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HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY
135

pleasures of the intellect and the appetite walked amicably hand in hand, has recorded his still more vehement denunciation: "I detest and abominate," says Mr. Macborrowdale, "the idea of a Siberian dinner, where you just look on fiddle-faddles, while your meal is behind a screen, and you are served with rations like a pauper."

The scorn of the true Briton for alien delicacies was repaid with interest by the Frenchman, who regarded his neighbor's groaning table very much as we might regard the doubtful provender of a cannibal chief. The contempt for frog-eating foreigners, on the one hand, was not greater than the contempt for beef-eating islanders, on the other; in fact, all nations, from Egypt down, seem to have cherished a wholesome dislike and distrust for each other's food. The British officer who, at the attack on Cadiz, shouted to his men, "You Englishmen, who are fed upon beef, don't surely mean to be beaten by a d——d lot of Spaniards, who live on oranges!" made a stronger appeal to human nature than did Napoleon with his