distinguished person, an honour to his country;
whose like, the journalist informs us, we
ne'er shall look upon again, and whose name
we thus hear mentioned for the first time.
We have never suspected the great man's
existence until he has ceased to exist. We
have never known of the honour we enjoyed
until we have ceased to enjoy it.

Thus it is that a large portion of the
Parisian public were perhaps utterly unable
to do honour to the Père Nicolet, until they
were all of a sudden deprived of him. Death,
however, unlocks the biographical treasures
of the French journals, and they have
celebrated the memory of Père Nicolet with that
nicely-modulated mournfulness, that neatly-balanced
regret, that well-punctuated pity,
and that enlarged sympathy which a
feuilletonist (who is paid by the line) can never
coldly repress.

"Who is, or rather, who was Père
Nicolet?" may especially be asked in our
own country, where ignorance—so that it be
the result of choice—is so distinguished and
respectable.

Few can answer the question better
than I can. The Père Nicolet! how well I
remember that great and magnificent man.
The remembrance carries me back (with a
swiftness comparable to nothing but Prince
Hussein's carpet, or an Excursion at two
and two-pence,) to old familiar Paris—to

"Other lips and other hearts,"

not to mention other cookery and other cartes
—Paris with its narrow Seine, that divides,
but does not separate its shores; its terraces,
fountains, and statues; its sauntering and
sun; its immaculate toilettes, and morals
(occasionally) to correspond; its balls where
people actually dance, and its conversaziones
where talking is not unknown—Paris, where
people go to the Opera merely because they
like music, and yawn not, though a play be in
nine acts; where gloves are carried to
perfection; where it is not customary to consider
any man a snob or a swindler until you have
been introduced to him; where nobody is so
ill-bred as to blush, although many, perhaps,
have reason to do so; where everybody is a
great deal more polite to everybody else than
anybody deserves; where all the children are
men, and all the men are children, and where
all the ladies are more important than the
two put together; for the politest nation in
Europe fully recognises the Rights of Woman
to govern—and to work.

The Père Nicolet! The mention of his
name recalls an eventful evening. Everybody
who has been accustomed to sun himself
occasionally in Paris has experienced the
difficulty of dining. Not difficulty in a vulgar
sense. That may be experienced elsewhere,
even in our own happy land, where great
men have been reduced to feed their horses
upon cheese-cakes. I allude to the more
painful embarrassment of prandial riches.
In England, according to Ude, a man is
troubled in the choice of a religious sect,
because there are fifty of them; but he has
no hesitation as to his fish sauce, because there
is, or was, but one. In France the case is
reversed. The example of the English
philosopher Hobson—proverbial for the ready
adaptation of his inclination to his alternativeless
condition—is readily followed in matters
of faith; it is in feeding (can alliteration
excuse a coarse expression?) that the Frenchman
finds himself at fault. Thus it is that
in Paris, I have found what I may call a carte-load
of five hundred dishes an insuperable
difficulty in the way of a dinner, compared to
which the English embarrassment between a
steak and a chop, or a chop and a steak, is
felicity itself. What monotony in variety it
is to go the round of the restaurants! How
soon the gilding is taken off the Maison Dorée;
how quickly the Café de Paris ceases to be
distinguished from any other café—de Paris,
or elsewhere; what a disagreeable family the
Trois Frères speedily become. Then Vachette,
Véry, and Vefour—Vefour, Véry, and
Vachette!—are ringing the changes in vain.
The dinner which was probably prepared for
the Sleeping Beauty previously to her siesta,
and kept waiting a hundred years, may have
been found somewhat behind the age when it
came to be eaten; but it could not have
been more changeless and unchangeable than
those great conservative cuisines.

Be it observed, however, that I am not
assuming to myself any particular claims to
epicurean honours. I am not going to set up
an ideal on so very material a subject, to talk
about the spiritual and divine side of gastronomy;
to fall into affected raptures at the
traditions of Vatel or the treatise of Savarin;
to talk of the rare repasts I used not to revel
in before the old Eocher was ruined, and the
wonderful old vintages which I must confess
had not then come under my notice. Nobody
raves in this manner but antiquated dogs,
who have not only had their day, but who
have been making a night of it ever since
—except perhaps the comic bon vivant of
some Irish magazine, who has probably drawn
his inspiration from a restaurant in the Palais
Royal, at two francs, prix fixe. Perhaps
there is no subject upon which more nonsense
has been written (inclusive of the lucubrations
of the comic Irishman) on both sides of the
question than upon French cookery. For my
part, I am perfectly aware that the best
dinners in the world are to be had in Paris,
if you go to the right places. But the vaunted
variety is all nonsense as far as the
accidental diner is concerned. Deduct from
the ten thousand plats, or whatever number
the carte may profess to contain, the dishes
that do not happen to be in season (always a
large proportion); those that never are, and
never will be in season (a still larger number);
those of which, at whatever time you dine,
the last plat has just been served (an equally