Punch: Punch (39.1860)

142

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI

[October 13, 1860.

FRENCH COOKS AND ENGLISH EATERS.

LAMORICIERE’S VOW, OR HE
WOULD BE AN ALYA.

He would be au Alya, vowed and sware
The red-hot Lamoriciere ;

Through him, the papacy restored
Should be, with wasting fire and sword.

The towns which spurned the Pontiff’s sway
Should be his mercenaries’ prey;

He’d turn his ruffians loose, to kill,

Burn, spoil, and work their bestial will.

But ere he went on this crusade,

The Erenchman sought celestial aid;

Thus, kneeling at Loretto’s shrine,
Invoked the female form divine:

“ 0 spotless Queen! Celestial Rose !
Lend me thine aid to crush my foes ;
Remembering that those foes are mine.
Because they are the Pope’s and thine.

Adorable and most adored,

Behold this ornamental Sword;

Thine, if I conquer, it shall be :

Here will I hang it up to thee ! ”

Unheard was the Crusader’s prayer,
Wholly by winds dispersed in air;

Because, there’s too much ground to fear,
Though dolls have ears, they cannot hear.

Our Hero’s doom was dire defeat,

As expeditious as complete;

His army driven from the field,

And he himself obliged to yield

Eulfil, though thou hast lost the game,

Thy vow, Crusader, all the same ;

Thy deity of wax, stone, wood,

Thy prayer had granted, if it could.

The will is equal to the deed,

And merits no inferior meed;

So let thy sword, in spite of scorn,

The angel-shifted house adorn.

Eor, now that weapon’s work is o’er,

Thou should’st resign it evermore :

Drawn against Freedom—drawn in vain—
Oh 1 never wear that Sword again.

THE POPE AS A LOGICIAN.

The Pope seems in a muddle in his mind
as well as his material affairs. Here, for
instance, is a proof of his confusedness of
intellect, in an address he issued lately to a
regiment of French soldiers sent for his
protection :—

“ Mark well, my dear sons, that the Church stands
in need of no man’s help in support of her spiritual
sovereignty; for being therein directly protected and
enlightened by God, far from requiring the aid of the
powers of earth, it is she who upholds nations and
empires. But since it has pleased God, in the pre-
sent dispensation of his Providence, that for the free
exercise of her spiritual sovereignty she should also
possess temporal power, it is this latter power, my
very dear sons, that you are called to defend in its
integrity. Great and glorious mission ! ”

To our thinking this is rather out-at-elbow
sort of reasoning, and is congruous in that
respect to what may be the temporal position
of the Pope. Indeed, it shows the Holy
Father is quite clearly on his last legs in the
point at least of intellect, however he may be
in more material possessions. If the Church,
as he affirms, be m her spiritual sovereignty,
“directly protected” by the Divine power,
this protection surely must extend as well to
her temporal possessions, which. His Holiness
alleges, it has pleased Heaven to bestow on
her to secure her the free exercise of her
spiritual sway. Clearly, then, the Church is
independent of man’s help, not less in her
material than in her spiritual sovereignty;
and if Elis Silliness the Pope be true to his
own logic, he will at once ask the French
army to withdraw, and beg of Irish friends
to make no more subscriptions for the secular
support of the pillars of their Church.

N Michaelmas Goose-day, dear Punch, happen-
ing to be in town (London, when quite ‘ empty,’
contains, lam informed, above two million people),
I dined with a City Company—I will not make
the others envious by specifying which. Being
of a reflective and a contemplative mind, I own
I found the dinner a most gratifying repast. I
shall not soon forget the gurgle of enjoyment
with which old Guttleton sucked down his
second plate of turtle; having, to secure the
possession of that luxury, it seemed to me made
somewhat of a gallop with the first. A younger
man, I own, I wished I had a similar digestive
apparatus, and no more apprehension of the
evils of good things. Judging from the way in
whicli old Guttleton gulped down as much of
them as he could get, he clearly did not need to
be flogged with laurestina leaves, which G. H. M.
assures us is provocative of appetite. Nor could
he have apprehended any bodily embarrassment
from the culinary richesses which he made away
with. Whatever robur et ces triplex were the
lining of his stomach, I feel convinced he stuffed
and swilled without the slightest fear of suffering
the next morning. Nobody I think could gor-
mandise with such a gusto, and suck his lips with
such a smack of satisfaction, if he knew that all
the agonies of biliousness awaited him. What
Damocles could feast with such a smile upon
his lips, when he felt assured he had a headache
hanging over him ; aud knew too by experience,
how it would come down on him, and pierce his
brain with pangs as sharp as any sword could
do?

“ But I did not take my pen up to talk to
ypu of Guttleton. It was the dinner, not the
diners, that I wished to say a word about. Of
course I need not tell you that although the day
was Gooseday, we ate something besides geese.
There was turtle I have said, and there were
turbot, eels, and cod, there were soles and there
were whitings, and though somewhat out of
season, there was not at all bad salmon. From
this account of the first course you may fancy
those which followed ; although perhaps you
won’t conceive that—albeit the day was the last
Saturday in September — we had Pheasants,
actual Pheasants, Sir, served up in the third
course: and what is more, they were not in the
slightest smuggled in, but, Sir, their name was
boldly printed in the carte, and not even the
chaste synonym of ‘Owlets’ was resorted to.
As a sportsman, I, of course refrained from eat-
ing of this dish; and I could not help reflecting
had a foreigner been present he might have
fairly gone away with the ridiculous conviction
that the Aldermen and other lords who form a
City Company are superior to the vulgar ope-
ration of the Game Laws; a supposition which
might justify his fancying that the Sovereign of
the City is superior to the Queen.

“ But, _ Sir, what I most had to complain of
in this civic bill of fare was its foreign phrase-
ology and polyglot profundities. These disturbed
me even more than its plain outspoken English
—though I still think that the ‘ pheasants ’
might have left a flavour less unpleasant on th&
palate, if the cook had veiled their name in the
more decent obscurity of some,dead or unknown
language. Unaccustomed, as I own I am, to
public dining, I am not acquainted with the
slang of the cuisine, and when I see such appel-
lations as ‘ Gratin de Coq de Bruyere ’ or
‘ Quenelles de Volatile aux Truffes,’ I have not
the least conception what dishes—no, I should
say, plats—they represent. The faint remem-
brance I possess of the language of our neigh-
bours (I was at a Public School, Sir, and of
course did not learn much of it) I find avails
me little in clearing up the puzzlement in which
at every line I’m plunged. Supposing I remem-
ber that ‘ crevette ' is a shrimp, and ‘ buisson ’ a
bush, that ' timbale ’ is a kettle-drum, and