) ‘et Amore,’[4]
The hearts of the damsels they ruthlessly task’d,
And finally gain’d twice as much as they ask’d.
Ah, sigh not to think that in Love’s stricken field,
The maidens of Ferques were so ready to yield;
For Livy declares that no maid can withstand
The wooer who comes with such arms in his hand.
They’re pleasant to talk of, but ’neath them doth lurk
A peril not felt less at Rome than at Ferques.

The banquet was sped, and the floor being clear’d,
Terpsichore’s summons distinctly was heard,
In the tuning Cremona that squeak’d forth its call,
Inviting all those light of foot to the ball.

Lovely dance! of thy charms how correct was the notion
Of her who the Poetry, called thee, of Motion![5]
When Beauty her features in smiles deigns to grace,
What are those same smiles but the dance of the face?
And when Dancing and Modesty happily meet,
What is Dancing just then but the smiles of the feet?[6]
I’d defy e’en a hermit the summons to shirk,
Ask’d a measure to tread by the beauties of Ferques.

When moonlight had risen to silver the scene,
The party adjourn’d from the hall to the green,
And their laughter was shaking the stars in the sky,
When by chance, on the heels of their mirth, there pass’d by
A Franciscan from Boulogne, Franciscanly shod,[7]
Who ask’d them to kneel at the sight of their God,
Whose presence mysterious he fully reveal’d.
But the fiddler, he swore, he’d be hang’d if he kneel’d,
And affirm’d--most irreverent charge ’gainst a monk--
That the bare-footed priest was decidedly drunk.
And the party applauded each quip and each quirk
That fell from this vile Paganini of Ferques.

But, oh, wonder! those ribalds their scoffs had scarce utter’d,
When, at a low prayer by the Cordelier mutter’d,
Their laughter was heard to change into a moan,
As the priest transform’d each to a figure of stone.
There motionless still do the revellers stand,
Misshapen, as turn’d from their sculptor’s rough hand;
Save one, who when moonlight pours down from above,
May be seen from the spot vainly trying to move.
Some affirm ’tis the bridegroom aroused from his trance,
Some declare ’tis the bride gliding forth to the dance.
But ’tis only the fiddler endeavouring to jerk
His bow arm o’er the once magic fiddle of Ferques.

THE SUPPORT OF SAINTS OF LATER DAYS.

It may be seen from our last chapter, that the bill of fare of those who dined in the desert was neither very long nor very varied. It was otherwise with the better fed, but perhaps not better-taught gentlemen of the church of later days. Thus, for instance, the Curé of Brequier kept a very different table from that of the lean Amphitryons of the desert. Brillat Savarin once called on the holy man just as he had dismissed the soup and beef from the table. These were replaced by a leg of mutton _à la royale_, a fat capon, and a splendid salad. The hour was scarcely noon, and the curé had sat down to this saint’s fare alone. He was not selfish, however, and he invited his guest to “break bread” with him, but the guest, a prince of “gastronomers” in his way, declined, and the curé, like Coriolanus, did it all alone! He finished the “gigot” to the ivory, the capon to the bones, and the salad to the polished bottom of the bowl. A colossal cheese was then placed before him, in which he made a breach of ninety degrees, and having washed down all with a bottle of wine, he, like the Irishman, thanked God “for that snack,” and betook himself to digestion and repose. “Le pauvre homme!”

The nuns were in no ways behind the priests. Madame d’Arestrel, lady Abbess of the nuns of the Visitation at Belley, (_faustum nomen_!) once told a secret to a visitor who feared she was going to expound a chapter from the Prophets. “If you want a foretaste of Paradise in the guise of good chocolate,” said she, “be sure to make it over-night, in an earthenware coffee-pot. Its standing still for a night concentrates it, and gives it a velvety taste, which is divine! And Heaven cannot be angry with us for this little luxury, for is not Heaven too divine?” How wide the distance between St. Paula, widow, and Madame d’Arestrel, of the convent of the Visitation! I may add, that if the Visitandines made good chocolate, the monks of the Feuillants, in Paris, were renowned for their ratafie. But they too have superior authority for good living. A dainty dish in Italy is commonly called a “mouthful for a cardinal.”--_un boccone di cardinali._

The canons took the tone from the cardinals. When the French canon Rollet became ill through excessive drinking, his doctor interdicted all strong beverages, and was not a little wroth, on his next visit, at finding the dignitary in bed indeed, but at his bed-side a little table, neatly laid out with bottles and glasses. The canon met the threatened storm by gently remarking:--“Doctor, when you forbade me drinking wine, you did not wish to deprive me of the pleasure of looking at the bottle!” It was such canons who were the best customers of the nuns who distilled liqueurs, and of the Ursulines who manufactured the daintiest drops flavoured by the daintiest essences! But in the Archbishop of Paris himself, M. de Belley, the clergy of France had example to which they might appeal as authority for indulging in good cheer. The archiepiscopal face was wreathed in smiles at the sight of a good dinner. The prelate lived to be a veteran among gastronomers, and was, in other respects, not an unworthy archbishop.

But M. de Belley was at least a gentleman in his gastronomic propensities. He was not, like a Russo-Greek “Papa,” a brandy-bibber. The Russo-Greek priests sanctify drinking, in the minds of the people, by their evil example. Monsieur Léverson Le Duc, a French diplomatist in Russia, tells us that he knows of one parish in Muscovy where the people lock up their pastor every Saturday night, in order that he may not be too muzzy for mass on the Sunday. They occasionally find him very drunk, nevertheless, when they have forgotten previously to examine beneath his robe, under which the sinning sot sometimes smuggles his quart of Cognac! Sir George Simpson crossed the Pacific in a Russian vessel. The chaplain had been sent in her to sea, because he was always too drunk to officiate on land. He was kept sober expressly for the hour of service on Sundays, but at other times, he appears to have realized the verse in the old song of Dibdin’s, wherein it is said that

“’Tother day as our chaplain was preaching,
Behind him I curiously slunk;
And while he our duty was teaching,
As how we should never get drunk,
I show’d him the stuff, and he twigg’d it,
And it soon set his Rev’rence agog.
And he swigg’d, and Nick swigg’d,
And Ben swigg’d, and Dick swigg’d,
And we all of us swigg’d it,--
And we swore there was nothing like grog.”

These examples, however, must be understood as occurring mostly, if not exclusively, among the lower classes of the clergy. There was a time when “the Vicar and Moses” illustrated the sad doings of a similar class among ourselves.

The Greek clergy in the South of Europe present us with something no less curious of aspect. The hall-kitchen of the Greek Patriarch, at Constantinople, is crowded with inferior clergy, who take their meals there, and his All-Holiness himself is served with pipes and sweetmeats by nothing less than gentlemen in Deacon’s orders. Fancy our Lord Primate ringing his bell for cheroots for two! and having them brought in on a silver tray by the Curate of St. Margaret’s!

The Greek usages however are classical. The stranger who dines with the Patriarch has, previous to falling to, water poured over his hands as he holds them over a basin with a perforated cover, and the napkins for drying them are as delicate as rose-leaves. The guest reclines on a low couch, in ancient fashion, and his repast is placed on a low stool at his side. The same custom exists in the convents, but meat is seldom to be found there by a guest who arrives unexpectedly. The monks themselves never eat it at all. During half the year they have but one meal a day, and that consists of vegetables and bread. On the other days of the year they are permitted the more liberal, but sufficiently eremitic fare of cheese, eggs, fish, wine, and milk; but even on these gala days they are never allowed more than two meals. Poor fellows! the majority of them pass their remarkably well-spent time, when not at table, in tilling the ground or teaching wonderful feats to very accomplished tom-cats!

A Greek monk’s idea of an Englishman is that he is a plum-pudding eater. And no wonder, since the English are almost the exclusive purchasers of the currant-grapes which are cultivated all along the northern shores of the Peloponnesus, from Patra to Corinth. As the Chinese think that we take their tea that we may live, so the Greek monks conclude that we _must_ buy their currants, or die! At the convent of Vestizza, the good fathers trouble their heads about nothing but the produce and price of their great staple crop. If you ask how many brethren there are in the convent, they will answer, “Three hundred; and what was the price of currants in England when you left?” Inquire if their books be in good order, and they will reply in the negative, adding an assurance that they do their utmost to produce the best currants in the country. And they will give you permission to see their church, if you will only promise to recommend their dwarf grapes to the English merchants who are catering for plum-pudding eaters at home. The grounds of other convents in the peninsula are famous for their nuts, in the exportation of which the brethren drive no inconsiderable trade.

These worthy people are said to be a trifle more enlightened and a degree less slothful than they were some thirty years ago. There was ample room and verge enough for improvement; for at the period mentioned, the Greek priests resisted the introduction of the potato into the kitchen-garden, for the very satisfactory reason that the _pomme de terre_ was the very identical apple with which Satan beguiled Eve out of Paradise! Yes, these modern and orthodox saints very generally held that the devil tempted Eve with an “ash-leaf kidney!”

If we cross over to Abyssinia, we shall find that the priests and orthodox people there keep as poor tables, at least on fast-days, as the Greeks. Above eight months in the year are assigned by the Abyssinian Christians to abstinence! On these occasions an Abyssinian neither eats nor drinks till long after noon. On festival days, however, they make up for their moderation by unrestrained excess. Mr. Mansfield Perkyns, a traveller who has given us the most recent account of life in Abyssinia, tells us that, in honour of the festival of the Elevation of the Cross, he gave an early breakfast to some dozen guests, who were engaged to half-a-dozen other parties in the course of the same joyous day, and that these guests whetted their appetite for later meals by consuming at breakfast a fine fat cow, two large sheep, and endless gallons of mead! On these occasions the mead is pretty prolific of murder. The guests get dreadfully drunk in honour of the day, exactly as many highly civilized Christian people in happy England do on the yearly recurrence of “merry Christmas.” Indeed, a feast of the Elevation of the Cross without plenty of quarrelling and bloodshed would be as dull as Donnybrook fair now is without a row. But the Abyssinian Christian is as clever in establishing a _casus belli_ as a Donnybrook Romanist. If the latter sees the fair is likely to end without a fight, he simply takes off his hat, draws a white line round it with chalk, and declaring that he will break the head of the first man who denies that such white line is silver lace, he has speedily abundance of active work before him. So a pious Abyssinian at an “Elevation” banquet, if he finds things dull, merely remarks to his dearest friend and next neighbour, “You are a good sort of man, but you are not so handsome as I am!” and thereupon out fly the knives of the parties and their respective friends, which they proceed to clean by plunging them into each other’s ribs!

The people are brought up on a food likely to encourage such pugnacious propensities. Mr. Perkyns, speaking of the slaughtering of oxen for the kitchen, says:--“Almost before the death-struggle is over, persons are ready to flay the carcase, and pieces of the raw meat are cut off, and served up before this operation is completed. In fact, as each part presents itself, it is cut off and eaten while yet warm and quivering. In this state it is considered, and justly so, to be very superior in taste to what it is when cold. Raw meat, if kept a little time, gets tough; whereas, if eaten fresh and warm, it is far tenderer than the most tender joint that has been hung a week in England. The taste is perhaps, in imagination, rather disagreeable at first, but far otherwise when one gets accustomed to it; and I can readily believe that raw meat would be preferred to cooked meat, by a man who from childhood had been accustomed to it.” Such fare, I may observe, may not be out of place at the table of a patriarch who lives in such a climate as that of Abyssinia, but we suspect that it would as much astonish a dinner party at an episcopal palace in England, as Mr. Perkyns himself would do were he to sit down to that dinner in his ordinary Abyssinian fashion of--a bald head covered with butter!

I have spoken in another chapter of a Brahmin who stuffed himself with sweetmeats until he was nearly suffocated, and who exclaimed, on being recommended to swallow a little water, that if he had had room for water he would have swallowed more sweetmeats! It is but justice, however, to these saintly gentlemen to confess that they _can_ fast when there is anything to be gained by it. Among the Mahrattas, when a fast man attempts to cheat his creditors, a Brahmin is hired to sit the _dhurna_, and this is the process--a process, by the way, which Monsieur Dimanche tried on Don Juan, but unsuccessfully. The Brahmin goes to the house or tent of the debtor, sometimes attended by numerous followers, and he announces the _dhurna_, by which the debtor must not eat until he has discharged his liabilities. The clerical bailiff sits at his side and is bound to fast also, until the matter is arranged. He who holds out longest wins the day, and if the debtor be famished he will pay rather than die outright, for eat he dare not until his creditor be satisfied; besides, if he were to starve the Brahmin to death, the crime would be so heinous, that the debtor himself had better have departed to the world of shadows. It ensues that sitting _dhurna_ is more successful in certain districts than it would be in Belgravia, even though the Archbishop of Canterbury himself were to take his seat in the middle of the square, with a declaration that he would neither move nor eat until every inhabitant in the parish had paid his Christmas bills. Poor man! he would have to sit as long as _infelix Theseus_.