to do.  The only difference will be, that it will not then be an establishment—­that it will have no special favor or grant from the State—­that it will stand in relation to the State just as your Church does, and just as the churches of the majority of the people of Great Britain at this moment stand.  There will then be no Protestant bishops from Ireland to sit in the House of Lords; but he must be the most enthusiastic Protestant and Churchman who believes that there can be any advantage to his Church and to Protestantism generally in Ireland from such a phenomenon.

BRILLAT-SAVARIN

(1755-1826)

Brillat-Savarin was a French magistrate and legislator, whose reputation as man of letters rests mainly upon a single volume, his inimitable ‘Physiologie du Gout’.  Although writing in the present century, he was essentially a Frenchman of the old regime, having been born in 1755 at Belley, almost on the border-line of Savoy, where he afterwards gained distinction as an advocate.  In later life he regretted his native province chiefly for its figpeckers, superior in his opinion to ortolans or robins, and for the cuisine of the innkeeper Genin, where “the old-timers of Belley used to gather to eat chestnuts and drink the new white wine known as vin bourru”

[Illustration:  Brillat-Savarin]

After holding various minor offices in his department, Savarin became mayor of Belley in 1793; but the Reign of Terror soon forced him to flee to Switzerland and join the colony of French refugees at Lausanne.  Souvenirs of this period are frequent in his ‘Physiologie du Gout’, all eminently gastronomic, as befits his subject-matter, but full of interest, as showing his unfailing cheerfulness amidst the vicissitudes and privations of exile.  He fled first to Dole, to “obtain from the Representative Prot a safe-conduct, which was to save me from going to prison and thence probably to the scaffold,” and which he ultimately owed to Madame Prot, with whom he spent the evening playing duets, and who declared, “Citizen, any one who cultivates the fine arts as you do cannot betray his country!” It was not the safe-conduct, however, but an unexpected dinner which he enjoyed on his route, that made this a red-letter day to Savarin:—­“What a good dinner!—­I will not give the details, but an honorable mention is due to a fricassee of chicken, of the first order, such as cannot be found except in the provinces, and so richly dowered with truffles that there were enough to put new life into old Tithonus himself.”

The whole episode is told in Savarin’s happiest vein, and well-nigh justifies his somewhat complacent conclusion that “any one who, with a revolutionary committee at his heels, could so conduct himself, assuredly has the head and the heart of a Frenchman!”