HARVARD "I could write a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written; it should be a book on philosophical principles."-DR. JOHNSON. XX. ON REST, SLEEP, AND DREAMS, AS THEY ARE PAGE XXVI. PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY OF COOKERY (Ancient) 208 220 228 BRILLAT-SAVARIN AND THE ESTHETICS OF THE DINING-TABLE. Cookery is not only an art, but a master-art. Saturday Review. Αρχη και ῥιζα παντος ἀγαθοῦ, ἡ της γαστρος ἡδονη. 6 THAT charming student of humanity, Montaigne, who was the favourite author of Shakespeare, and who more than any other Frenchman has coloured the universal thought of the world,' might well at first sight appear as the strongest possible contrast to our modern Savarin. The one retiring to his quaint old Gascon castle, in a wild country, still remote from towns and highways, to shut himself up for the latter half of his life with his books, and ponder on his great theme, Humani nihil a me alienum puto; the other, always a man of the world, b nothing if not genuinely French, and testing everything by the Parisian standards: the one, a stoic (in theory, at least), solitary, all his thoughts tinged with melancholy; the other, an enthusiastic Epicurean, sociable, with an intense enjoyment of life. Yet in one principal quality and most distinctive feature they are alike. They are both full of the "I"-both conscious of it; both their works are steeped in subjectivity, and both owe to its presence much of their charm. Montaigne, indeed, is himself the subject of his book; and as to his opinion on any matter, he gives it, he says, not as being a good one, but as being his. Savarin, again, makes no other excuse for the use of the "me" than the garrulity of age-a plea which is unnecessary to secure plenary indulgence from most of his readers. They, like Balzac, find that, while there is nothing more intolerable than the "I" of ordinary writers, "that of Brillat-Savarin is adorable." Indeed, it is by the association of dissimilar ideas that Montaigne comes to be mentioned here. The thought of Savarin, "the high-priest of gastronomy," with his sometimes comic affectation of grandiloquence, at once suggested a caustic passage, in the first book of the Essays, which is aimed at the 'science de gueule,' and especially at the pompous |