TABLE MANNERS OF THE PAST.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3303, 23 August 1911, Page 8

TABLE MANNERS OF THE PAST.

We wonder what Julius Caesar thought of our rude forefathers as he watched them tearing with teeth and nails the evillooking lumps of meat as they sat round the low stool which constituted their dining-table Julius, whose own manners were so polite that when served with ointment instead of sauce at a dinner at which lie was a guest, could finish it' with a relish as heroic as it was affected. .. . . It is .not too much to say that the Roman legions, after seizing Britain, at the point of the sword, completed the conquest in the cooking-pot. - ' ' ; - But. according to a writer in the London. Magazine, table manners, liad not much improved in the passing off the centuries.

Some of the English table-manners described by Simon (in his English Journal of just 100 years ago) seem almost too coarse to be true, and many not be mentioned here—manners, as our French author says, scarcely consistent with the scrupulous delicacy on which the English, even in those days, piaued themselves. One, less indelicate than others, but still objectionable .enough, was as follows: “Towards the end of dinner, and before the ladies retire, bowls of colored glass full of water are placed before each person. All (women as well as men) stoop over it, sucking tip some of the water, and 1 returning it-, often more than once, and with a spitting and washing sort of noise—the ot eration frenuently assisted by a finger elegantly thrust into the mouth!”