Defendants whose case would otherwise go by default need this brief plea, which their own modesty forbids their uttering, their modesty, their busy hands and heads, and their Antigone-like love and ἀσθένεια. They know sympathy is really as large as the world, and that room is here for other women than those who make dictionaries at so much a mile as well as for themselves; and for other men than neurotic caterwaulers and hysterical shriekers like our ancient friend Knox, assuming that the masculine is the only form of expression, that women have no right to utter the human voice, and that certain men have up wire connections with omniscient knowledge and Nature’s designs and God’s will, and, standing on this pretence, are the dispensers of authority. “If the greatest poems have not been written by women,” said our Edgar Poe, with a clearer accent of the American spirit toward women, “it is because, as yet, the greatest poems have not been written at all.” The measure is large between the purple-faced zeal of John Knox and the vivid atavism of our brilliant professor and that luminous vision of Poe. “THE GULLET SCIENCE” A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen. ROBERT BURTON _Sir Anthony Absolute._--It is not to be wondered at, ma’am--all this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet! RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN “THE GULLET SCIENCE” A LOOK BACK AND AN ECONOMIC FORECAST The cook-book is not a modern product. The Iliad is the hungriest book on earth, and it is the first of our cook-books aside from half-sacred, half-sanitary directions to the early Aryans and Jews. It is that acme of poetry, that most picturesque of pictures, that most historical of histories, that most musical and delicious verse, the Iliad, which was the first popularly to teach the cooking art--the art in its simplicity, and not a mere handmaid to sanitation, jurisprudence, or theology. Through the pages of that great poem blow not only the salt winds of the Ægean Sea, but also the savor of tender kid and succulent pig, not to mention whole hectacombs, which delighted the blessed gods above and strengthened hungry heroes below. To this very day--its realism is so perfect--we catch the scent of the cooking and see the appetiteful people eat. The book is half-human, half-divine; and in its human part the pleasures and the economic values of wholesome fare are not left out.