Now it fell out in the year of redemption--I have not the slightest idea--that P. Maremnius Citronius Ostendius, a great gastronome and connoisseur in oysters, came from Asia to visit his kinsman Pomponius. There was some talk of his marrying the beautiful Flavia Pomponilia, the eldest daughter of the Pomponian house (she was as jealous of Zita as Fleur de Lys was of Esmeralda, and would have thrust golden pins into her, à-la-mode Romaine, but for fear of her father); but at all events Ostendius was come down from Asia to Genoa, and there was to be a great feast in honour of his arrival. Ostendius had an aldermanic abdomen under his toga, had a voice that reminded you of fruity port, bees-wings in his eyes, a face very like collared brawn, and wore a wig. Those adjuncts to beauty were worn, ladies and gentlemen, fifteen hundred years ago. Ay! look in at the Egyptian Room of the British Museum, London, and you shall find wigs older than that. He had come from Asia, where he was reported to have partaken of strange dishes--birds of paradise, gryphons, phœnixes, serpents, elephants--what do I know but he despised not the Persicos apparatus, and was not a man to be trifled with in his victuals! Pomponius Cotta called his cook into his sanctum, and gave her instructions as to the banquet, significantly telling her what she might expect if she failed in satisfying him and his gastronomical guests. Poor Zita felt a cold shudder as she listened to the threats which, in lazy Latin, her noble master lavished upon her. But she determined, less through fear of punishment than a sincere desire of doing her duty, to exert herself to the very utmost in the preparation of the feast. Perhaps there may have been a little spice of vanity in this determination; perhaps she was actuated by a little harmless desire to please the difficult Ostendius, and so prove to him that Pomponius Cotta had a slave who was the best cook in Genoa and in Italy. Why not? I am one who, believing that all is vanity, think that the world as it is could not well get on without some vanity. By which I mean an honest moderate love of and pleasure in approbation. I think we could much easier dispense with money than with this. When I see a conceited man, I think him to be a fool; but when I meet a man who tells me he does not rejoice when he is praised for the good book he has written, or the good picture he has painted, or the good deed he has done, I know him to be a humbug, and a mighty dangerous one to his fellow-creatures.