The people of the sixteenth century were gross and unclean eaters, delighting in viands we should now relegate to the tables of the Esquimaux. Thus they would eat dog-fish, porpoise,[169] and whale, as well as herons, cormorants, bitterns, cranes, and storks. Champier saw on the table of Francis I. “a pudding made of the blood, fat, and entrails of the sea-calf.” Frogs[170] fricasseed, snails boiled, and tortoises stewed in their shells were among the “dainty dishes” of this period. To wash such coarse viands down the people drank so much beer that the tax on it produced two-thirds more than the tax upon wine. The beer was sweet, for hops (if introduced) were scarce; and it was “doctored” by the addition of aromatics, spice, butter, honey, apples, bread-crumbs, etc. A taste for unsophisticated liquors is one of the results of advancing civilization. These were the times of sumptuary laws and other regulations to preserve the distinction of ranks, and fill the treasury at the expense of human vanity. Custom, quite as much as law, regulated the costumes of the different classes, from the silks and the scarlet robes of the nobles to the blue serge of the laborer. But on fête and gala days, which were more numerous than now, the variety of costumes was strikingly picturesque, especially where the inhabitants of different provinces met together. The tendency of modern civilization to bring every thing to one monotonous uniformity has robbed us of this variety. It still lingers here and there in France, where the women with honest pride cling to the costume peculiar to their calling, while the men have become lost in the common herd.[171] No bourgeois could build what sort of house he pleased; nor, when built, was he free to decorate it as he liked. Even the number of steps up to the door was regulated by law. The house might be painted with certain colors, but gilding was strictly prohibited.[172] In 1867 there is scarcely a mechanic so poor that his wife can not boast of a silk gown, but, three hundred years ago, no woman, below the rank of duchess, except “dames et demoiselles de maison” living “à la campagne et hors des villes,” could wear any silk except as trimming, and then only under certain restrictions, so that the “fashion” should not cost more than sixty sols for each dress.[173] Nay, worse than that, a fine of two hundred livres _parisis_ awaited any woman who should venture to wear a _vertugale_ or hooped petticoat more than an ell and a half round--a restriction which a modern house-maid would think very tyrannical. Although silk was not so scarce as these regulations would seem to imply, certain manufactures of it were so rare that historians record that Henry II. wore silk stockings at his coronation. Thirty years later such an article of dress was still regarded as an extravagant and wicked luxury.[174] The Ordonnance of Orleans (1560) forbade the use of perfumery among certain classes, who seem to have