Much has been written of the luxury and enervation of Romans after the republic, how they feasted scented with perfumes, reclining and listening to music, “nudis puellis ministrantibus.” The story is old of how Vedius Pollio “hung with ecstasy over lampreys fattened on human flesh;” how Tiberius spent two days and two nights in one bout; how Claudius dissolved pearls for his food; how Vitellius delighted in the brains of pheasants and tongues of nightingales and the roe of fish difficult to take; how the favorite supper of Heliogabalus was the brains of six hundred thrushes. At the time these gluttonies went on in the houses of government officials, the mass of the people, the great workers who supported the great idlers, fed healthfully on a mess of pottage. The many to support the super-abundant luxury of a few is still one of the mysteries of the people. But in the old Rome the law of right and honest strength at last prevailed, and monsters gave way to the cleaner and hardier chiefs of the north. The mastery of the world necessarily passed to others;--it has never lain with slaves of the stomach. The early folk of Britain--those Cæesar found in the land from which we sprang--ate the milk and flesh of their flocks. They made bread by picking the grains from the ear and pounding them to paste in a mortar. Their Roman conquerors doubtless brought to their midst a more elaborated table order. Barbarous Saxons, fighters and freebooters, next settling on the rich island and restraining themselves little for sowing and reaping, must in their incursions have been flesh-eaters, expeditiously roasting and broiling directly over coals like our early pioneers. This mode of living also would seem true of the later-coming Danes, who after their settlement introduced, says Holinshed, another habit. “The Danes,” says that delightful chronicler, “had their dwelling ... among the Englishmen, whereby came great harme; for whereas the Danes by nature were great drinkers, the Englishmen by continuall conversation with them learned the same vice. King Edgar, to reforme in part such excessive quaffing as then began to grow in use, caused by the procurement of Dunstane [the then Archbishop of Canterbury] nailes to be set in cups of a certeine measure, marked for the purpose, that none should drinke more than was assigned by such measured cups. Englishmen also learned of the Saxons, Flemings, and other strangers, their peculiar kinds of vices, as of the Saxons a disordered fierceness of mind, of the Flemings a feeble tendernesse of bodie; where before they rejoiced in their owne simplicitie and esteemed not the lewd and unprofitable manners of strangers.”