“Si mon vaisseau long-temps égaré loin du bord, Ne se hâtait enfin de regagner le port, Peut-être je peindrais les Ciens chéris de Flore; Le Narcisse en mes vers s’empresserait d’éclore, Les roses m’ouvriraient leurs calices brillants, Le tortueux concombre arrondirait ses flancs; Du persil toujours vert, des pâles chicorées Ma muse abreuverait les tiges altérées, Je courberais le lierre et l’acanthe en berceau, Et du myrthe amoureux j’ombragerais les eaux.”[VII-12] One more fact will serve to show to what extent the Romans carried their enthusiastic affection for leguminous plants: we know that illustrious families did not disdain to borrow their names from them. The appellations, Fabius, Cicero, and Lentulus, thus enhanced the humble renown of beans (_faba_), peas (_cicer arietinum_), and lentils (_lenticula_).[VII-13] The eminent orator we have just named gave the preference one day to a dish of beet-root, instead of oysters and lampreys, of which he was passionately fond.[VII-14] It is true that, since the promulgation of the Licinian law,[VII-15] which allowed but little meat and plenty of vegetables, the voluptuaries of Rome invented most astonishing ragouts of mushrooms and pot-herbs. So true is it that the genius of man develops itself more particularly under difficult circumstances, and that the art of cookery owes, perhaps, the perfection and glory which it has attained to the impediments with which its formidable enemy, frugality, seems always ready to surround it. Apicius, that profound culinary chemist, who nobly expended immense treasures in inventing new dishes, and who killed himself[VII-16] because the remainder of his fortune was not sufficient for him (though to another it would have seemed magnificent)--Apicius shows us what he believed to be the most suitable manner of preserving vegetables. “Choose them,” he says, “before they are perfectly ripe, put them in a vessel coated with pitch, and cover it hermetically.”[VII-17] The reader will decide for himself between this process and those which science has since discovered. The capitulars (or statutes) of Charlemagne enter, on the subject of vegetables, into some instructive details. They inform us that lettuces, cresses, endive, parsley, chervil, carrots, leeks, turnips, onions, garlic, scallions, and eschalots, were nowhere to be found, except in the emperor’s kitchen-gardens. Charlemagne had all those vegetables sold, and derived from them a very considerable revenue.[VII-18] Anderson makes an observation (under the date 1548), which deserves to be noticed here, were it only on account of its singularity. “The English,” says he, “cultivated scarcely any vegetable before the last two centuries. At the commencement of the reign of Henry VIII., neither salad, nor carrots, nor cabbages, nor radishes, nor any other comestibles of a like nature, were grown in any part of the kingdom; they came from Holland and Flanders.”