expense has been spared to procure for me
the very best of everything.

I seem to be extravagant in vegetables.
That is well. I have read how, in the year
after the battle of Nevill's Cross, all leprous
persons were commanded to depart from
London. I might very possibly have been a
leper had I lived in the days when vegetables
formed no part of English diet; but, since
that day, as the consumption of greens and
potatoes has increased, leprosy and many
another foul disease has vanished. I am glad
to see that, like a civilised and happy man, I
eat abundantly of vegetables.

My meat account is heavy. Well; they
were barbarous and plaguy times when meat
used to be cheap. So many people died of a
great plague in London once, that all sorts of
provisions were to be had by the survivors
at such rates as these—to make them seem
the more surprising, I say nothing of increase
in the worth of money since that day when
wheat, at a fair price, was two shillings a
quarter. The best fed ox was to be had for
four shillings, the best cow for a shilling, the
best heifer or steer for sixpence, the best
wether for fourpence, the best ewe for
threepence, a fat pig for fivepence, and a lamb for
twopence. When prices rose again, they
were still apparently much lower than they
now are; but there could have been no great
store of food when it was thought necessary
to ordain—as it was once ordained in London—
that no vintner should allow guests to eat in
his house other food than bread and wine,
and that nobody should spend more than
two shillings, including wine and beer, but
that a servant's expenditure should not
exceed eightpence.

Now I must needs go on recollecting about
dinner. In the year one, five, three, one,
Richard Rose, cook to the Bishop of Rochester,
was boiled in a copper in Smithfield.
He had poisoned sixteen people with
porridge meant to kill his master.

At a feast given at Norwich in the time
of Queen Elizabeth, sweet water and
perfumes cost fourpence, sixteen oranges cost
two shillings, two gallons of white wine the
same; there were also sack, malmsey, and
muscadine, and the whole cost of the
entertainment was one pound eighteen shillings
and a penny. Against this we may set a
dinner given by the City of London to King
George the Second, at which there were
upwards of one thousand dishes eaten, and
there were drunk three thousand seven
hundred and eighty-nine bottles of divers
sorts of wine. The king when he left gave
a thousand pounds to the sheriff for poor
debtors, the dinner having cost nearly five
thousand. After all, Mrs. Caddypick does
not run up my weekly bills so very royally,
and the good appetite with which she flatters
me, is not equal to that of the festive citizen,
whose dinner eaten at the Bridewell
Hospital a hundred years ago, was noted and
recorded by a guest who would have been
better employed if he had used his mouth
more, and eyes less. Mr.——consumed for
the first course: two plates of mock turtle,
some salmon trout, venison, ham, and
chicken. For the second course,—some goose
and green peas, cold lobster, hot marrow
pudding, codlins, tart creamed, some prawns, one
small custard. For dessert,—some blancmange,
two jellies, one plate of raspberries
thoroughly soaked in wine, two slices of a melon,
and some cheese. When the waiters came to
clear the table he told them angrily that they
were a confounded set of scavengers, and that
he would knock some of them down if they
did not get him a dish of ice-cream, adding
withall, "It is desperate hard a body cannot
dine at these here places in comfort."

I see as I look out of window a fine lady
whose expansive flounce covers much
pavement, and remember to have heard it said
even by my landlady, whose skirts hang in
thin folds, that the invention of balloon
flounces now in vogue must have proceeded
from an idiot. I see no objection to the
present fashions. In the good old times,
indeed, when ladies wore the great and
stately farthingales, gentlemen wore what an
old chronicler calls "verdingale breeches."
If we fall back on the past, following the
lead of the other sex, and have to wear
clothes thickly stuffed with wool or bran, I
only hope that the wool-casing will not come
into use during summer weather. In cold
weather, especially when streets are slippery,
the padded dress will, I confess—to my old
bones, at any rate—be welcome. Only, I
shall be heedful to avoid the mischance that
befel the fashionable gentleman in a bran-
new stuffed falloda, who was pleased at the
laughter he awakened in a party of young
ladies, whom he entertained with animated
talk and gesture. He did not perceive till
he was totally collapsed that he had been
offering his chaff to the assembled company
through a hole torn in his falloda by a nail in
the chair on which he had been sitting. I
think, however, that we shall not overlook
modern improvements, and am quite sure
that the casing of the male population of this
town, like the population of the other sex, in
air-balloons, will tend much to the benefit of
the community. To be knocked down and
run over; to be crushed in a collision on the
railway; to fall down an area, or even from
a fourth-storey window upon area spikes, will
then no longer be a cause of death, or any
more than the most trivial inconvenience.
Some wise ideas we may recover from the
past, and this, no doubt, is one. I wonder
greatly at the ridicule it is encountering.