The lettuce, by long familiarity, has come to be considered the true basis of all salad, and in its generous expanse of faintly flavoured leaf, so cool and juicy and crisp when brought in fresh from the garden, it has certainly some claims to the proud position. But a multitude of salads can be made without any lettuce at all, and it is doubtful whether either Greece or Rome used it as an ingredient of the bowl in which the austere endive and pungent onion always found a place. Now-a-days however, lettuce is a deserving favourite, It has no sympathies or antipathies, and no flavour strong enough to arouse enthusiasm or aversion. It is not aggressive or self-assertive, but, like those amiable people with whom no one ever quarrels, is always ready to be of service, no matter what company may be thrust upon it, or what treatment it has to undergo. Opinions of its own it has none, so it easily adopts those of others, and takes upon itself--and so distributes over the whole--any properties of taste or smell that may be communicated to it by its neighbours. An onion might be rubbed with lettuce for an indefinite period and betray no alteration in its original nature, but the lettuce if only touched with onion becomes at once a modified onion itself, and no ablution will remove from it the suspicion of the contact. The gentle leaf is therefore often ill-used; but, after all, even this, the meekest of vegetables, will turn upon the oppressor, and if not eaten young and fresh, or if slaughtered with a steel blade, will convert the salad that should have been short and sharp in the mouth into a basin of limp rags, that cling together in sodden lumps, and when swallowed conduce to melancholy and repentance. The antithesis of the lettuce is the onion. Both are equally essential to the perfect salad, but for most opposite reasons. The lettuce must be there to give substance to the whole, to retain the oil and salt and vinegar, to borrow fragrance and to look green and crisp. It underlies everything else, and acts as conductor to all, like consciousness in the human mind. It is the bulk of the salad so far as appearances go, and yet it alone could be turned out without affecting the flavour of the dish. It is only the canvas upon which the artist paints.