last gasp; a carpet of wild flowers
unsurpassed in any country in the world; and
game enough for all the leading shots of
Europe—these are Mr. Seyd's chief points in
his Californian pleadings, these are the
inducements which he holds out to English
emigrants of all classes.

Mr. Seyd is, we believe, an American
gentleman, and with this part of his book we
have nothing to do.

MEAT AND DRINK IN SHAKESPEARE'S
TIME.

WHEN William Shakespeare applied to his
doctor for some information about eating and
drinking, what was he told? Was he dry or
moist, a hot body or a cold body, in the
doctor's eyes? For men and meats seem in
his days, to have been divided into two classes,
the hot and the cold; so that, if they paid any
heed to dietetics, the cold men fed warmly,
and the hot men ate cold dinners: that is to
say, dinners physiologically cold. Witness
Tobias Venner, doctor of physic, in the days
of Shakespeare and of Bacon, of our glorious
old Marlowes, and of a host of men mighty of
wit, and fierce in thirst and hunger. When
Doctor Venner was born, Spenser was a young man
in the north of England, yet unknown to fame.
He lived in the days, not only of Shakespeare
and Bacon, but also in the days of Milton, and
departed this life when John Dryden was upon
the verge of thirty. Doctor Venner wrote the
Straight Road to a Long Life, a work on
diet: also a philosophical discourse upon
dietetics and the preservation of health; also
upon the nature and use of the springs at
Bath; also upon spring medicines; also upon
a mineral spring in the neighbourhood of
Bristol; also upon the smoking of tobacco.
The author writes himself "To. Venner,
Doctor of Physicke, at Bathe, in the Spring and
Fall, and at other times in the Burrough of
North Petherton, neere to the ancient Haven-Towne
of Bridgewater in Somersetshire."

To consider everything in order, Dr. To.
Venner treats first of the nature and choice
of habitable places; then of the divers kinds
of bread; thirdly, of drinks; fourthly, of the
flesh of beasts and fowls; fifthly, brethren,
of fish; sixthly, of eggs and milk; seventhly,
of sauces and spices; eighthly, of eatable fruits,
roots, and herbs; in the ninth place, and
finally, of the manner and custom of diet.

"Of habitations, wisely says the doctor, that
they should be set where there is good air,
good water, and good soil. He loves not
houses hemmed in among hills, or drenched
in the corrupt vapour of standing pools. He
loves a subtle, bright, and clear air, temperate,
and tolerably moist; but a dry air, he says,
is most agreeable to moist constitutions. He
has a prejudice, (probably because he was a
moist man,) against what he denounces as
"the moist and excrementall blasts of the
west wind;" and would have houses built with
windows looking " as much as may be towards
the east, because the sun, in the beginning of
the day, arising upon them, doth excellently
clarify and purge the air of them, and are
all the day after better exposed to the most
wholesome blasts of the east wind." Next
to the east, the north wind is the one he
loves. Dwellers on the hills, are by reason of
the good air they get, "witty, nimble,
magnanimous and aspiring. The contrary is seen
in low and marish places; for there, the
inhabitants, by reason of the evilness of the
air, have gross and earthy spirits, whereof
it is that they are for the most part men,
grovelling, dull, sluggish, sordid, sensual,
plainly irreligious, or perhaps some of them,
which is a little worse, religious in show,
external honest men, deceitful, malicious,
disdainful: " low people in every sense.

He next discusses bread, which was in his
time chiefly made of three sorts of grain:
wheat, rye and barley. Except in Wales and
some of the northern shires of England, no
use was made of oats unless in times of
scarcity. The wheat bread is best. They
who, being in health, use the finest wheat
bread are "more curious than judicious."
A yeoman-bread, which hath in it the finer
part of the bran, is for strong and healthy
bodies very convenient. Bread made only of
the branny part of the meal, brown bread, used
by the poorest sort of people in times of great
scarcity, is only fit for dogs. Sometimes the
grosser part of the bran is separated by a
sieve, and a bread wholesome enough, called
one-way-bread, is made with the siftings.
Rye bread, cold, heavy, and hard, is " most
meet for rustic labourers; " rye mixed with
wheat makes Messeling bread, and that is
wholesomer. Dr. Venner next enumerates
the seven qualities of good bread. One is that
it be well leavened, " howbeit we daily prove
that no bread is lighter of digestion, or
giveth better nourishment to the body, than
our manchet, which is made of fine flour of
wheat, having in it no leaven, but a little
barm." Those were the early days of yeast.
Mind how you eat crust, says Dr. Venner to
the men among whom rare Ben Jonson
flourished at the Mermaid. Biscuit "is only
profitable for the phlegmatic, and for them
that have crude and moist stomacks, and that
desire to grow lean, because it is a very great
dryer; and therefore let such as are choleric
and melancholic beware how they use it.
The like may be said of the crust of bread; for
it is also very hardly digested, and breedeth
choler adust and melancholic humours.
Wherefore let the utmost and harder part of
the crust be chipped away, of which let such
as are by nature choleric and melancholic
have special care. But it is good for the
phlegmatic, and for such as have over moist
stomacks, and yet healthy, and desirous to
grow lean, to eat crusts after meat, the
very superficial and burnt parts of them only
chipped away, because they press down the