About twelve o’clock I commonly visited him, and frequently found him in bed, or declaiming over his tea, which he drank very plentifully. He generally had a levee of morning visitors, chiefly men of letters; Hawkesworth, Goldsmith, Murphy, Langton, Steevens, Beauclerk, etc., etc., and sometimes learned ladies, particularly I remember a French lady of wit and fashion doing him the honour of a visit.[170] He seemed to be considered as a kind of public oracle, whom everybody thought they had a right to visit and consult; and doubtless they were well rewarded.[171]
When Johnson visited Boswell in Edinburgh after the tour of the Hebrides ‘he had, from ten o’clock to one or two, a constant levee of various persons, of different characters and descriptions;’ so that poor Mrs. Boswell was obliged to ‘devote the greater part of the morning to the endless task of pouring out tea.’[172]
This custom, thus sanctioned by fashion and by literary authority, was adopted by all who pretended to wit. In 1760, Goldsmith sneers at the philosophical beau who ‘receives company in his study, in all the pensive formality of slippers, night-gown, and easy-chair.’[173] Flavia, in the same author’s Double Transformation, after marrying an Oxford Fellow, aspires to the reputation of a femme savante:
Proud to be seen she kept a bevy
Of powdered coxcombs at her levee.
By 1779 the function had become so popular that its name was frequently extended to any formal entertainment where conversation was the principal attraction, even when it was held in the evening.[174]
The levee merged easily into the formal breakfast. This function might occur at any hour from eight o’clock in the morning to three in the afternoon.[175] It was in 1750 that Madame du Bocage recorded her impressions of Mrs. Montagu’s breakfasts, generalizing upon the custom of the nation in these words:
In the morning breakfasts which enchant as much by the exquisite viands as by the richness of the plate in which they are served up, agreeably bring together both the people of the country and strangers [i.e., both natives and foreigners].[176]
The diaries and letters of Beattie, Mrs. Delany, Miss Burney, and Miss More are strewn with references to this fashionable meal. In the spring of 1774, Walpole professes himself frightened at the inundation of them coming on.[177] A favourite diversion at these matutinal parties, as at entertainments later in the day, was the declamation of Thomas Sheridan (who would repeat Gray’s Elegy, Dryden’s Ode, and ‘everything that everybody could say by heart’[178]), the French readings of Tessier, the tragic recitations of Tighe (who expected his auditors to swoon from emotion), and, occasionally, bits of recitation or acting by Garrick. Sheridan gave so many of these literary breakfasts that Mrs. Boscawen suspected that he received money for them.[179] At times such functions were more or less public, and were held in the Haymarket, at Vauxhall, or at Bath, in the Assembly Rooms.
The receptions of the later afternoon and evening are of a less definite character. Beattie describes a gathering at Mrs. Montagu’s as ‘an assembly or conversation or rout.’[180] The entertainment was of wide scope, as in Italian and French drawing-rooms, and might include dancing, card-playing, and literary readings, as well as conversation.[181] In this work we are concerned only with the literary aspect of these parties; the origin and the more serious results of the London salon are discussed elsewhere, so that the rest of this chapter may be devoted to a consideration of the means adopted for shining in conversation at these parties, and the attempt to connect such assemblies directly with the production of poetry.