HAD Izaak Walton been a Parisian he might have written “The Physiology of Taste” as well as it was actually done by Brillat-Savarin, but it is not imaginable that it could have been done at all by any one else. The extreme seriousness of the humor with which Brillat-Savarin makes everything else in the range of human experience depend on gastronomy has never been equaled elsewhere, though Charles Lamb approaches it in his suggestion that pineapple is a flavor “almost too transcendent,—a delight, if not sinful, yet so like sinning that a tender-conscienced person would do well to pause.” In much the same spirit the author of “The Physiology of Taste” gave Paris a new emotion by inquiring into the true relations of gastronomy to the other sciences,—even endeavoring to reconcile mankind to death itself, as the climax and consummation of good living. In this he is truly Horatian, and when he dismisses us at last, it is as sated guests from whom he expects to hear without regret his “Lusisti satis, edisti satis atque bibisti,”—

  Born at Belley, France, April 1st, 1755, Brillat-Savarin had the philosophical quiet necessary for the best possible digestion rudely interrupted by the French Revolution. He emigrated to America in 1793, but returned to France in 1796, and spent the rest of his life in fitting himself for his great work which appeared in 1825 as “La Physiologie du Goût,” and at once demonstrated by its world-wide success its right to immortality. Its author died in 1826 without writing anything else comparable to it,—leaving it thus forever incomparable, not only among kitchen classics, but in literature at large.