Such was Lord Guloseton. To my surprise no other guest but myself appeared.
"A new friend," said he, as we descended into the dining-room, "is like a new dish—one must have him all to oneself, thoroughly to enjoy and rightly to understand him."
"A noble precept," said I, with enthusiasm. "Of all vices, indiscriminate hospitality is the most pernicious. It allows us neither conversation nor dinner, and realizing the mythological fable of Tantalus, gives us starvation in the midst of plenty."
"You are right," said Guloseton, solemnly; "I never ask above six persons to dinner, and I never dine out; for a bad dinner, Mr. Pelham, a bad dinner is a most serious—I may add, the most serious calamity."
"Yes," I replied, "for it carries with it no consolation: a buried friend may be replaced—a lost mistress renewed—a slandered character be recovered—even a broken constitution restored; but a dinner, once lost, is irremediable; that day is for ever departed; an appetite once thrown away can never, till the cruel prolixity of the gastric agents is over, be regained. 'Il y a tant de maitresses, (says the admirable Corneille), 'il n'y a qu'un diner.'"
"You speak like an oracle—like the Cook's Oracle, Mr. Pelham: may I send you some soup, it is a la Carmelite? But what are you about to do with that case?"
"It contains" (said I) "my spoon, my knife, and my fork. Nature afflicted me with a propensity, which through these machines I have endeavoured to remedy by art. I eat with too great a rapidity. It is a most unhappy failing, for one often hurries over in one minute, what ought to have afforded the fullest delight for the period of five. It is, indeed, a vice which deadens enjoyment, as well as abbreviates it; it is a shameful waste of the gifts, and a melancholy perversion of the bounty of Providence: my conscience tormented me; but the habit, fatally indulged in early childhood, was not easy to overcome. At last I resolved to construct a spoon of peculiarly shallow dimensions, a fork so small, that it could only raise a certain portion to my mouth, and a knife rendered blunt and jagged, so that it required a proper and just time to carve the goods 'the gods provide me.' My lord, 'the lovely Thais sits beside me' in the form of a bottle of Madeira. Suffer me to take wine with you?"
"With pleasure, my good friend; let us drink to the memory of the
Carmelites, to whom we are indebted for this inimitable soup."
"Yes!" I cried. "Let us for once shake off the prejudices of sectarian faith, and do justice to one order of those incomparable men, who, retiring from the cares of an idle and sinful world, gave themselves with undivided zeal and attention to the theory and practice of the profound science of gastronomy. It is reserved for us, my lord, to pay a gratefu tribute of memory to those exalted recluses, who, through a long period of barbarism and darkness, preserved, in the solitude of their cloisters, whatever of Roman luxury and classic dainties have come down to this later age. We will drink to the Carmelites at a sect, but we will drink also to the monks as a body. Had we lived in those days, we had been monks ourselves."
"It is singular," answered Lord Guloseton—"(by the by, what think you of this turbot?)—to trace the history of the kitchen; it affords the greatest scope to the philosopher and the moralist. The ancients seemed to have been more mental, more imaginative, than we are in their dishes; they fed their bodies as well as their minds upon delusion: for instance, they esteemed beyond all price the tongues of nightingales, because they tasted the very music of the birds in the organs of their utterance. That is what I call the poetry of gastronomy!"