Note 945 — Chapter VIII · THE FESTIVALS.

See the authorities quoted in Favre, Mélanges d’Hist. Lit. i. 138; Corio, fol. 417 sqq. The menu fills almost two closely printed pages. ‘Among other dishes a mountain was brought in, out of which stepped a living man, with signs of astonishment to find himself amid this festive splendour; he repeated some verses and then disappeared’ (Gregorovius, vii. 241). Infessura, in Eccard, Scriptt. ii. col. 1896; Strozzii Poetae, fol. 193 sqq. A word or two may here be added on eating and drinking. Leon. Aretino (Epist. lib. iii. ep. 18) complains that he had to spend so much for his wedding feast, garments, and so forth, that on the same day he had concluded a ‘matrimonium’ and squandered a ‘patrimonium.’ Ermolao Barbaro describes, in a letter to Pietro Cara, the bill of fare at a wedding-feast at Trivulzio’s (Angeli Politiani Epist. lib. iii.). The list of meats and drinks in the Appendix to Landi’s Commentario (above) is of special interest. Landi speaks of the great trouble he had taken over it, collecting it from five hundred writers. The passage is too long to be quoted (we there read: ‘Li antropofagi furono i primi che mangiassero carne humana’). Poggio (Opera, 1513, fol. 14 sqq.) discusses the question’: ‘Uter alteri gratias debeat pro convivio impenso, isne qui vocatus est ad convivium an qui vocavit?’ Platina wrote a treatise ‘De Arte Coquinaria,’ said to have been printed several times, and quoted under various titles, but which, according to his own account (Dissert. Vossiane, i. 253 sqq.), contains more warnings against excess than instructions on the art in question.