Now this is manly, and so is the diet it advises; I recommend both to my readers. Let each determine to make one convert, himself that one. On Christmas day, let each dine off, or at least have on his table, the good old English fare, roast beef and plum-pudding! and does such beef as our island produces need recommendation? What more nutritive and delicious? and, for a genuine healthy Englishman, what more proper than this good old national English dish? Let him whose stomach will not bear it, look about and insure his life--I would not give much for it. It ought, above all other places, to be duly honoured in our officers' mess-rooms. As Prior says,
"If I take Dan Congreve right, Pudding and beef make Britons fight."
So, then, if beef be indeed so excellent, we shall not much wonder that Shakspeare should say,
--"A pound of man's flesh Is not so estimable or profitable. As flesh of mutton, beeves, or goats!"
The French have christened us (and I think it no disreputable _sobriquet_) Jack Roastbeef, from a notion we cannot live without roast-beef, any more than without plum-pudding, porter, and punch; however, the notion is palpably erroneous. We are proving more and more every day--to our shame be it spoken!--that we can live without it. At least do not let it be said we can pass a Christmas without it, merely to make way for turkeys, fricassees, and ragouts! "Oh, reform it altogether!"