That overhangs his head from the green wall,
Feeds in the sunshine ...
—Wordsworth (Reflective Poems).
The fruit in the rectory garden, the pears from the rector’s own tree, had all been culled; Madam Tutterville had seen to that. And where she ruled, if there was always abundance of the choicest description, there was no waste.
The rector liked fruit to his breakfast. He belonged to a generation who made breakfast an important meal; an occasion for the feast of wit as well as of palate; for the consorting of choice souls, the first freshness upon them and the dew still sparkling upon the laurel that binds the poet’s brow. The breakfast hour is one when the mellow beam of good repose shines still in the eye, mitigating the sarcasm of the man of humour, enhancing the charm of the man of elegant parts, ripening the wits of the learned. That hour (not unduly early, mind you) when the morning has already gained warmth but not lost crispness; when with pleasure and profit a party of cultured gentlemen can meet, bloom as of peach on well-shaven cheek—rasés à velour, as the French barber of those days quaintly had it—silk stocking precisely drawn over re-invigorated muscle; and, thus meeting, exchange the good things of the mutual mind with critical sobriety, while discussing in similar manner the good things of bodily refreshment.
They were good days when social convention countenanced such hours of elegant leisure! Good times were they that still cherished the delicately dallying scholar, the epicure in life and in learning; that admired the man who knew how to sip and relish, and to whom essential quality was of overpoweringly vaster importance than quantity. A good age, when hurry was looked upon almost as an ungentlemanly vice and the anxious mind of business was held incompatible with culture!
Of such was the reverend Horatio Tutterville, D.D., late Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, Rector of Bindon. And to him the breakfast hour was still sacred: an hour of serene enjoyment to which he daily looked forward as the great prize of life, and which prepared him for a day of duties performed with admirable deliberation.
True, the fates had so marshalled his existence that but few were the congenial friends who could now and again come and share these pleasant moments under the flickering shades of the pear-tree, or in the cosy parsonage dining-room; sit at those tables—both round! —which it was at once Madam Sophia’s pride and privilege to supply with an exquisite and varied fare.
But little recked he of that; choice spirits there were still with whom he could consort at any time; spirits as rare as any who in Oxford Common-Room, in Town, or in Cathedral precincts ever had communed with him. Aye, and rarer! Spirits, moreover, ready at all hours of the night or day, and always in gracious mood, to yield their hoarded wisdom or sweetness to the lingering appreciation of his palate.
The choice of his morning’s companion always was with Dr. Tutterville one of solicitude and discrimination. A Virgil, or some other subtle singer of like brilliance, on mornings when the sun was very hot and the sky of Italian blue between the high garden walls; when the bees were extra busy over the fragrant thyme beds, and when some fresh cream cheese and honey and whitest flour of wheat were most tempting on the fair cloth. “Rare Ben Jonson,” perhaps, on a stormy autumn day, when the wood fire roared up the chimney and a fine old hearty English breakfast of the game pie or boar-head order could be fitly topped up by a short, but nobly creaming beaker of Audit ale.