These details will, we hope, give a sufficient idea of ancient pastry. We must remember that these recipes form, as it were, the starting point. The oil fritter of the Hebrews and the meringues of our period are wide apart: more than thirty-three centuries separate the two; two thousand years have elapsed since Cato wrote the recipe for his somewhat heavy tart. The author of the “Culinary Art,” Apicius himself, is very old. The private life of the ancient people appears to be worthy of serious study; but we too often only bestow on it our disdain. The author of this work has observed their customs in the kitchen and in the dining-room--the only places to which he had access--and he has taken the liberty of writing the result of his investigations. Sometimes he admires, but never does he despise, a civilisation different to our own, but which was not without its good side. He conjures the reader to believe him when he says, that whatever eccentricities the gastronomy of ancient nations may present to us, those people (he has, perhaps, acquired the right to venture such an assertion) doubtless eat in a very different manner from ourselves; but they certainly knew how to eat. The pastry just mentioned is certainly not altogether irreproachable--that is clear; but many kinds reveal that exquisite sentiment of the good which is nothing else than taste--whether it relate to art, literature or cooking--and the entire development of which seems to have been the appurtenance of a small number of privileged centuries. Great epochs--such as those of Pericles, Augustus, Leo XII., Louis XIV., and Queen Anne--have seen roses and myrtles flourish by the side of the laurels with which the muses are crowned. Charles XII. was fond of tartlets; Frederic II. gave himself fits of indigestion by eating Savoy cakes; and the Maréchal de Saxe rested from the fatigues of glory before a plate of macaroons. We have renounced the kind of pastry with which our ancestors used to regale themselves in the 14th century. Their stag pies[XXIV-31] are no longer in vogue; neither have we any taste for their great pies which contained a lamb or a stuffed kid, surrounded with goslings by dozens and scores.[XXIV-32] Their tarts have fallen into the same oblivion. Who thinks now of their Janus, or double-faced, tarts, herb tarts, rose-leaf tarts, oat tarts, or chesnut tarts?[XXIV-33]