 a mixture of pepper, lovage and
assa foetida, and the sauce consisting of wine and herring-pickle, which he had
used instead of the celebrated garum of the Romans; that famous pickle having
been prepared sometimes of the scombri, which were a sort of tunny fish, and
sometimes of the silurus, or shad-fish: nay, he observed that there was a third
kind, called garum hæmation, made of the guts, gills and blood of the thynnus.
    The physician, finding it would be impracticable to re-establish the order
of the banquet, by presenting again the dishes which had been discomposed,
ordered every thing to be removed, a clean cloth to be laid, and the desert to
be brought in.
    Mean while, he regretted his incapacity to give them a specimen of the
alieus, or fish meals of the ancients, such as the jus diabaton, the conger-eel,
which in Galen's opinion is hard of digestion, the cornuta, or gurnard,
described by Pliny in his Natural History, who says, the horns of many of them
were a foot and a half in length; the mullet and lamprey, that were in the
highest estimation of old, of which last Julius Cæsar borrowed six thousand for
one triumphal supper. He observed, that the manner of dressing them was
described by Horace, in the account he gives of the entertainment to which
Mæcenas was invited by the epicure Nasiedenus:
 
Affertur squillas inter Murena natantes, etc.
 
And told them, that they were commonly eaten with the rhus syriacum, a certain
anodyne and astringent seed, which qualified the purgative nature of the fish.
Finally, this learned physician gave them to understand, that though this was
reckoned a luxurious dish in the zenith of the Roman taste, it was by no means
comparable, in point of expence, to some preparations in vogue about the time of
that absurd voluptuary Heliogabalus, who ordered the brains of six hundred
ostriches to be compounded in one mess.
    By this time the desert appeared, and the company were not a little rejoiced
to see plain olives in salt and water: but what the master of the feast valued
himself upon, was a sort of jelly, which he affirmed to be preferable to the
hypotrimma of Hesychius, being a mixture of vinegar, pickle and honey, boiled to
a proper consistence, and candied assa foetida, which he asserted, in
contradiction to Humelbergius and Lister, was no other than the laser syriacum,
so precious, as to be sold among the ancients to the weight of a silver penny.
The gentlemen took his word for the
