flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they call it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string, or spit, came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious arts, make their way among mankind.

Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, 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 mantain it to be the most delicate-princeps obsoniorum.

I speak not of your grown porkers - things between pig and pork - those hobbydehoysbut a young and tender suckling -under a moon old — guiltless as yet of the sty — with no original speck of the amor immunditia, 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!

There is no flavour comparable, I will con