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value of a succession of different kinds of bouquet. Our own views are that Chablis or a low growth of Sauterne may be permitted with oysters; a good quality of Lower Burgundy or a grand ordinaire' of Bordeaux to begin the repast; but the moment you get to a point in the feast where a higher quality of wine is permitted, you should, with any regard to the stomach or the palate, stick to the same class of wine.

Not the least important element in a well-ordered repast is the coffee, which should complete it. It is very easy but not altogether just to condemn the methods of making it practised in England, and impute to them the only cause for our finding it bad here. Opinions may differ as to whether we do or do not find the several varieties of the berry, Mocha, Bourbon, Martinique, &c., which are mixed together in a French household, or by the tradesmen who sell them. What we maintain to be necessary as a first step towards a perfect beverage is fresh roasting at home. We should then find a very indifferent coffee-berry produce a very refreshing cup. We should get the true aroma. It would appear that, in the early part of the last century, coffee was not only ground but roasted by the ladies, as we gather from the lines of Pope in the 'Rape of the Lock':'For lo! the board with cups and spoons is

crowned,

The berries crackle and the mill turns round.'

Upon which Mr. Elwin adds the following note:-"There was a side-board of coffee," says Pope, in his letter describing Swift's mode of life at Letcombe, in 1714, "which the Dean roasted with his own hands in an engine for that pur

pose.

Until lately we were not aware that a roasting-machine for household use was on sale in England, but on passing down Oxford Street and Holborn we met with two kinds, similar in principle to one which we had ourselves suggested to a Parisian ironmonger before the war-i.e. the use of clockwork to turn the barrel, so that a cook's time may be saved and

no berries burnt. Those we have seen do not appear quite suited for a kitchener, but a slight addition would easily adapt them to that kind of range.

Elwin's Pope,' vol. ii. p. 163.

One observation, not altogether known, may be added: coffee made with Schwalheim water is superior to that made with any other, due probably to the extracting power of the alkali held in solution therein, and it might be worth while testing Apollinaris or Taunus water in like manner. Also let us note that since the war, coffee, as served at the cafés in Paris, has much fallen off, in consequence, mainly, of the use of chicory. For our own part we never, during the Second Empire, considered it exceptionally fine and pure, save at the Café du Cardinal at the corner of the Rue Richelieu. It was only in private houses that one could be secure of the genuine flavor.

In the simplicity of tea-making it is only necessary to insist on water boiling at the moment it is poured on the tea: but we came upon some remarks in a modern cookery book against which we would beg to protest. The writer begins by saying that a silver or metal teapot draws out the strength and fragrance more readily than one of earthenware, a point on which we opine the Heathen Chinee would differ; nor, if we recollect right, would that interesting paper by Mr. Savile Lumley, when Secretary to the Legation at St. Petersburg, on the tea-houses frequented by the ishvoshniks or droshky-drivers, support such a view; and the said ishvoshniks are great connoisseurs in that beverage. The writer of the said cookery book goes on to say that you may half fill the pot with boiling water, and, if the tea be of very fine quality, you may let it stand ten minutes (!) before filling up. Now there was one Ellis, who had some reputation in the neighborhood of Richmond Hill in the matter of food and drink-to be plain, for the information of the youngest generation, he owned the Star and Garter there-and his view about tea was that you lost the aroma and gained less valuable properties for all the time beyond one minute that you let it stand. We can quote no higher authority for our own most persistent view on this question.

The hours at which repasts are taken are too much at the caprice of fashion in England to admit of any hope that reason will be heard on the subject. Some day fashion will permit us to have

our mid-day breakfast or luncheon, and fall to our dinner with no jaded appetite at 6 or 7 o'clock. On sanitary grounds nothing will ever surpass the Frenchman's regulation of his meals a light breakfast in his bedroom at 8 A.M., a serious breakfast from 11 to noon, and a dinner from 6 to 8, according to his occupations for the evening. To insist any more on this would be to attempt the codification of laws that will never be codified, or if codified never carried out, save subserviently to the reigning fashion.

We will close these remarks by referring once more to two of the works at the head of this article. Gouffé's is eminently practical, and adapted to the use of man or woman who likes to go sometimes into the kitchen and converse courteously with the artist. Dubois' 'Cosmopolitan Cookery' has some admirable recipes, e.g. salmon cutlets, sauce des gourmets,' page 83 of the English edition, and his list of menus are worth attention. Gouffé, by the way, expressly declines to give a list, for reasons stated (p. 336). Among Dubois' menus may be noted one (p. xvii) for ten guests, served at Nauheim (1867) by Cogery, who now keeps a restaurant at Nice; p. xxi, one for forty guests, served by the same artist at Helsingfors, where good judgment is united to simplicity; p. xxvi, one for fifty guests, served by Ripé (1867) to Prince (then Count) Bismarck, a menu where we observe the Bohemian pheasant, already referred to; and p. xxii, a very good menu for twelve persons, served by Blanchet at the Yorkshire Club, no date given. But, even after thus referring to them as deserving attention, we are bound to say that they are generally over-loaded, and we opine there are few diners-out who would not be thankful to see on their plate less elab

orate menus.

It proves the fallibility of cooks, even so great as one who has been chef' to the King of Prussia, when we find M. Urbain Dubois in his recipe for plumpudding omit the essential ingredient of bread-crumbs! Gouffé does not commit this grave error.

In the matter of English cookery-books adapted to private families, few surpass that excellent work by Mrs. Rundell, of which, with some little revision and the

addition of truly colored plates, Mr. Murray might surely give us another edition. Its excellence consists in that it is a manual for the household as well as a guide in the kitchen, but we are bound to say it is lamentably deficient where it attempts to instruct us in French cookery.

We ought not to conclude this review, devoted to simplicity in cooking, eating and drinking, without a reference to condiments under various names of this and that sauce, many of which are admirable when used in their right places. We take it that the 'dernier mot' as between French and English 'gourmets,' neither of them addicted to the dishes of a City, Alderman, would be, on the part of the second, Are not our manufactured sauces admirable?' On the part of the first 'Are they not too pungent, and do you not ask them to do the work of flavor which ought to be the business of the cook?'

The finest of them all is rather based on simple mushroom-ketchup than on Indian herbs, but it is scarcely the most popular, and those members of the medical profession who prescribe for dyspeptic individuals have as great an interest in columns of advertisements, for which in the end the purchaser pays, as even the adventurous manufacturers who fabricate sauces from the recipe of this or that nobleman. Still, let the best of them be accepted as adjuncts to a broiled bone at 2 A.M., without admitting the propriety of their position on the dinnertable.

Simple salt, and vegetable combinations that have been made with it, is worth some further comment. Salt is used at once too much and too little in English kitchens; too much, when by order of the landlord (like the bad brandy in the sauces at suburban hotels of reputation) it is to excite a desire for drink on the part of the guest; too little when in the case of a grilled beefsteak the cook forgets that salt combines during the process of cooking more effectively in its coarse kitchen form.*

The combination of salt with herbs has notably succeeded in two instances, and it is reserved for the future to bor

*Poulet au gros sel is too little known in England.

row from what is known, and combine more delicate, and yet more delicate, forms. We allude to known combinations in speaking of that composed of the Chili-bean rubbed up with salt, to which the maker has given the name of Oriental salt, a condiment that has the flavor without the extreme pungency of cayenne, and would be an admirable substitute for it in that much-ill-used incentive to drink called devilled whitebait. Another useful combination is that of celery seed and salt, sold by a well-known Italian warehouseman. On the table each must stand on its own merits in reference to the guest's taste; neither to be insisted on indiscriminately, but each in turn especially adapted to soup, fish, roast and relevé,' cheese or a salad.

This, to conclude, is the sum of gastronomical observation which appears to us as most worthy of reflection by those who would see the English 'cuisine' raised to a higher level, and who desire that the younger generation may at least have a palate.

1. Herbal flavor is to be desired in soups, and increased knowledge on the part of cooks of the various kinds and qualities of herbs and roots.

2. The batterie de cuisine' should be improved by an increased number of copper vessels, and by the use of the salamander and smaller implements for cutting, scooping and otherwise arranging vegetables. Moreover, the use of charcoal should be established.

3. The use of more butter and less lard should be encouraged.

4. The market-gardener should learn that he has duties to fulfil.

5. Red wines should be the rule and not the exception at dinner, and champagne, if served at all, should be served with the sweets and not with the mutton.

6. Coffee should be made from different varieties of the berry and, if possible, should be roasted at home, certainly always ground there.

7. Fashion should permit us to adopt more sensible hours for our meals.Quarterly Review.

MONTENEGRO.

BY ALFRED TENNYSON.

THEY rose to where their sovran eagle sails,

They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height, Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,

And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales. O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne

Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,

Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.

MONTENEGRO. A SKETCH.*

The Nineteenth Century.

BY THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE.

It is sometimes said, in relation to individuals, that the world does not know

1. Le Monténégro Contemporain. Par G. FRILLEY, Officier de la Légion d'Honneur, et JOVAN WLAHOVITI, Capitaine au Service de la Serbie. Paris: 1870.

its greatest men. It might at least as safely be averred, in speaking of large numbers, that Christendom does not know

2. Montenegro und die Montenegriner geschildert von SPIRIDION GOPTCHEVITCH. Leipzig: 1877.

its most extraordinary people. The name of Montenegro, until within the last two years, was perhaps less familiar to the European public than that of Monaco, and little more than that of San Marino. And yet it would, long ere this, have risen to world-wide and immortal fame, had there been a Scott to learn and tell the marvels of its history, or a Byron to spend and be spent on its behalf. For want of the vates sacer, it has remained in the mute inglorious condition of Agamemnon's predecessors. I hope that an interpreter between Montenegro and the world has at length been found in the person of my friend Mr. Tennyson, and I gladly accept the honor of having been invited to supply a commentary to his text. In attempting it I am sensible of this disadvantage-that it is impossible to set out the plain facts of the history of Montenegro (or Tsernagura in its own Slavonic tongue) without begetting in the mind of any reader strange, and nearly all are strange, to the subject, a resistless suspicion of exaggeration or of fable.

The vast cyclone of Ottoman conquest, the most formidable that the world has ever seen, having crossed the narrow sea from Asia in the fourteenth century, made rapid advances westward, and blasted, by its successive acquisitions, the fortunes of countries the chief part of which were then among the most civilised, Italy alone being excepted, of all Europe. I shall not here deal with the Hellenic lands. It is enough to say that Bulgaria, Serbia (as now known), Bosnia, Herzegovina, Albania, gradually gave way.

Before telling the strange tale of those who, like some strong oak that the lightning fails to rive, breasted all the wrath of the tempest, and never could be slaves, let me render a tribute to the fallen. For the most part, they did not succumb without gallant resistance. The Serbian sovereigns of the fifteenth century were great and brave men, ruling a stout and brave people. They reached their zenith when, in 1347, Stephen Dushan entitled himself Emperor of Serbs, Greeks, and Bulgarians. In an evil hour, and to its own ruin, the Greek Empire invoked against him the aid of the Ottoman Turks. In 1356, he closed a prosperous career by a sudden death. On the fatal field of Kossovo, in 1389,

treachery allied itself with Ottoman prowess to bring about the defeat of the Serbian army; and again it was by treacherous advances that a qualified subjection was converted into an absolute servitude. The West, with all its chivalry, can cite no grander examples of martial heroism than those of Marko Kraljevitch, so fondly cherished in the Serbian lands, and of George Castriotes or Scanderbeg, known far and wide, and still commemorated by the name of a vicolo of Rome.

The indifference, or even contempt, with which we are apt to regard this field of history, ought to be displaced by a more rational, as well as more honorable, sentiment of gratitude. It was these races, principally Slavonian, who had to encounter in its unbroken strength, and to reduce, the mighty wave, of which only the residue, passing the Danube and the Save, all but overwhelmed not Hungary alone, but Austria and Poland. It was with a Slavonian population that the Austrian Emperor fortified the north bank of the Save, in the formation of the famous military Frontier. It was Slav resistance, unaided by the West, which abated the impetus of the Ottoman attack just to such a point, that its reserve force became capable of being checked by European combinations.

Among the Serbian lands was the flourishing Principality of Zeta. It took its name from the stream, which flows southward from the mountain citadel towards the Lake of Scutari. It comprised the territory now known as Montenegro or Tsernagora, together with the seaward frontier, of which a niggardly and unworthy jealousy had not then deprived it, and with the rich and fair plains encircling the irregular outline of the inhospitable mountain. Land after land had given way; but Zeta ever stood firm under the Balchid family. At last in 1478 Scutari was taken on the south, and in 1483 the ancestors of the still brave population of Herzegovina on the north submitted to the Ottomans. Ivan Tchernoievitch, the Montenegrin hero of the day, hard pressed on all sides, applied to the Venetians for the aid he had often given, and was refused. Thereupon he, and his people with him, quitted, in 1484, the sunny tracts in which they had basked for some seven hundred

years, and sought, on the rocks and amidst the precipices, surety for the two gifts, by far the most precious to mankind, their faith and their freedom. To them, as to the Pomaks of Bulgaria, and the Bosnian Begs, it was open to purchase by conformity a debasing peace. Before them, as before others, lay the trinoda necessitas, the alternatives of death, slavery, or the Koran. They were not to die, for they had a work to do. To the Koran or to slavery they preferred a life of cold, want, hardship, and perpetual peril. Such is their Magna Charta; and, without reproach to others, it is, as far as I know, the noblest in the world.

To become a centre for his mountain home, Ivan had built a monastery at Cettinjé, and declared the place to be the metropolis of Zeta. What is most of all remarkable in the whole transaction is, that he carried with him into the hills a printing-press. This was in 1484, in a petty principality; they were men worsted in war, and flying for their lives. Again, it was only seven years after the earliest volume had been printed by Caxton in the rich and populous metropolis of England; and when there was no printing-press in Oxford, or in Cambridge, or in Edinburgh. It was only sixteen years after the first printing-press had been established (1468) in Rome, the capital of Christendom: only twentyeight years after the appearance (1456) of the earliest printed book, the firstborn of the great discovery.

Then and there,

They few, they happy few, they band of

brothers

voted unanimously their fundamental law, that, in time of war against the Turks, no son of Tsernagora could quit the field without the order of his chief; that a runaway should be for ever displaced, and banished from his people; that he should be dressed in woman's clothes, and presented with a distaff; and that the women, striking him with their distaffs, should hunt the coward away from the sanctuary of freedom.

And now, for four centuries wanting only seven years, they have maintained in full force the covenant of that awful day, through an unbroken series of trials, of dangers, and of exploits, to which it is

hard to find a parallel in the annals of Europe, perhaps even of mankind.

It was not to be expected that the whole mass of any race or people should have the almost preterhuman energy, which their lot required. All along, from time to time, the weaker brethren have fallen away; and there were those who said to Ivan, as the Israelites said to Moses, 'Wherefore have ye made us to come up out of Egypt, to bring us unto this evil place?' The great Ivan died in 1490, and was succeeded by his eldest son George, who in 1499 was persuaded by his Venetian wife to go back into the habitable world; not of Islam, however, but at Venice. Worse than this, his younger brother Stephen had gone with a band of companions to Constantinople and proposed to Bajazet the Second the betrayal of his country. He, and those whom he took with him, were required to turn Mahometans, and they did it. None could be so fit, as traitors, to be renegades. They then set out with an Ottoman force for the work of conquest. They were met by George, and utterly defeated. But these victors, the men of the printing-press as well as of the sword, were no savages by nature, only afterwards when the Turks in time made them so. They took back their renegade fellow-countrymen into Montenegro, and allowed them the free exercise of their religion.

On the retirement of George, which seems only to have become final in 1516, the departing prince made over the sovereign power to the Metropolitan. And now began, and lasted for 336 years, an ecclesiastical government in miniature over laymen, far more noble than that of the Popes in its origin and purer in its exercise, as well as in some respects not less remarkable.

The epithet I have last used may raise a smile. But the greatness of human action, and of human character, do not principally depend on the dimensions of the stage where they are exhibited. In the fifth century, and before the temporal power arose, there was a Leo as truly Great as any of the famous mediæval Pontiffs. The traveller may stand upon the rock of Corinth, and look, across and along the gulf, to the Acropolis of Athens; and may remember, with advantage no less than with wonder, that these little

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