Table traits, with something on them

by Dr. Doran

TABLE TRAITS OF THE LAST CENTURY.

When Mr. Chute intimated to Horace Walpole that his “temperance diet and milk” had rendered him stupid, Walpole protested pleasantly against such an idea. “I have such lamentable proofs,” he says, “every day, of the stupifying qualities of beef, ale, and wine, that I have contracted a most religious veneration for your spiritual nouriture. Only imagine that I here, (Houghton,) every day, see men who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant rock at Pratolino! I shudder when I see them brandish their knives, in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour one another. I should not stare at all more than I do, if yonder Alderman, at the end of the table, was to stick his fork into his jolly neighbour’s cheek, and cut a brave slice of brown and fat. Why, I’ll swear I see no difference between a country gentleman and a sirloin: whenever the first laughs, or the latter is cut, there run out just the same streams of gravy! Indeed, the sirloin does not ask quite so many questions. I have an aunt here, a family piece of goods, an old remnant of inquisitive hospitality and economy, who, to all intents and purposes, is as beefy as her neighbours.”

Certainly, I think it may be considered that, in diet and in principles, we have improved upon the fashion of one hundred and ten years ago;—and, perhaps, the improvement in principles is a consequence of that in diet. There was a profound meaning in the point of faith of some old religionists, that the stomach was the seat of the soul. However this may be, the “beefy” men of Walpole’s time had, occasionally, strange ideas touching honour. Old Nourse, for instance, challenged Lord Windsor, who refused to fight him, either with sword or pistols, on the plea that Nourse was too aged a man. Thereupon Nourse, in a fit of vexation and indigestion, went home from the coffee-house and cut his throat! “It was strange, yet very English,” says Walpole. Old Nourse must have had Japanese blood in him. At Jeddo, when a nobleman feels himself slighted, he walks home, takes the sharpest knife he can find, and rips himself open, from the umbilicus to the trachea!

Quite as certainly, strong diet and weak principles prevailed among our great-grandsires and their dames. Lady Townshend fell in love with the rebel Lord Kilmarnock, from merely seeing him at his trial. She forthwith cast off her old lover, Sir Harry Nisbett, and became “as yellow as a jonquil” for the new object of her versatile affection. She even took a French master, in order that she might forget the language of “the bloody English!” She was not so afflicted, but that she could bear the company of gay George Selwyn to dine with her; and he, believing that her passion was feigned, joked with her, on what was always a favourite topic with himself,—the approaching execution. Lady Townshend forthwith rushed from the table in rage and tears, and Mr. Selwyn finished the bottle with “Mrs. Dorcas, her woman,” who begged of him to help her to a sight of the execution! Mrs. Dorcas had a friend who had promised to protect her, and, added she, “I can lie in the Tower the night before!” This is a pretty dining-room interior of the last century. As for George Selwyn, that most celebrated of the diners-out of a hundred years ago, he said the pleasantest thing possible at dessert, after the execution of Lord Lovat. Some ladies asked him how he could be such a barbarian as to see the head cut off. “Nay,” said he, “if that was such a crime, I am sure I have made amends; for I went to see it sewed on again!” “George,” says Walpole, “never thinks but à la tête tranchée; he came to town t’other day to have a tooth drawn, and told the man that he would drop his handkerchief for the signal.”

Selwyn kept his powers bright by keeping good company; while Gray the poet was but indifferent society, from living reclusely, added to a natural turn for melancholy, and “a little too much dignity.” Young, a greater poet than Gray, was as brilliant in conversation as Selwyn himself, as long as, like Selwyn, he polished his wit by contact with the world. When he dined with Garrick, Quin, and George Anne Bellamy, he was the sprightliest of the four; but when he took to realizing the solitude he had epically praised, Young, too, became a proser. Quin loved good living as much as he did sparkling conversation; and Garrick, the other guest noticed above, has perfectly delineated Quin the epicure in the following epigram, as he subsequently did Quin, the man and brother of men, in his epitaph in Bath Abbey:—

“A plague on Egypt’s art! I say;

Embalm the dead, on senseless clay

Rich wines and spices waste!

Like sturgeon, or like brawn, shall I,

Bound in a precious pickle, lie,

Which I shall never taste?

“Let me embalm this flesh of mine

With turtle fat and Bordeaux wine,

And spoil th’ Egyptian trade.

Than Humphrey’s Duke more happy I;

Embalm’d alive, old Quin shall die,

A mummy, ready-made.”

A good many female mummies were prepared during the last century after a similar receipt. Witness Walpole’s neighbour at Strawberry Hill, “an attorney’s wife, and much given to the bottle. By the time she has finished that and daylight, she grows afraid of thieves, and makes her servants fire minute-guns out of the garret windows. The divine Asheton,” he proceeds, “will give you an account of the astonishment we were in last night at hearing guns. I began to think that the Duke (of Cumberland) had brought some of his defeats from Flanders.”

Young denounces, in his “Satires,” both tea and wine, as abused by the fair sex of the last century. In Memmia he paints Lady Betty Germain, in the lines I have quoted under the head of “Tea;” and then, hurling his shafts of satire at that which another poet has described as “cups which cheer, but not inebriate,” he adds,—

“Tea! how I tremble at thy fatal stream!

As Lethe, dreadful to the love of fame.

What devastations on thy banks are seen!

What shades of mighty names which once have been!

A hecatomb of characters supplies

Thy painted altar’s daily sacrifice.

Hervey, Pearce, Blount, aspersed by thee, decay,

As grains of finest sugars melt away,

And recommend thee more to mortal taste:

Scandal’s the sweetener of a female feast.”

And then, adverting to the ladies who, like Walpole’s “attorney’s wife,” were much given to the bottle, the poet exclaims,—

“But this inhuman triumph shall decline,

And thy revolting Naiads call for wine;

Spirits no longer shall serve under thee,

But reign in thy own cup, exploded Tea!

Citronia’s nose declares thy ruin nigh;

And who dares give Citronia’s nose the lie?

The ladies long at men of drink exclaim’d,

And what impair’d both health and virtue blamed.

At length, to rescue man, the generous lass

Stole from her consort the pernicious glass.

As glorious as the British Queen renown’d,

Who suck’d the poison from her husband’s wound.”

Manners and morals generally go hand in hand; but those of the ladies satirized by Young were not so bad as those of the French Princesses of a few years before, when they and Duchesses were so addicted to drinking, that no one thought it a vice, since royalty and aristocracy practised it. The Dauphine of Burgundy is indeed praised by her biographers as not drinking to any great excess during the three last years of her life. But this was exceptional. The Duchess of Bourbon and her daughters drank like dragoons; but the latter were unruly in their cups, whereas the old lady carried her liquor discreetly. Henrietta, Madame de Montespan, and the Princess di Monaco, were all addicted, more or less, to tippling. The Duchess de Bourbon and Her Grace of Chartres added smoking to their other boon qualities; and the Dauphin once surprised them with pipes which had been cullotés for them by common soldiers of the Swiss Guard! In France, devotion even was made a means towards drunkenness. Bungener tells us, in his “Trois Sermons sous Louis XV.,” that Monsieur Basquiat de la House owned a small estate in Gascony, which produced a wine which no one would buy. Being at Rome, as Secretary of an Embassy, he procured a body from the catacombs, which he christened by the name of a saint venerated in his part of the country. The people received it with great pomp. A fête was appointed by the Pope, a fair by the Government, and the wine was sold by hogsheads! It was a wine as thin as the beverage which Mr. Chute lived on when he had the gout, at which time, says Walpole, “he keeps himself very low, and lives upon very thin ink.”

There was a good deal of latitude of observation and conversation at the dinner-tables of the last century; and the letter-writer I have just cited affords us ample evidence of the fact. John Stanhope, of the Admiralty, he informs us, “was sitting by an old Mr. Curzon, a nasty wretch, and very covetous; his nose wanted blowing, and continued to want it; at last Mr. Stanhope, with the greatest good breeding, said, ‘Indeed, Sir, if you don’t wipe your nose, you will lose that drop.’”

A hundred years ago, Walpole remarked that Methodism, drinking, and gambling were all on the increase. Of the first he sneeringly says, “It increases as fast as any religious nonsense did.” Of the second he remarks, “Drinking is at the highest wine-mark;” and he speaks of the third as being so violent, that “at the last Newmarket meeting, in the rapidity of both gaming and drinking, a bank bill was thrown down, and, nobody immediately claiming it, they agreed to give it to a man who was standing by!”

There was a love of good eating, as well as of deep drinking, even among the upper classes of the last century. What a picture of a Duchess is that of her Grace of Queensberry, posting down to Parson’s Green, to tell Lady Sophia Thomas “something of importance;” namely, “Take a couple of beefsteaks, clap them together as if they were for a dumpling, and eat them with pepper and salt: it is the best thing you ever tasted! I could not help coming to tell you this;”—and then she drove back to town. And what a picture of a Magistrate is that of Fielding, seated at supper with a blind man, a Drury-Lane Chloris, and three Irishmen, all eating cold mutton and ham from one dish, on a very dirty cloth, and “his worship” refusing to rise to attend to the administration of Justices’ justice! It is but fair, however, to Fielding to add, that he might have had better fare had he been more oppressive touching fees. And, besides, great dignitaries set him but an indifferent example. Gray, speaking of the Duke of Newcastle’s installation at Oxford, remarks, that “every one was very gay and very busy in the morning, and very owlish and very tipsy at night. I make no exceptions, from the Chancellor to Blewcoat.” Lord Pembroke, truly, was temperate enough to live upon vegetables; but the diet did not improve either his temper or his morals. Ladies—and they were not over delicate a century ago—as much dreaded sitting near him at dinner, as their daughters and grand-daughters dreaded to be near the late Duke of Cumberland, who was pretty sure to say something in the course of dinner expressly to embarrass them. The vegetarian Lord Pomfret was so blasphemous at tennis, that the Primate of Ireland, Dr. George Stone, was compelled to leave off playing with him. For Primates handled the rackets then, as Pope and Cardinals do now the cue. Pio Nono and the expertest of the Sacred College play la poule at billiards, after dinner, with the view of keeping down the good Pontiff’s obesity. This is almost as curious a trait as that of Taafe, the Irishman, who, conceiving himself to have been insulted at a dinner, and not being then able, as a Roman Catholic, to wear a sword, changed his religion, and ran his adversary through the body. The confusion of ideas which prompted a man to follow a particular faith, in order that he might commit murder, was something like that which influenced the poor woman who, suddenly becoming pious, after hearing a sermon from Rowland Hill, went to a book-stall, and stole a Bible.

I have noticed the love of good eating, and the coarseness connected with it. There was also a coarse economy attendant on it. The Duchess of Devonshire would call out to the Duke, when both were presiding at supper after one of their assemblies, “Good God, Duke! don’t cut the ham; nobody will eat any;” and then she would relate the circumstances of her private ménage to her neighbour: “When there’s only my Lord and I, besides a pudding, we have always a dish of roast,”—no very dainty fare for a ducal pair. Indeed, there was much want of daintiness, and of dignity, too, in many of those with whom both might have been looked for as a possession. Lord Coventry chased his Lady round the dinner-table, and scrubbed the paint off her cheeks with a napkin. The Duke and Duchess of Hamilton were more contemptible in their pomposity than their Graces of Devonshire were in their plainness. At their own house they walked in to dinner before their company, sat together at the upper end of their own table, ate together off one plate, and drank to nobody beneath the rank of Earl. It was, indeed, a wonder that they could get any one of any rank to dine with them at all. But, in point of dinners, people are not “nice” even now. Dukes very recently dined with a railway potentate, in hopes of profiting by the condescension; and Duchesses heard, without a smile, that potentate’s lady superbly dismiss them with an “au reservoir!”—an expression, by the way, which is refined, when compared with that taught by our nobility, a hundred years ago, to the rich Bohemian Countess Chamfelt; namely, “D—n you!” and, “Kiss me!” but it was apologetically said of her, that she never used the former but upon the miscarriage of the latter. This was at a time when vast assemblies were followed by vast suppers, vast suppers by vast drinking, and when nymphs and swains reached home at dawn with wigs, like Ranger’s in the comedy, vastly battered, and not very fit to be seen.

Pope, in the last century, moralized, with effect, on the deaths of the dissolute Buckingham and the avaricious Cutler; and the avarice of Sir John was perhaps more detestable than any extravagance that is satirized by Pope, or witticized by Walpole. But Sir John Cutler was ingenious in his thrift. This rich miser ordinarily travelled on horseback and alone, in order to avoid expense. On reaching his inn at night, he feigned indisposition, as an excuse for not taking supper. He would simply order the hostler to bring a little straw to his room, to put in his boots. He then had his bed warmed, and got into it, but only to get out of it again as soon as the servant had left the room. Then, with the straw in his boots and the candle at his bed-side, he kindled a little fire, at which he toasted a herring which he drew from his pocket. This, with a bit of bread which he carried with him, and a little water from the jug, enabled the lord of countless thousands to sup at a very moderate cost.

Well, this sordidness was less culpable perhaps than slightly overstepping income by giving assemblies and suppers. At the latter there was, at least, wit, and as much of it as was ever to be found at Madame du Deffand’s, where, by the way, the people did not sup. “Last night, at my Lady Hervey’s,” says Walpole, “Mrs. Dives was expressing great panic about the French,” who were said to be preparing to invade England. “My Lady Rochford, looking down on her fan, said, with great softness, ‘I don’t know; I don’t think the French are a sort of people that women need be afraid of.’” This was more commendable wit than that of Madame du Deffand herself, who, as I have previously remarked, made a whole assembly laugh, at Madame de Marchais’, when her old lover was known to be dying, by saying as she entered, “He is gone; and wasn’t it lucky? He died at six, or I could not possibly have shown myself here to-night.”

Our vain lady-wits, however, too often lacked refinement. “If I drink any more,” said Lady Coventry at Lord Hertford’s table, “if I drink any more, I shall be ‘muckibus.’” “Lord!” said Lady Mary Coke, “what is that?” “O,” was the reply, “it is Irish for sentimental!” In those days there were no wedding breakfasts: the nuptial banquet was a dinner, and bride and bridegroom saw it out. Walpole congratulates himself that, at the marriage of his niece Maria, “there was neither form nor indecency, both which generally meet on such occasions. They were married,” he adds, “at my brother’s in Pall Mall, just before dinner, by Mr. Keppel; the company, my brother, his son, Mrs. Keppel and Charlotte, Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Lady Betty Waldegrave, and I. We dined there; the Earl and new Countess got into their post-chaise at eight o’clock, and went to Navestock alone, where they stay till Saturday night.” Walpole gives instances enough—and more than enough—where matters did not go off so becomingly. Lords and Ladies were terribly coarse in sentiment and expression; and the women were often worse than the men. “Miss Pett,” says the writer whom I have so often quoted, “has dismissed Lord Buckingham: tant mieux pour lui! She damns her eyes that she will marry some Captain: tant mieux pour elle.” This is a sample of Table Traits in 1760; and it was long before manners and morals improved. The example was not of the best sort even in high places. The mistress of Alfieri dined at Court, as widow of the Pretender; and Madame du Barry was publicly feasted by our potential Lord Mayor.

Some of the women were not only coarse in speech, but furies in act, and often sharpers to boot. Thus, when “Jemmy Lumley,” in 1761, had a party of ladies at his house, with whom, after dinner, he played whist, from six at night till noon the next day, he lost two thousand pounds, which, suspecting knavery, he refused to pay. His antagonist, Mrs. Mackenzie, subsequently pounced upon him in the garden of an inn at Hampstead, where he was about to give a dinner to some other ladies. The sturdy “Scotchwoman,” as Gray calls her, demanded her money, and, on meeting with a refusal, she “horsewhipped, trampled, bruised,” and served him with worse indignities still, as may be seen by the curious, in Gray’s Letter to Warton. Lumley’s servants only with difficulty rescued their master from the fury, who carried a horse-whip beneath her hoop. The gentlemen do not appear to have been so generous, in their character of lovers, as their French brethren, who ruined themselves for “les beaux yeux” of some temporary idol. Miss Ford laughed consumedly at Lord Jersey, for sending her (“an odd first and only present to a beloved mistress”) a boar’s head, which, she says, “I had often the honour to meet at your Lordship’s table before ... and would have eat it, had it been eatable.”

The public are pretty familiar with the Household-Book of the Earl of Northumberland; and have learned much therefrom touching the Table Traits of the early period in which it was written. A later Earl did not inherit the spirit of organization which influenced his ancestor. “I was to dine at Northumberland House,” says Walpole, in 1765, “and went there a little after hour. There I found the Countess, Lady Betty Mackinsy, Lady Strafford, my Lady Finlater,—who was never out of Scotland before,—a tall lad of fifteen, her son, Lord Drogheda, and Mr. Worseley. At five” (which is conjectured to have been the hour of extreme fashion a century ago) “arrived Mr. Mitchell, who said the Lords had commenced to read the Poor Bill, which would take, at least, two hours, and, perhaps, would debate it afterwards. We concluded dinner would be called for; it not being very precedented for ladies to wait for gentlemen. No such thing! Six o’clock came,—seven o’clock came,—our coaches came! Well, we sent them away; and excuses were, we were engaged. Still, the Countess’s heart did not relent, nor uttered a syllable of apology. We wore out the wind and the weather, the opera and the play, Mrs. Cornely’s and Almack’s, and every topic that would do in a formal circle. We hinted, represented—in vain. The clock struck eight. My Lady, at last, said she would go and order dinner; but it was a good half-hour before it appeared. We then sat down to a table of fourteen covers; but, instead of substantials, there was nothing but a profusion of plates, striped red, green, and yellow,—gilt plate, blacks, and uniforms. My Lady Finlater, who never saw those embroidered dinners, nor dined after three, was famished. The first course stayed as long as possible, in hopes of the Lords; so did the second. The dessert at last arrived, and the middle dish was actually set on, when Lord Finlater and Mr. Mackay arrived! Would you believe it?—the dessert was remanded, and the whole first course brought back again! Stay—I have not done! Just as this second first course had done its duty, Lord Northumberland, Lord Strafford, and Mackinsy came in; and the whole began a third time. Then the second course, and the dessert! I thought we should have dropped from our chairs with fatigue and fumes. When the clock struck eleven, we were asked to return to the drawing-room, and take tea and coffee; but I said I was engaged to supper, and came home to bed!” This dinner may be contrasted with another given, at a later period, by a member of the same house. The Nobleman in question was an Earl Percy, who was in Ireland with his regiment,—the Fifth Infantry; and who, after much consideration, consented to give a dinner to the officers in garrison at Limerick. The gallant, but cautious, Earl ordered the repast at a tavern, specifying that it should be for fifty persons, at eighteen-pence per head. The officers heard of the arrangement, and they ordered the landlord to provide a banquet at a guinea per head, promising to pay the difference, in the event of their entertainer declining to do so. When the banquet was served, there was but one astonished and uncomfortable individual at the board; and that was the Earl himself, who beheld a feast for the gods, and heard himself gratefully complimented upon the excellence both of viands and wines. The astonished Earl experienced an easily-understood difficulty in returning thanks when his health was drunk with an enthusiasm that bewildered him; and, on retiring early, he sought out the landlord, in order to have a solution of an enigma that sorely puzzled him. Boniface told the unadorned and unwelcome truth; and the inexperienced young Earl, acknowledging his mistake, discharged the bill with a sigh on himself, and a cheque on his banker.

A host, after all, may appear parsimonious without intending to be so. “This wine,” said one of this sort to the late Mr. Pocock of Bristol, who had been dining with him, “costs me six shillings a bottle!” “Does it?” asked the guest, with a quaint look of gay reproof, “then pass it round, and let me have another six-penn’orth!”

But, to return to our Table Traits of the Last Century. In 1753, on the 4th of June, there was an installation of Knights of the Garter, at Windsor Castle, followed by a grand dinner, and a ball. It would seem as if the public claimed the right of seeing the spectacle for which they had to pay; for we read that “the populace attempted several times to force their way into the hall where the Knights were at dinner, against the Guards, on which some were cut and wounded, and the Guards fired several times on them, with powder, to deter them, but without effect, till they had orders to load with ball, which made them desist.” This is an ill-worded paragraph from the papers of the day; but it is a graphic illustration of the manners of the period.

These few samples of what society was in the last century, would suffice alone to show that it was sadly out of joint. What caused it? Any one who will take the trouble to go carefully through the columns of the ill-printed newspapers of the early part of the last century, will find that drunkenness, dissoluteness, and the sword hanging on every fool’s thigh, ready to do his bidding, were the characteristics of the period. People got drunk at dinners, and then slew one another, or in some other way broke the law. Lord Mohun and Captain Hall dined together before they made their attempt to carry off Mrs. Bracegirdle; and when defeated in their Tarquin-like endeavour, they slaughtered poor Will Montford, the player, in the public streets, for no better reason than that Montford admired the lady, and Hall was jealous of the admirer. But neither copious dining, nor copious drinking, could make a brave man of Mohun. In proof of this, it is only necessary to state that before he fought his butchering duel with the Duke of Hamilton, he spent the previous night feasting and drinking at the Bagnio, which place he left in the morning, with his second, Major-General M’Carty, as the “Post-boy” remarks, “seized with fear and trembling.” “The dog Mohun,” as Swift styled him, was slain, and so was the Duke; but it is uncertain whether the latter fell by the hand of his adversary, or the sword of that adversary’s second. A few years later we read of Fulwood, the lawyer, going to the play after dinner, drawing upon Beau Fielding, running him through, rushing in triumph to another house, meeting another antagonist, and getting slain by him, without any one caring to interfere.

In one of the numbers of the “Daily Post” for 1726, I find it recorded that a bevy of gallants, having joyously dined or supped together, descended from a hackney-coach in Piccadilly, bilked the coachman, beat him to a mummy, and stabbed his horses. Flushed with victory, they rushed into a neighbouring public-house, drew upon the gallants, terrified the ladies, and laughed at the mistress of the establishment, who declared that they would bring down ruin upon a place noted for “its safety and secrecy.” The succeeding paragraph in the paper announces to the public that the Bishop of London will preach on the following Sunday in Bow-church, Cheapside, on the necessity for a reformation of manners!

The Clubs, and especially the “Sword Clubs,” with their feastings and fightings, were the chief causes that manners were as depraved as they were. After supper, these Clubs took possession of the town, and held their sword against every man, and found every man’s sword against them. The “Bold Bucks,” and the “Hell-Fires,” divided the Metropolis between them. The latter, a comparatively innocent association, found their simple amusement in mutilating watchmen and citizens. The “Bold Bucks” took for their devilish device, “Blind and Bold Love,” and, under it, committed atrocities, the very thought of which makes the heart of human nature palpitate with horror and disgust. No man could become a member who did not denounce the claims both of nature and God! They used to assemble every Sunday at a tavern, close to the church of St. Mary-le-Strand. During divine service, they kept a noisy band of horns and drums continually at work; and, after service, they sat down to dinner, the principal dish at which was a “Holy-Ghost pie!” Assuredly the sermon of the metropolitan Prelate was much needed; but, when preached, reformation did but very slowly follow, especially in high places. At the very end of the century we hear of the Prince of Wales dining at the Duke of Queensberry’s, at Richmond, with the last mistress of Louis XV.; and nobody appears to have been scandalized. And this was the characteristic of the time: vice was not only general, but it did not very seriously offend the few exceptional individuals. For the first three quarters of the century the epitaph of that time might have been taken from the eulogium passed by a May-Fair preacher in his Funeral Sermon upon Frederick, Prince of Wales: “He had no great parts, but he had great virtues; indeed, they degenerated into vices: he was very generous; but I hear his generosity has ruined a great many people; and then his condescension was such, that he kept very bad company.”

I have, elsewhere, spoken of some of the roystering Clubs of the last century; but I cannot refrain from adding two other instances here, as examples of the Table Traits of the same period. The Calves’-Head Club established itself in Suffolk-Street, Charing Cross, on the anniversary of the martyrdom of King Charles, in the year 1735. The gentlemen members had an entertainment of calves’ heads, some of which they showed to the mob outside, whom they treated with strong beer. In the evening, they caused a bonfire to be made before the door, and threw into it, with loud huzzas, a calf’s head, dressed up in a napkin. They also dipped their napkins in red wine, and waved them from the windows, at the same time drinking toasts publicly. The mob huzzaed, as well as their fellow brutes of the Club; but, at length, to show their superior refinement, they broke the windows; and at length became so mischievous, that the Guards were called in to prevent further outrage.

The above was, no doubt, a demonstration on the part of gentlemen of republican principles. Some few years later, a different instance occurs. The “Monthly Review,” May, 1757, mentions, that “seven gentlemen dined at a house of public entertainment in London, and were supposed to have run as great lengths in luxury and expense, if not greater, than the same number of persons were ever known to do before at a private regale. They afterwards played a game of cards, to decide which of them should pay the bill. It amounted to £81. 11s. 6d.; besides a turtle, which was a present to the company.” This was certainly a heavy bill. A party of the same number at the Clarendon, and with turtle charged in the bill, would, in our days, find exceeding difficulty in spending more than £5 each. Their grandsires expended more than twice as much for a dinner not half as good.

It is only with the present century that old customs disappeared; and, with regard to some of them, society is all the better for their disappearance. Even plum-porridge did not survive the first year of this half century; when the more solid and stable dynasty of plum-pudding was finally established. Brand relates, that on Christmas-Day, 1801, he dined at the Chaplain’s table, at St. James’s, “and partook of the first thing served and eaten on that festival, at that table, namely, a tureen full of rich, luscious plum-porridge. I do not know,” he says, “that the custom is anywhere else retained.” The great innovation, after this, was in the days of the Regent, when oysters were served as a prelude to dinner. This fashion was adopted by the Prince on the recommendation of a gentleman of his household, the elder Mr. Watier, who brought it with him from France, and added an “experto crede” to his recommendation. This fashion, however, like others, has passed away; and oysters and drams, as overtures to dinner, are things that have fallen into the domain of history.

There is a custom of these later days, much observed at Christmas time, which deserves a word of notice. I allude to the “Christmas-tree.” The custom is one, however novel in England, of very ancient observance elsewhere. Its birth-place is Egypt. The tree there used was the palm; and the ceremony was in full force long before the days of Antony and Cleopatra. The palm puts forth a fresh shoot every month. Its periodical leaves appear as regularly as those of Mr. Bentley’s “Miscellany.” In the time of the winter solstice, when parties were given in ancient Misraim, a spray of this tree, with twelve shoots, was suspended, to symbolize the completion of another year. The custom passed into Italy, where the fir-tree was employed for the purposes of celebration; and its pyramidal tips were decorated with burning candles, in honour of Saturn. This festival, the Saturnalia, was observed at the winter solstice, from the 17th to the 21st of December, and, during its continuance, Davus was as good a man as Chremes. The Sigillaria, days for interchanging presents of figures in wax, like those on the Christmas-tree, followed; and, finally, the Juvenalia, when men became “boys with boys,” matrons turned children once again, and young and old indulged in the solemn romps with which the festival closed, and which used to mark our own old-fashioned festivities at Christmas time. That the Egyptian tree passed into Germany, may be seen in the pyramids which sometimes there are substituted for the tree. But the antique northern mythology has supplied some of the observances. The Juel Fesi was the mid-winter “Wheel Feast;” and the wheel represented the circling years which end but to begin again. The yule-log, as we call it, was the wheel-shaped log; in front of which was roasted the great boar,—an animal hateful to the god of the sun, but the flesh of which was religiously eaten by his worshippers. At this festival presents were made, which were concealed in wrappers, and flung in at open windows, emblematical, we are told, of the good, but as yet hidden, things which the opening year had in store.

The Church generally made selection of the heathen festivals for its own holy-days. In the early days, this was done chiefly to enable Christians to be merry without danger to themselves. It would not have been safe for them to eat, drink, and rejoice on days when Pagan Governments put on mourning. They were glad, then, when these were glad, and feasted with them, but holding other celebrations in view. Hence the German tree; only, for the sun which crowned the Roman tree, in honour of Apollo, the Germans place a figure of the Son of God; and, for the Phœbus and his flocks at the foot, they substitute “the Good Shepherd.” The waxen figures are also the sigillaria, but with more holy impress. The Saturnalia have a place in the table joys that attend the exhibition of the tree, in presence of which joy is supposed to wither.

In conclusion, I cannot but notice one other table custom, which is of Teutonic origin. I allude to the Cabinet dinners given by Ministers previous to the opening of Parliament, and at which the Royal Speech is read, before it is declared in the presence of collective wisdom. This, at all events, reminds us of the ancient German custom, mentioned by Tacitus, who tells us, that the Teutonic legislators and warriors consulted twice touching every question of importance: once, by night, and over the bowl; and once, by day, when they were perfectly sober. Of course, I would not insinuate that Ministers could possibly indulge too fondly over their cups, like the Senators of the Hercynian forest; and yet Viscount Sidmouth’s vice, as Lord Holland tells us, “was wine;” and we have heard even of grave Lord-Stewards so drunk as to pull down the Monarchs they held by the hand, and should have supported. The last unfortunate official who so offended, should have craftily qualified his wine with water; and the mention of that subject reminds me of the origin of wine and water, of which I will say a few words, after adding one or two more traits of table manners.

I have spoken, in another page, of the unlucky exclamation touching haddock, which caused the perpetual exile of Poodle Byng from Belvoir. There was, however, no offence meant. How different was the case with that impudent coxcomb, Brummell, who managed to be the copper-Captain of fashion in London, when the true Captains were fighting their country’s battles! When Brummell was living almost on the charity of Mr. Marshall, he was one of a dinner party at that gentleman’s house, whither he took with him, according to his most impertinent custom, one of his favourite dogs. The “Beau” had, during dinner, helped himself to the wing of a roasted capon stuffed with truffles. He chose to fancy that the wing was tough, and, delicately seizing the end of it with a napkin-covered finger and thumb, he passed it under the table to his dog, with the remark, “Here, Atout! try if you can get your teeth through this; for I’ll be d—d if I can.” Not less ungratefully impudent was this gentleman-beggar on another occasion. A French family had given a dinner entirely on his account. It was perfect in its way. The ortolans came from Toulouse, the salmon was from the waters in the neighbourhood of Rouen, and the company most select. A friend, encountering him next day, asked how the dinner had gone off. Brummell lifted up his hands, shook his head in a deprecatory manner, and said, “Don’t ask me, my good fellow; but, poor man! he did his best.”

The two most recent examples of Table Traits of the present century, that I have met with, illustrate the two extremes of society; and as they refer to a period of not above a month ago, they will serve, not inaptly, to close this section of my series. The first example is that afforded by a dinner given at Boston, in Lincolnshire, to twenty aged labourers. At this dinner, one of the gentlemen donors of the feast, gave “the Ladies,” and called on the octogenarian Chairman to return thanks. The old President, however, shook his head, with a mixed melancholy and cunning air, as if he too well knew there was nothing to return thanks for. The venerable “Vice” was then appealed to; but his reply was, that the least said about the subject of the toast would be the soonest mended. At length, a sprightly old man of threescore and ten was requested to respond, he having a gay look about him which seemed warranting gallantry; but he surprised the toast-giver by answering, that “as for t’leddies, he’d nowt to say; for his part, he’d never liked ’em.” This unchivalrous sentiment awoke, at last, the spirit of a strip of a lad who was only sixty-five; and he responded to the toast, with a touch of satire, however, in his remarks, that left it uncertain whether he were so much a champion of the fair sex, as the company had expected to find in him. The second “Trait” of the customs of this country is presented by the dinner given in February of the present year, by Earl Granville, the guests at which were Lord Aberdeen, the Bishop of Oxford, and Mr. Bright. There were not such startling contrasts at the reconciliation dinner which brought Wilkes and Johnson together, as at Earl Granville’s unique banquet. The host and the Premier represented—the first, smiling courtesy; the second, the most frigid severity of a freezing civility. But the strongest contrast was in the persons of the Bishop and the “Friend:”—Dr. Wilberforce, highest of Churchmen, briefest of Preachers, and twice as much curled as the son of Clinias himself; while Mr. Bright, with every hair as if a plummet depended at the end of it, hating the Church, but not indifferent to petits pâtés à la braise, must have looked like the vinegar of voluntaryism that would not mingle with the oil of orthodoxy. To have made this banquet complete, there should have been two more guests,—Dr. Cumming and Dr. Cahill, with appropriate dishes before each:—a plate of sweetbreads in front of the gentle apostle of the Kirk; and a bowl of blood-puddings opposite the surpliced Priest who has gained a gloomy notoriety by the “glorious idea,” to which I have referred, of a massacre of English heretic beef-eaters, by the light-dieted holders of Catholic and continental bayonets. But Dr. Cahill, it may be hoped, is something insane, or would he have deliberately recorded, as he did the other day in the “Tablet,” that it were much better for Romanists to read immoral works than the English Bible? His excellent reason is, that “the Church” easily forgives immorality, but has no mercy for heresy. Well, well; we should not like to catch a Confessor of this school sitting next our daughter at dinner, and intimating that Holywell-street literature was better reading than the English version of the Sermon on the Mount.—But let us sweeten our imagination with a little Wine and Water.