We have all heard that poets are born, not made; but M. Brillat-Savarin makes the same assertion respecting gourmands. The art of eating, it seems, cannot be acquired. Those who have an original aptitude to enjoy the luxuries of the table, are described as having “broad faces, sparkling eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips, and round chins. The females are plump, rather pretty than handsome, with a tendency to embonpoint. It is under this exterior that the pleasantest guests are to be found; they accept all that is offered, _eat slowly_, and _taste with reflection_. They never hurry away from the places where they have been well treated; and you are sure of them for the evening, because they know all the games and pastimes which form the ordinary accessories of a gastronomic meeting. Those, on the contrary, to whom nature has refused an aptitude for the enjoyments of taste, have long faces, long noses, and large eyes; whatever their height, they have always in their tournure a character of elongation. They have black and straight hair, and are above all deficient in _embonpoint; it is they_ _who invented trowsers_. The women whom nature has affected with the same misfortune are angular, get tired at table, and live on tea and scandal.” In the same strain he speaks of _eprouvettes_, “dishes of acknowledged flavor, of such undoubted excellence, that their bare appearance ought to excite in a human being, properly organized, all the faculties of taste; so that all those in whom, in such cases, we perceive neither the flush of desire nor the radiance of ecstasy, may be justly noted as unworthy of the honors of the sitting and the pleasures attached to it.” As an awful warning to the eaters of America, it should be mentioned that Napoleon owed his ruin to his habits of rapid eating. At Borodino and at Leipsic he was prevented from pushing his successes to a victorious conclusion, solely from the indecision and weakness of mind proceeding from a disordered stomach. On the third day at Dresden—we have it on the authority of the poet Hoffman—he again evinced a lack of his usual energy, owing to his having eat part of a shoulder of mutton stuffed with onions—“a dish,” says the writer in the Quarterly, “only to be paralleled by the pork chops which Messrs. Thurtell and Co. regaled on, after completing the murder of their friend Mr. Weare.” One instance of Napoleon’s good taste, and the only one, we have reluctantly been compelled to give up as a fiction. Tom Moore, in “The Fudge Family in Paris,” mentions Chambertin Burgundy, the most delicious wine in the world, as the “pet tipple of Nap;” but the Quarterly asserts that it was never taken on serious occasions, for after the battle of Waterloo there were found in his carriage two bottles—empty—one of which was marked _Malaga_, the other _Rum_.