The same story is told with a little variation by Stobaeus, Serm. xxix., and Plutarch, Institut.  Lacon., 2.  The latter writer says, that the Syracusan, having tasted the Spartan broth, “spat it out in disgust,” [Greek:  dyscheranunta apoptusai].

It would not have been unlike the Lacedaemonians purposely to have established a disagreeable viand in their system of public feeding.  Men that used iron money to prevent the accumulation of wealth, and, as youths, had volunteered to be scourged, scratched, beat about, and kicked about, to inure them to pain, were just the persons to affect a nauseous food to discipline the appetite.

R.O.

Lacedaemonian Black Broth.—­I should be glad to know in what passages of ancient authors the Lacedaemonian black broth is mentioned, and whether it is alluded to in such terms as to indicate the nature of the food.  It has occurred to me that it is much more probable that it was the same black broth which is now cooked in Greece, where I have eaten of it and found it very good, although it looked as if a bottle of ink had been poured into the mess.

The dish is composed of small cuttle-fish (with their ink-bags) boiled with rice or other vegetables.  Edinburgh, Jan. 13. 1850.

W.C.  TREVELYAN.

ON A LADY WHO WAS PAINTED. (From the Latin.)

  It sounds like a paradox—­and yet ’tis true,
  You’re like your picture, though it’s not like you.

RUFUS.

Bigotry.—­The word Bigotry pervades almost all the languages of Europe, but its etymology has not been satisfactory to Noah Webster.  The application of it is generally intelligible enough; being directed against those who pertinaciously adhere to their own system of religious faith.  But as early as the tenth century it appears, that the use of the word Bigot originated in a circumstance, or incident, unconnected with religious views.  An old chronicle, published by Duchesne in the 3rd vol. of his Hist.  Francorum Scriptores, states that Rollo, on receiving Normandy from the King of France, or at least of that part of it, was called upon to kiss the foot of the king, a ceremony, it seems, in use not at the Vatican only; but he refused “unless the king would raise his foot to his mouth.”  When the counts in attendance admonished him to comply with this usual form of accepting so valuable a fief, he still declined, exclaiming in pure Anglo-Saxon, “Not He, By God,”—­Ne se bigoth; “quod interpetatur,” says the chronicler, “non [ille] per Deum.”  The king and his peers, deriding him, called him afterwards Bigoth, or Bigot, instead of Rollo.  “Unde Normanni,” adds the writer, who brings his history down to the year 1137, “adhuc Bigothi dicuntur.”  This will account for the prepositive article “Le” prefixed to the Norman Bigods, the descendants of those who followed William the Conqueror into England, such as Hugh Le Bigod, &c.  Among other innovations in France, the word Bigotisme has been introduced, of which Boiste gives an example as combined with Philosophisme:—­“Le Bigotisme n’est, comme le Philosophisme, qu’un Egoisme systematique.  Le Philosophisme et le Bigotisme se traitent comme les chiens et les loups; cependant leurs especes se rapprochent, et produisent des monstres.”