Royalty in times past has had many an accomplished epicure, as learned in culinary lore as in the practice of the cuisine. Charlemagne took a warm personal interest in the management of his table, and Hardicanute, one of our Danish kings, was so great a gourmand that he was designated “Swine’s Mouth”--his table, it is said, having been covered four times a day with the most costly viands that the air, sea, or land could produce. It was Henry de Valois who brought into fashion aromatic sauces and various spicy dainties, inheriting his taste for cooking from Catherine de Medicis, who introduced into France not only ices, but much of the culinary art from Italy; while the Prince de Soubise, immortalised by the sauce named after him, was a connoisseur of no mean order. He could boast of an excellent cook, but a man with princely notions of expenditure. One day the Prince announced his intention to him of giving a supper, and demanded an estimate. The first article on which the Prince cast his eyes was this: “Fifty hams;” whereupon he inquired, “Are you going to feast my whole regiment?” “My lord,” replied the cook, “you do not understand our resources; give the word, and these fifty hams which confound you, I will put them all into a glass bottle no bigger than my thumb.” Accordingly the Prince nodded, and the article passed. Charlemagne once ate cheese mixed with parsley seeds at a bishop’s palace, and liked it so much that ever after he had two cases of such cheese sent yearly to Aix-la-Chapelle--a device which Gay has noted:-- “Marbled with sage, the hardened cheese she press’d.” Charles the Great ate venison with special pleasure, and Henry IV. of France ate melons and oysters whenever possible--a taste which reminds us of that of Frederick, son of Ernest “the Iron,” who on recovering from amputation of the leg one day resolved on dining on melons, his favourite dish. He was told that such a diet would be fatal to him, as it had already been to one Austrian archduke of his house; but he took no heed of the advice. “I will have melons,” said he, “betide what may!” Of melons, accordingly, he ate to his heart’s content, and death followed shortly afterwards.