Table traits, with something on them

by Dr. Doran

More than a century ago, Mr. Urban, who is the only original “oldest inhabitant,” gave a “Literary Bill of Mortality for 1752,” showing the casualties among books as well as among authors. Touching the respective fates of the former, we find the productions of the year set down as, “Abortive, 7000; still-born, 3000; old age, 0.” Sudden deaths fell upon 320. Three or four thousand perished by trunk-makers, sky-rockets, pastrycooks, or worms; while more than half that number were privily disposed of. If such were the fortunes of the works, how desperate must have been the diet of the authors! So also was their destiny. As a class, they are fixed, in round numbers, at 3000; and a third of these are registered as dying of lunacy. Some 1200 are entered as “starved.” Seventeen were disposed of by “the hangman,” and fifteen by hardly more respectable persons, namely themselves! Mad dogs, vipers, and mortification, swept off a goodly number. Five pastoral poets, who could not live by the oaten pipe, appropriately died of “fistula.” And, as a contrast to the multitude “starved,” we find a zero indicating the ascertained quantity of authors who had perished by the aldermanic malady of “surfeit.”

There is, perhaps, more approximation to truth than appears at first sight in this jeu d’esprit. It was only in Pagan days that authors could boast of obesity. They dined with the tyranni, as Persian poets get their mouths stuffed with sugar-candy by the Shah Inshah. And yet Pliny speaks of poets feeding sparingly, ut solent poetœ. Perhaps this was only an exception, like that of Moore, who smilingly sat down to a broil at home when not dining with “right honourables;” or contentedly thanked Heaven for “salt fish and biscuits” with his mother and sister in Abbey Street, the day after he had supped with the ducal viceroy of Ireland, and half the peerage of the three kingdoms.

Still, in the old times, authors took more liberty with their hosts. In Rome they kept more to the proprieties; for a nod of the head of the imperial entertainer was sufficient to make their own fly from their shoulders. In presence of the Roman emperor of old, an author could only have declared that the famous invasion of Britain, which was productive of ship-loads of spoil, in the shape of sea-shells, was a god-like feat. So, at the table of the czar, all the lyres of Muscovy sing the ode of eternal sameness, to the effect that the dastardly butchery at Sinope was an act that made the angels of God jubilant! The Russian lyres dare not sing to any other tune. It was not so of yore. Witness what is told us of Philoxenus, the ode writer, whose odes, however, are less known than his acts. He was the author of the wish that he had a crane’s neck, in order to have prolonged enjoyment in swallowing. This is a poor wish compared with that of Quin, elsewhere recorded, that he might have a swallow as long as from here to Botany Bay in palate all the way! He was a greedy fellow, this same Philoxenus. He accustomed himself to hold his hands in the hottest water, and to gargle his throat with it scalding; and, by this noble training, he achieved the noble end of being able to swallow the hottest things at table, before the other guests could venture on them. He would have conquered the most accomplished of our country bumpkins in consuming hasty-pudding at a fair. His mouth was as though it was paved, and his fellow-guests used to say of him, that he was an oven and not a man. He once travelled many miles to buy fish at Ephesus; but, when he reached the market-place, he found it all bespoke for a wedding banquet. He was by no means embarrassed; he went uninvited to the feast, kissed the bride, sang an epithalamium that made the guests roar with ecstasy, and afforded such delight by his humour, that the bridegroom invited him to breakfast with him on the morrow. His wit had made amends for his devouring all the best dishes. It is a long way from Philoxenus to Dr. Chalmers forgetting his repast in the outpouring of his wisdom, and entering in his journal the expression of his fear that he had been intolerant in argument. What a contrast, too, between Philoxenus and Byron, who, when dining with a half-score of wits at Rogers’s, only opened his mouth to ask for biscuits and soda-water, and not finding any such articles in the bill of fare, silently dining on vegetables and vinegar! The noble poet’s fare in Athens was often of the same modest character; but we know what excesses he could commit when his wayward appetite that way prompted, or when he wished to lash his Pegasus into fury, as, after reading the famous attack on his poetry in the Edinburgh Review, when he swallowed three bottles of claret, and then addressed himself to the tomahawking of his reviewers and rivals.

Philoxenus, however, had his counterpart in those abbés and poets who used, in the hearing of Louis XV., to praise Madame de Pompadour. He was writing a poem called “Galatea,” in honour of the mistress of Dionysius of Sicily, when he was once dining with that tyrant. There were a couple of barbels on the royal board, a small one near the poet, and a larger near the prince. As the latter saw Philoxenus put his diminutive barbel to his ear, he asked him wherefore, and the poet replied that he was asking news of Nereus, but that he thought the fish he held had been caught too young to give him any. “I think,” said Philoxenus, “that the old fish near your sacredness would better suit my purpose.” This joke has descended to Joe Miller, in whose collection it is to be found in a modified form. But the story is altogether less neat than the one told of Dominic, the famous Italian harlequin and farce writer. He was standing in presence of Louis XIV. at dinner, when the Grand Monarque observed that his eyes were fixed on a dish of partridges. “Take that dish to Dominic,” said the king. “What!” exclaimed the farceur, “partridges and all!” “Well,” said the monarch, smiling with gravity, “yes, partridges and all!” This reminds me of another anecdote, the hero of which is the Abbé Morallet, whom Miss Edgeworth in her “Ormond” praises so highly, and praises so justly. But Morallet, if he loved good deeds, loved not less good dinners, and he shone in both. His talents as a writer, and his virtues as a man, to say nothing of his appetite, made him especially welcome at the hospitable table of Monsieur Ansu. The abbé had learned to carve expressly that he might appropriate to himself his favourite portions,—a singular instance of selfishness in a man who was selfish in nothing else. It was on one of these occasions that a magnificent pheasant excited the admiration of the guests, and of the abbé in particular, who nevertheless sighed to think that it had not been placed close to him. Some dexterity was required so to carve, it, that each of the guests might partake of the oriental bird; and the mistress of the house, remembering the abbé’s skill as a carver, directed an attendant to pass the pheasant to M. l’Abbé de Morallet. “What!” exclaimed the latter, “the whole of it? how very kind!” “The whole of it?” repeated the lady; “I have no objection, if these ladies and gentlemen are willing to surrender their rights to you.” The entire company gave consent, by reiterating the words, “the whole of it!” and the man, who might have gained the Montholon prize for virtue, really achieved a prize of gluttony which hardly confers honour on a hungry clown at a fair.

La Fontaine at table was seen in a better light than the Abbé Morallet. A fermier-general once invited him to a dinner of ceremony, in the persuasion that an author who excited such general admiration would create endless delight for the select company, to entertain whom he had been invited. La Fontaine knew it well, during the whole repast ate in silence, and immediately rose, to the consternation of the convives, to take his departure. He was going, he said, to the Academy. The master of the house represented to him that it was by far too early, and that he would find none of the members assembled. “I know that,” said the fabulist, with his quiet smile and courteous bow; “I know that, but I will go a long way round.” If this seemed a trifle uncourteous—and it was so more in seeming than reality—it was not so much so as in the case of Byron, who used to invite a company to dinner, and then leave them to themselves to enjoy their repast. Noble hosts of the past century used to do something like this when they gave masquerades. Fashion compelled them to adopt a species of amusement which they detested; but they vindicated personal liberty nevertheless, for when their rooms were at their fullest, the noble host, quietly leaving his guest to the care of his wife, would slip away to some neighbouring coffee-house, and over a cool pint of claret enjoy the calm which was not to be had at home. The late Duke of Norfolk used habitually to dine at one of the houses in Covent Garden, out of pure liking to it. He was accustomed to order dinner for five, and to duly eat what he had deliberately ordered; but, as he one day detected a waiter watching him in his gastronomic process, he angrily ordered his bill, and never entered the house again.

It was a common practice with Haydn, like his Grace of Norfolk, to order a dinner for five or six, and then eat the whole himself. He once ordered such a dinner to be ready by a stated hour, at which time he alone appeared, and ordered the repast to be served. “But where is the company?” respectfully inquired the head waiter. “Oh!” exclaimed Haydn, “I am de gompany!” But if he ate all, he also paid for all. Moore and Bowles, in their visits together to Bath, used sometimes to dine at the White Hart, where, as Moore records, he paid his share of the dinner and pint of Madeira, and then Bowles magnificently “stood” a bottle of claret, at dessert. And a pleasant dinner the two opposite, yet able, poets, made of it;—far more pleasant than Coleridge’s dinner with a party at Reynolds’s, when he bowled down the glasses like nine-pins, because they were too small to drink from copiously!

The name of Coleridge reminds me of Dufresny, an author of the time of Louis XIV., who was full of sentiment and majestic sounds, but who was content to live at the cost of other people, and who never achieved anything like an independence for himself. After the death of his royal patron, he was one day dining with the Regent Duke of Orleans, who expressed a wish to provide for him. Caprice inspired the author to say, “Your royal highness had better leave me poor, as I am, as a monument of the condition of France before the regency.” He was not displeased at having his petition refused. A guest at his side did indeed remark, by way of encouragement, that “poverty was no vice.” “No,” answered Dufresny, sharply, “but it is something very much worse.” In act and spirit he was not unlike a prince of wits and punsters among ourselves, who used to set up bottles of champagne on his little lawn and bowl them down for nine-pins; and who, of course, left his wife and children pensioners on the charity of the state and the people.

I have spoken of La Fontaine; he was as absent at table as poor Lord Dudley and Ward, whose first aberrations so alarmed Queen Adelaide. La Fontaine was also like Dean Ogle, who, at a friend’s table, always thought himself at his own, and if the dinner were indifferent, he would make an apology to the guests, and promise them better treatment next time. So La Fontaine was one day at the table of Despreaux; the conversation turned upon St. Augustin, and after much serious discourse upon that Christian teacher, La Fontaine, who had till then been perfectly silent, turned to his neighbour, the Abbé Boileau, one of the most pious men of his day, and asked him “if he thought that St. Augustin had as much wit as Rabelais?” The priest blushed scarlet, and then contented himself with remarking, “M. de la Fontaine, you have got on one of your stockings the wrong side out;”—which was the fact.

The poet’s query to the priest was no doubt as startling as that put by the son of a renowned reverend joker to the then Lord Primate. The anxious parent had informed his somewhat “fast” offspring, that as the archbishop was to dine with him that day, it would be desirable that the young gentleman should eschew sporting subjects, and if he spoke at all, speak only on serious subjects. Accordingly, at dessert, during a moment of silence, the obedient child, looking gravely at his grace, asked him “if he could tell him what sort of condition Nebuchadnezzar was in, when he was taken up from grass?” The Lord Primate readily replied that he should be able to answer the question by the time he who had made it had found out the name of the man whom Samson ordered to tie the torches to the foxes’ tails, before they were sent in to destroy the corn of the Philistines!

Moore loved to dine with the great; but there have been many authors who could not appreciate the supposed advantages of such distinction. Lainez was one of these, and there were but few of his countrymen who resembled him. One day the Duke of Orleans met him in the park at Fontainebleau, and did him the honour of inviting him to dinner. “It is really quite impossible,” said Lainez; “I am engaged to dine at a tavern with half-a-dozen jolly companions; and what opinion would your royal highness have of me if I were to break my word?” Lainez was not like Madame de Sevigné, who, after having been asked to dance by Louis XIV., declared in her delight that he was the greatest monarch in the world. Bussi, who laughed at her absurd enthusiasm, affirms that the fair authoress of the famous “Letters” was so excited at the supper after the dance, that it was with difficulty she could refrain from shrieking out “Vive le Roi!”