This profusion--this overfood, as it were--has been brought to its noblest expression by the English aristocracy, whose tables literally groan with costly viands, whose spits are always turning, and whose scullions and kitchen wenches are as an army. It is related that when a certain duke found it necessary to retrench, and was advised by his family solicitor to get rid of his fifth, sixth, and seventh cooks, his grace remarked, "But ----, So-and-so, a man must have a biscuit!" And the English middle class of course faithfully imitates to the best of its powers the English upper class, and so on through the grades. Among all classes there is a rooted prejudice against food that happens to be cheap. To this day people who eat escallops are rather looked down upon, for no other reason than that oysters run you into half a crown a dozen, while you can get excellent escallops at ninepence. So the herring, the whiting, and other kinds of cheap fish are considered little better than offal by persons who can afford to pay for sole and salmon. Turtle soup is infinitely to be preferred to any other soup in the world because it is dearer, and champagne is drunk, not because people like it, but because it looks swagger and testifies to the possession of means. These gustatory idiosyncrasies are purely English, and obviously they are the offspring of the English love of display and superfluity. Among the lower classes the general feeding, though cheaper, is just as wasteful and just as gross. Excluding bread, it consists chiefly of inferior cuts of butcher's meat with _charcuterie_ and dried fish thrown in. It has been complained against the Scot that he is none too clean a feeder, delighting hugely in inferior meats. Haggis is held forth as a great exemplar in point. But it cannot be denied that throughout England the one kind of emporium for the sale of comestibles which flourishes and is unfailingly popular is the pork or ham-and-beef shop. And here what do you obtain? Why, exactly the meats which gentlemen of the type of Mr. Henley describe as offal. They include, in addition to pork in and out of season, pig's feet, pig's heads, pig's liver and kidneys, pig's blood sausages, the "savoury duck" or mess of seasoned remnants, tripe boiled and raw, and chitterlings. So that the haggis of Scotland is fairly well balanced. I am not suggesting for a moment that the English display other than a proper judgment in devouring these dainties. But if they will favour the pork shop and its contents, they can scarcely expect to be set down for an angel-bread and manna-eating people.