--W.
[7] Here follows a disquisition upon the table practices of
the ancients.--W.
With us the nobility, gentry, and students do ordinarily go to dinner
at eleven before noon, and to supper at five, or between five and six
at afternoon. The merchants dine and sup seldom before twelve at noon,
and six at night, especially in London. The husbandmen dine also at
high noon as they call it, and sup at seven or eight; but out of the
term in our universities the scholars dine at ten. As for the poorest
sort they generally dine and sup when they may, so that to talk of
their order of repast it were but a needless matter. I might here take
occasion also to set down the variety used by antiquity in their
beginnings of their diets, wherein almost every nation had a several
fashion, some beginning of custom (as we do in summer time) with
salads at supper, and some ending with lettuce, some making their
entry with eggs, and shutting up their tables with mulberries, as we
do with fruit and conceits of all sorts. Divers (as the old Romans)
began with a few crops of rue, as the Venetians did with the fish
called gobius; the Belgres with butter, or (as we do yet also) with
butter and eggs upon fish days.
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