Immodest youth and irreverent age; woman savage, man cowardly; the swarthy Ethiopian beslabbered with stinking oil; the stolid Briton begrimed with dirt--these, and a hundred other varying combinations, to be imagined rather than expressed, met the attention in every direction.

To describe the odours exhaled by the heat from this seething mixture of many pollutions, would be to force the reader to close the book; we prefer to return to the distribution which was the cause of this degrading tumult, and which consisted of small baskets of roasted meat packed with common fruits and vegetables, and handed, or rather flung down, to the mob by the servants of the nobleman who gave the feast.

The people revelled in the abundance thus presented to them.

They threw themselves upon it like wild beasts; they devoured it like hogs, or bore it off like plunderers; while, secure in the eminence on which they were placed, the purveyors of this public banquet expressed their contempt for its noisy recipients, by holding their noses, stopping their ears, turning their backs, and other pantomimic demonstrations of lofty and excessive disgust.

These actions did not escape the attention of those members of the assembly who, having eaten their fill, were at leisure to make use of their tongues, and who showered an incessant storm of abuse on the heads of their benefactor's retainers.
'See those fellows!' cried one; 'they are the waiters at our feast, and they mock us to our faces! Down with the filthy kitchen thieves!' 'Excellently well said, Davus!--but who is to approach them?
They stink at this distance!' 'The rotten-bodied knaves have the noses of dogs and the carcases of goats.' Then came a chorus of voices--'Down with them! Down with them!' In the midst of which an indignant freedman advanced to rebuke the mob, receiving, as the reward of his temerity, a shower of missiles and a volley of curses; after which he was thus addressed by a huge, greasy butcher, hoisted on his companions' shoulders:-- 'By the soul of the emperor, could I get near you, you rogue, I would quarter you with my fingers alone!--A grinning scoundrel that jeers at others! A filthy flatterer that dirts the very ground he walks on! By the blood of the martyrs, should I fling the sweepings of the slaughter-house at him, he knows not where to get himself dried!' 'Thou rag of a man,' roared a neighbour of the indignant butcher's, 'dost thou frown upon the guests of thy master, the very scrapings of whose skin are worth more than thy whole carcase! It is easier to make a drinking-vessel of the skull of a flea than to make an honest man of such a villainous night-walker as thou art!' 'Health and prosperity to our noble entertainer!' shouted one section of the grateful crowd as the last speaker paused for breath.
'Death to all knaves of parasites!' chimed in another.
'Honour to the citizens of Rome!' roared a third party with modest enthusiasm.
'Give that freedman our bones to pick!' screamed an urchin from the outskirts of the crowd.
This ingenious piece of advice was immediately followed; and the populace gave vent to a shout of triumph as the unfortunate freedman, scared by a new volley of missiles, retreated with ignominious expedition to the shelter of his patron's halls.
In the slight and purified specimen of the 'table talk' of a Roman mob which we have here ventured to exhibit, the reader will perceive that extraordinary mixture of servility and insolence which characterised not only the conversation but the actions of the lower orders of society at the period of which we write.