The subject of diet—he prefers to call it diet—is apparently one of unlimited interest to the Englishman. Meet him where you will, he is ever ready to discuss, first, the weather, and then the things—that is to say, the kinds of food—that agree with him. Indeed, you could almost stake your life on extracting from any strange Englishman you happen to come across some such statement as, "I can\'t abide eggs," or, "Veal always makes me bilious," within ten minutes of opening up a conversation with him. The Englishman\'s house, we are told, is his castle; and the Englishman\'s hobby, surely, is his digestion. In point of fact, ninety-nine per cent. of adolescent and adult English people[Pg 154] suffer from chronic indigestion in a more or less severe form. Flatulence, heartburn, colic, and "liver" are the Englishman\'s mortal heritage. He is invariably troubled with some of them, and quite commonly with all. If you relieved him of them he would scarcely thank you, because he has nursed them from his youth up, and what he really wants is amelioration, and not cure. Probably this is the reason why in the midst of his wails and his unholy talk about diet he continues to feed in precisely the grossest, greasiest, and least rational manner that generations of bad feeders have been able to develop.

Of mornings, if you sojourn with an English family, you will be invited to breakfast at half-past eight. Promptly at that hour they serve a sort of sickly oatmeal soup, compounded apparently of milk and sugar, which they call porridge. Then follow thick and piping-hot coffee with \'am and eggs, fish, or a chop, and bread and butter and marmalade as a sort of wind-up. The man who tackles this menu goes to business belching like a[Pg 155] torn balloon. By eleven o\'clock, however, he is ready for a little snack—oysters and chablis, prawns on toast, a mouthful of bread and cheese and a bottle of Bass, or something of that kind. Then at half-past one there is lunch, practically a dinner of several courses, or a cut from the joint, accompanied by what the English euphoniously term "two veg." At tea-time your Englishman must needs lave himself in a dish of Orange-Pekoe or Bohea, to the accompaniment of lumps of cake. And at long and last comes dinner, the crowning guzzle of the Englishman\'s day, and a function usually spread over a couple of hours. It will be perceived that this gustatory programme or routine has been copied from the French. The French put away two good meals per diem, one at noon and the other in the evening, and there is no reason why the English should not do the same. When you come to think of it, dinner in the middle of the day is a low, under-bred, undistinguished arrangement; also not to dine at night is to run the risk of not losing one\'s[Pg 156] figure, and of having the neighbours say that one cannot afford it.

The French programme would be all very well if it were carried out on French lines all through. But it is not. When you say "soup" in a French restaurant, it means that you will be served with half a dozen table-spoonfuls of consommé, or petite marmite, or bisque, as the case may be. When the Englishman says "soup," he means enough thick stock to wash a bus down. What is more, he gets it and swallows it. And it is so all down the menu—too much of everything, and don\'t you think you can put me off with your blooming hom?opathic portions. A liberal table, no stint, good food, and plenty of it, is one of the bulwarks of English respectability. That bad digestion and talks about diet follow is nobody\'s fault.

This profusion—this overfood, as it were—has been brought to its noblest expression by the English aristocracy, whose tables literally groan with costly viands, whose spits are always turning, and whose scullions and[Pg 157] kitchen wenches are as an army. It is related that when a certain duke found it necessary to retrench, and was advised by his family solicitor to get rid of his fifth, sixth, and seventh cooks, his grace remarked, "But ——, So-and-so, a man must have a biscuit!" And the English middle class of course faithfully imitates to the best of its powers the English upper class, and so on through the grades. Among all classes there is a rooted prejudice against food that happens to be cheap. To this day people who eat escallops are rather looked down upon, for no other reason than that oysters run you into half a crown a dozen, while you can get excellent escallops at ninepence. So the herring, the ............