Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/489

Rh cutlets" at Lyons; how "dinner came to his inexpressible relief" at Avignon; how wistfully he looked about in the dreary kitchen of a quasi-inn, but all in vain, "for a flitch of bacon, or a rope of onions, or a mouldy cheese, to hint of something that some one might eat, or for a battered pewter-pot, or even a rim of liquor-stain on a bench or table to indicate that once upon a time something had been drank there." Gratefully he recals the fare on board the steamer to Genoa; the sumptuous breakfast at ten; "then, four dishes of exquisite French cookery, with a bottle of clear amber-coloured dry Italian wine for each person, fallowed by a dessert of fresh grapes and melons or peaches, and rich dried fruits, with coffee and liqueurs," &c.; while "at five in the afternoon, dinner was served with similar taste, but with greater variety and profusion." At Genoa, he says, "To secure a dinner—the first object of sensible man's selfish purpose—by obtaining the reversion of seats at a table-d'hôte, we toiled as good men do after the rewards of virtue." At the same place, the "terrible brilliancy of the sunlight" seared him from the fatigues of sighs-seeing, and "unnerved" him "for anything but dinner. That was welcome, though coarsely conceived and executed," &c. At the ancient capital of the Volsci, the fatal asylum of Coriolanus,—"although black stale bread and shapeless masses of rough-hewn mutton and beef boiled to the consistency of leather, flanked by bottles of the smallest infrà-acid wine, constituted our fare, we breakfasted with the enjoyment of the Homeric rage, and were deaf to wise suggestions that we should be obliged to dine in Rome." In a rude inn at Montefiascone, "we satisfied the rage of hanger with coarse and plentiful repast of fish, beef boiled to leather, and greasy beans, accompanied by a pale white wine of an acidity more pungent than ever elsewhere gave man an unmerited heartburn." In an old palatial inn at Radicofani, "we enjoyed a breakfast of hard black bread, a large platter of eggs, some boiled beef of the usual consistency, and a great skinny fowl swimming in yellowish butter, with the true relish of hunger." Further illustrations are not wanting; and, not wanted.

Something like a qualm of conscience we feel, at leaving this book, without affording mean of neutralising the impression producible by such shreds of literal table-talk, by a set-off of examples of the writers grave and reflective mood, such as, the reader is cautioned, are fairly interspersed in the course of the Rambles. Half a dozen at the least we had marked for citation, but now is space exhausted, and we can only therefore refer to the Rambler's meditations on the career of Sir William Follett, on Philo-Romanism, and other occasional musings suggested by sights and sounds in foreign travel. And another huge omission must crave the pardon it deserves not; that of the descriptive sketches of scenery and men and manners, often pencilled with a grace and animation that make the omission more unpardonable still.