The doctor--possibly with an eye to business, a publisher being present--was describing a volume he had in mind to make, “a book upon philosophical principles,” “a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written.” “Then,” wisely said the dogmatic doctor, “as you can not make bad meat good, I would tell what is the best butcher’s meat, the best beef, the best pieces; how to choose young fowls; the proper seasons of different vegetables; and then how to roast and boil and compound.” This was the plan of a poet, essayist, lexicographer, and the leading man of letters of his day. His cook-book was never written. But good Mrs. Glasse had also with large spirit aimed at teaching the ignorant, possibly those of a kind least often thought of by instructors in her art. She had, forsooth, caught her hare outside her book, even if she never found him in its page. “If I have not wrote in the high polite style,” she says, with a heart helpful toward the misunderstood and oppressed, and possibly with the pages of some pretentious chef in mind, “I hope I shall be forgiven; for my intention is to instruct the lower sort, and therefore must treat them in their own way. For example, when I bid them lard a fowl, if I should bid them lard with large lardoons, they would not know what I meant; but when I say they must lard with little pieces of bacon, they know what I mean. So in many other things in Cookery the great cooks have such a high way of expressing themselves, that the poor girls are at a loss to know what they mean.” Mrs. Glasse’s book was published in 1747--while Dr. Johnson had still thirty-seven years in which to “boast of the niceness of his palate,” and spill his food upon his waistcoat. “Whenever,” says Macaulay, “he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead.” But within forty-eight years of the December his poor body was borne from the house behind Fleet Street to its resting-place in Westminster Abbey, a thin volume, “The Frugal Housewife,” written by our American Lydia Maria Child, had passed to its ninth London edition, in that day sales being more often than in our own a testimony of merit. This prevailing of justice over prejudice is “too good for any but very honest people,” as Izaak Walton said of roast pike. Dogmatism is always eating its own words. Since the master in literature, Dr. Johnson, planned his cook-book many cooking men have dipped ink in behalf of instruction in their art. Such names as Farley, Carême, and Soyer have been written, if not in marble or bronze, at least in sugar of the last caramel degree--unappreciated excellencies mainly because of the inattention of the public to what nourishes it, and lack of the knowledge that the one who introduces an inexpensive, palatable, and digestible dish benefits his fellow-men.