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upon the matter of cheese.
I have premised its antiquity, which is of two sorts, as is that of a
nobleman. First, the antiquity of its lineage; secondly, the antiquity of
its self. For we all know that when we meet a nobleman we revere his
nobility very much if he be himself old, and that this quality of age in
him seems to marry itself in some mysterious way with the antiquity of
his line.
The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record. What did the
faun in the beginning of time when a god surprised him or a mortal had
the misfortune to come across him in the woods? It is well known that
the faun offered either of them cheese. So he knew how to make it.

There are certain bestial men, hangers-on of the Germans, who would
contend that this would prove cheese to be acquired by the Aryan race
(or what not) from the Dolichocephalics (or what not), and there are
certain horrors who descend to imitate these barbarians--though
themselves born in these glorious islands, which are so steep upon their
western side. But I will not detain you upon these lest I should fall head
foremost into another digression and forget that my article, already in
its middle age, is now approaching grey hairs.
At any rate, cheese is very old. It is beyond written language. Whether
it is older than butter has been exhaustively discussed by several
learned men, to whom I do not send you because the road towards them
leads elsewhere. It is the universal opinion of all most accustomed to
weigh evidence (and in these I very properly include not only such
political hacks as are already upon the bench but sweepingly every
single lawyer in Parliament, since any one of them may tomorrow be a
judge) that milk is older than cheese, and that man had the use of milk
before he cunningly devised the trick of squeezing it in a press and by
sacrificing something of its sweetness endowed it with a sort of
immortality.
The story of all this has perished. Do not believe any man who
professes to give it you. If he tells you some legend of a god who
taught the Wheat-eating Race, the Ploughers, and the Lords to make
cheese, tell him such tales are true symbols, but symbols only. If he
tells you that cheese was an evolution and a development, oh!
then!--bring up your guns! Open on the fellow and sweep his
intolerable lack of intelligence from the earth. Ask him if he discovers
reality to be a function of time, and Being to hide in clockwork. Keep
him on the hop with ironical comments upon how it may be that
environment can act upon Will, while Will can do nothing with
environment--whose proper name is mud. Pester the provincial. Run
him off the field.
But about cheese. Its noble antiquity breeds in it a noble diffusion.
This happy Christendom of ours (which is just now suffering from an
indigestion and needs a doctor--but having also a complication of
insomnia cannot recollect his name) has been multifarious
incredibly--but in nothing more than in cheese!
One cheese differs from another, and the difference is in sweeps, and in

landscapes, and in provinces, and in countrysides, and in climates, and
in principalities, and in realms, and in the nature of things. Cheese does
most gloriously reflect the multitudinous effect of earthly things, which
could not be multitudinous did they not proceed from one mind.
Consider the cheese of Rocquefort: how hard it is in its little box.
Consider the cheese of Camembert, which is hard also, and also lives in
a little box, but must not be eaten until it is soft and yellow. Consider
the cheese of Stilton, which is not made there, and of Cheddar, which is.
Then there is your Parmesan, which idiots buy rancid in bottles, but
which the wise grate daily for their use: you think it is hard from its
birth? You are mistaken. It is the world that hardens the Parmesan. In
its youth the Parmesan is very soft and easy, and is voraciously
devoured.
Then there is your cheese of Wensleydale, which is made in
Wensleydale, and your little Swiss cheese, which is soft and creamy
and eaten with sugar, and there is your Cheshire cheese and your little
Cornish cheese, whose name escapes me, and your huge round cheese
out of the Midlands, as big as a fort whose name I never heard. There is
your toasted or Welsh cheese, and your cheese of Pont-l'evêque, and
your white cheese of Brie, which is a chalky sort of cheese. And there
is your cheese of Neufchatel, and there is your Gorgonzola cheese,
which is mottled all