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In a tract coeval with Coryat the Fork-bearer, Breton's "Court and Country," 1618, there is a passage very relevant to this part of the theme: "For us in the country," says he, "when we have washed our hands after no foul work, nor handling any unwholesome thing, we need no little forks to make hay with our mouths, to throw our meat into them."
Coryat found the use of the fork nowhere else in Christendom, and when he returned, and, oftentimes in England, imitated the Italian fashion, his exploit was regarded in a humorous light.
Fabling Paganism had probably raised into a deity the little man who first taught us, as Ben Jonson describes its excellence the laudable use of forks, To the sparing of napkins. This personage is well-known to have been that odd compound, Coryat the traveller, the perpetual butt of the wits. He positively claims this immortality.
Coryat next visited the fine quadrangle of the Louvre, whose outside was exquisitely wrought with festoons, and decked with many stately pillars and images.
Next day Coryat saw the one thing above all he desired to see, "that most rare ornament of learning Isaac Casaubon," who told him to observe "a certain profane, superstitious ceremony of the papists a bedde carried after a very ethnicall manner, or rather a canopy in the form of a bedde, under which the Bishop of the city, with certain priests, carry the Sacrament.
MacCarthy, indeed, I remember, used the words 'the life of the spirit. But I could not well understand what he meant, except that he hoped to attain it by violence; and in that way what I would seek and value cannot be furthered. Coryat, again, and Harington spoke of the good life. But Coryat seemed to think that any and all life is good.
Coryat found the use of the fork nowhere else in Christendom, and when he returned, and, oftentimes in England, imitated the Italian fashion, his exploit was regarded in a humorous light.
Vastly diverting as the eighteenth-century travel-books sometimes are, there is nothing in them that warms the heart like the travels of poor Tom Coryat, that infatuated tourist, chief of the tribe of Gad, whom nothing daunted in his determination to see the world.
The prejudice against the fork in England remained very steadfast actual centuries after its first introduction; forks are particularised among the treasures of kings, as if they had been crown jewels, in the same manner as the iron spits, pots, and frying-pans of his Majesty Edward III.; and even so late as the seventeeth century, Coryat, who employed one after his visit to Italy, was nicknamed "Furcifer."
And I felt some difficulty whom to choose of the few who had not yet spoken, so as to avoid, as far as possible, a tone that would jar upon our mood. Finally, I selected Coryat, the poet, knowing he was incapable of a false note, and hoping he might perhaps begin to pull us, as it were, up out of the pit into which we had slipped.
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