I have entered into this discourse upon the occasion of an Italian I lately received into my service, and who was clerk of the kitchen to the late Cardinal Caraffa till his death.  I put this fellow upon an account of his office:  when he fell to discourse of this palate-science, with such a settled countenance and magisterial gravity, as if he had been handling some profound point of divinity.  He made a learned distinction of the several sorts of appetites; of that a man has before he begins to eat, and of those after the second and third service; the means simply to satisfy the first, and then to raise and actuate the other two; the ordering of the sauces, first in general, and then proceeded to the qualities of the ingredients and their effects; the differences of salads according to their seasons, those which ought to be served up hot, and which cold; the manner of their garnishment and decoration to render them acceptable to the eye.  After which he entered upon the order of the whole service, full of weighty and important considerations: 

               “Nec minimo sane discrimine refert,
               Quo gestu lepores, et quo gallina secetur;”

["Nor with less discrimination observes how we should carve a hare, and how a hen.” or, ("Nor with the least discrimination relates how we should carve hares, and how cut up a hen.)” —­Juvenal, Sat., v. 123.]

and all this set out with lofty and magnificent words, the very same we make use of when we discourse of the government of an empire.  Which learned lecture of my man brought this of Terence into my memory: 

         “Hoc salsum est, hoc adustum est, hoc lautum est, parum: 
          Illud recte:  iterum sic memento:  sedulo
          Moneo, qux possum, pro mea sapientia. 
          Postremo, tanquam in speculum, in patinas,
          Demea, Inspicere jubeo, et moneo, quid facto usus sit.”

["This is too salt, that’s burnt, that’s not washed enough; that’s well; remember to do so another time.  Thus do I ever advise them to have things done properly, according to my capacity; and lastly, Demea, I command my cooks to look into every dish as if it were a mirror, and tell them what they should do.”  —­Terence, Adelph., iii. 3, 71.]

And yet even the Greeks themselves very much admired and highly applauded the order and disposition that Paulus AEmilius observed in the feast he gave them at his return from Macedon.  But I do not here speak of effects, I speak of words only.

I do not know whether it may have the same operation upon other men that it has upon me, but when I hear our architects thunder out their bombast words of pilasters, architraves, and cornices, of the Corinthian and Doric orders, and suchlike jargon, my imagination is presently possessed with the palace of Apollidon; when, after all, I find them but the paltry pieces of my own kitchen door.