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as a very able Italian critic, Latinus Latinius, passed a sinister and unfavourable sensure on certain seemingly strange medlies, disgusting and preposterous messes, which we mee with in Apicius; Dr. Lister very sensibly replies to his strictures on that head, "that these messes are not immediately to be rejected, because they may be displeasing to some. Plutarch testifies, that the ancients disliked pepper and the sour juice of lemons, insomuch that for a long time they only used these in their wardrobes for the sake of their agreeable scent, and yet they are the most wholesome of all fruits. The natives of the West Indies were no less averse to salt; and who would believe that hops should ever have a place in our common beverage,^[1] and that we should ever think of qualifying the sweetness of malt, through good housewifry, by mixing with it a substance so egregiously bitter? Most of the American fruits are exceedingly odoriferous, and therefore are very disgusting at first to us Europeans: on the contrary, our fruits appear insipid to them, for want of odour. There are a thousand instances of things, would we recollect them all, which though disagreeable to taste are commonly assumed into our viands; indeed, custom alone reconciles and adopts sauces which are even nauseous to the palate. Latinus Latinius there

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