ART OF DINING.

There is such a thing as nationality in dining, just as Mr. Browning has proved, in a brilliant poem, that there is nationality in drinks.  Surveying mankind with extensive view, the essayist recognizes that the science is not absolutely ignored in Turkey, where we cannot but think that an archaic school retains too much wool with the mutton, and that dining (like Egyptian Art) is rather a matter of sacred and immemorial rules than in any worthy sense of the word a science.  The Chinese and Japanese have long been famous for their birds’-nest soup, and for making the best, after his lamented decease, of the friend of man—­the dog.  About the Australians and New Zealanders, perhaps the less said the better.  Many students will feel that our own colonists have neglected to set a proper example to these poor heathen races, who, save kangaroos, have no larger game than rats.  The Englishman in Australia revels in boundless mutton, in damper, in tea, and in the vintages of his adopted soil, which he playfully, and patriotically, compares to those of the Rhine.  It is impossible, on the other hand, not to recognize the merits of the Russian cuisine, where the imported civilization of France has found various good traditional ideas still retained by the Sclavonic people; and where the caviare, “with that pale green hue which denotes the absence of salt,” is not to be overlooked.  In melancholy contrast to the native genius of the Sclavs is the absolute dearth of taste and sense in gastronomic Germany.  If a map of the world could be made—­and why not?—­in which lands of utter darkness in culinary matters should be coloured black (like heathen countries in the missionary atlas, and coalfields in the map of physical geography), the German Empire would be one vast blot on Central Europe.  Science might track Teutonic blood by the absence of respectable cookery; and in England too obvious tokens would be found of that incapacity of the art of dining which we brought from the marshes of Holstein.  In America, nature herself has put the colonists on many schemes for the improvement of dinner, and terrapin soup is gratefully associated with memoirs of Virginia—­in the minds of those who like terrapin soup.  The canvas-backed duck has been praised as highly as the “swopping, swopping mallard” of a comfortable college in Oxford.  As to the wild turkey, the poet has not yet risen in America who can do justice to the charms of that admirable bird.  Mr. Whitman, who has much to say about “bob-a-links” and “whip-poor-wills,” and some other fowl which sing “when lilacs bloom in the garden yard,” has neglected, we fear, the wild turkey, simply because the Muse has not given this bird melody, and made it, like the robin-redbreast, which goes so well with bread-crumbs, “an amiable songster.”  American genius neglects the turkey, and positively takes more interest in the migrations of the transatlantic