tells of an epicure who knew by the taste the
birthplace of every oyster set before him, whether
it came from the Circean promontory, from the
Lucrine rocks, or from the Rutupinian deeps in
Britain. It was the small Lucrine that the poet
Martial delighted in, and Seneca, Cicero, Horace,
Lucilius, Ausonius, every Roman of note almost,
has a good word to say for his favourite oyster.
The imperial Dando, Vitellius, seems, like his
English prototype, never to have known when to
leave off when once he sat down to a good
"tuck-in" of oysters: it is on record that he went in
for them four times a day (by what process I
leave unmentioned), and at each meal swallowed
no fewer than a hundred dozen! The Emperor
Trajan, too, indulged largely in oysters, and
Apicius CÅ“lius is said to have supplied him with
fresh ones all the year round, without caring
for the month indicated by the canine letter,
which was a restriction as much in force with
the Romans as amongst ourselves and our epicurean
friends across the water. We have, however,
on the south-east coast of England, what
are called " summer-oysters," which are reckoned
a great delicacy.

But it is not only amongst the highly civilised
that we find a passion for oysters. The old
exploring voyagers of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries met with oyster-eaters everywhere.
Alvaro Nuñez, who was a prisoner to the
Florida Indians, shortly after the discovery of
that part of the American continent, speaks of
certain flat shores where oysters abounded, " and
for three moneths in the yeare, they eat no
other thing, and drink very bad water. Their
houses are made of mats spread upon the shells
of oysters, and over them they sleepe upon the
hides of beasts." Master Richard Jobson, in
Voyage for the Discoverie of Gamboa, on the
coast of Afrika (A.D. 1620), says, that in the
river of Sofala " there is good fishing for oysters,
which grow on the branches of the trees that
hange downe into the water;" and in the
Observations of William Finch, touching Sierra
Leone(in 1607), I find that the people there "feed
upon Cockles and Oysters, whereof they have
good store growing on the rocks and trees by the
sea-side." This adherence of oysters to the
drooping branches of the mangrove, whose
habitat is the sea-shore, is more fully described
a little further on: " There growe likewise
within the Bayes, great store of Oysters on Trees,
resembling Willowes in forme, but the leafe
broad and of thicknesse like leather, bearing
small knops like those of the Cypresse. From
this tree hange downe many branches (eache
about the bignesse of a good walking sticke),
into the water, smooth, lithe, pithy within,
over-flowne with the tyde, and hanging as thicke of
oysters as they can sticke together, being the
only fruit the tree beareth, begotten thereof, as
it seemeth, of the sea-water." A later traveller,
Captain Light, bears further testimony to the
fondness of the Africans for oysters: " At Galabshee,"
he says, in his Travels in Egypt and
Nubia, "the Nile divided itself among several
rocks and uninhabited islands, and here we had
occasion to remark shells of the oyster kind
attached to the granite masses of these cataracts,
similar to those often found in petrifactions,
whose presence we attributed to some communication
of former times between the Nile and the
ocean." Communication, no doubt! That of
oyster-caravans, companies of merchants, such
as Joseph's brethren met in the Desert. The
people of Galabshee were, in all probability, a
community of sable Dandos!

What, however, concerns us most, is not the
oyster-eating of the Greeks, the Romans, the
Africans, and the inhabitants of the remotest
Ind, but the art as practised in our own island
and on its adjacent shores. That which the
Romans discovered, the inhabitants of the
British Isles did not neglect, and our earliest records
make mention of Oysters as amongst the chief
delicacies of the table, when swans and peacocks
added grace and splendour to royal feasts. The
oyster-trade of England has been of considerable
importance for centuries, and "Oyster Day"
was then, as now, one of the great domestic
events of the year. " On Saint James's Day"
(July 25, old style), says Brande in his Antiquities,"
oysters come into London, and there
is a popular superstition still in force, like
that relating to Goose on Michaelmas Day, that
whoever eats oysters then will never want money
for the rest of the year." It is on this principle,
I suppose, that the juvenile grotto-builders
always so clamorously desire to be
"remembered." That celebration, by the way, in
honour of Saint James, the pilgrim-saint par
excellence, has reference to the scallop-shell
which the Palmer wore in his broad-leafed hat,
"when bound for Palestine," but whether St.
James himself (he of Compostella is the saint
in question) were an oyster-eater or not is more
than I can determine.

The most famous localities for Oysters in
England, are in the estuaries of the rivers on the
shores of Essex, Kent, and Sussex. The best
kind of oysters in this country is the small
variety called Natives; they are found near the
mouths of the rivers Colne, Blackwater, and
Crouch, in Essex; the Swale and the Medway,
in Kent; the Ouse, in Sussex; in Southampton
Water; and at other places in all the three
kingdoms. So far as regards the London
supply, the oysters are brought principally
from the Essex coast and rivers; but the
Milton, Faversham, and Burnham oysters are
most highly esteemed. Some are sent from the
north of England; but broods are sent thence
to be fattened in the artificial beds. The sale
at Billingsgate is enormous.

But England does not monopolise the oyster
celebrity of the United Kingdom: Scotland
sends from Edinburgh the " Pandores" in which
Christopher North and The Shepherd so greatly
delighted; and from Ireland come the superb
black-bearded " Carlingfords " and the
"Powldoodies of Burran," famous in song. France,
too, is a dangerous rival, deriving her most
celebrated oysters from Marennes, in the B
Biscay, from Cancale, in the Bay of Mont St.