Table traits, with something on them

by Dr. Doran

Had the famous “petit père André” kept down his impulses as successfully as Madame de Sevigné did at the supper, where, after all, she did not exclaim, “Vive le Roi,” it would have been more to his credit, and less to our amusement. The good father, like a better man, H. Vincent de Paul, was excessively fond of cards, but he did not cheat, like the saint, for the sake of winning for the poor. He had been playing at piquet, and in one game had won a considerable sum by the lucky intervention of a fourth king. He was in such ecstasy at his luck, that he declared at supper he would introduce his lucky fourth king into his next day’s sermon. Bets were laid in consequence of this declaration, and the whole company were present when the discourse was preached. The promise made at the supper was kept in the sermon, though something profanely: “My brethren,” said the abbé, “there arrived one king, two kings, three kings; but what were they?—and where should I have been without the fourth king, who saved me, and has benefited you? That fourth king was He who lay in the manger, and whom the three royal magi came but to worship!” At the dinner which followed the author of the sermon was more eulogised than if he had been as grand as Bourdaloue, as touching as Massillon, or as winning as Fénelon.

There was more wit in a curé of Basse Bretagne, who was the author of his diocesan’s pastorals, and who happened to hold invitations to dinners for the consecutive days of the week. He could not take advantage of them and perform his duty too, but he hit on a method of accomplishing his desire. He gave out at church, an intimation to this effect:—“In order to avoid confusion, my brethren, I have to announce that to-morrow, Monday, I will receive at confession, the liars only; on Tuesday, the misers; on Wednesday, the slanderers; on Thursday, the thieves; Friday, the libertines; and Saturday, the women of evil life.” It need not be said that the priest was left during that week to enjoy himself without let or hindrance. And it was at such joyous dinners as he was in the habit of attending that most of the sermons, with startling passages in them, like those of Father André, were devised. Thus, the Cordelier Maillard, the author of various pious works, at a dinner of counsellors, announced his intention of preaching against the counsellors’ ladies,—that is, against their wives, or such of them that wore embroidery. And well he kept his word, as the following choice flowers from the bouquet of his pulpit oratory will show. “You say,” he exclaimed to the ladies in question, “that you are clad according to your conditions; all the devils in hell fly away with your conditions, and you too, my ladies! You will say to me, perhaps, Our husbands do not give us this gorgeous apparel, we earn it by the labours of our bodies. Thirty thousand devils fly away with the labours of your bodies, and you too, my ladies!” And, after diatribes like these against the ladies in question, the Cordelier would dine with their lords, and dine sumptuously too. The dinners of the counsellors of those days were not like the Spanish dinner to which an author was invited, and which consisted of capon and wine, two excellent ingredients, but unfortunately, as at the banquet celebrated by Swift, where there was nothing warm but the ice, and nothing sweet but the vinegar, so here the capon was cold and the wine was hot. Whereupon, the literary guest dips the leg of the capon into the flask of wine, and being asked by his host wherefore he did so, replied, “I am warming the capon in the wine, and cooling the wine with the capon.”

The host was not such a judge of wine, apparently, as the archbishops of Salzbourg, who used not indeed to write books, nor indeed read them, but who used to entertain those who did, and then preach against literary vanity from those double-balcony pulpits which some of my readers may recollect in the cathedral of the town where Paracelsus was wont to discourse like Solan, and to drink like Silenus; and before whose tomb I have seen votaries, imploring his aid against maladies, or thanking him for having averted them! It is said of one of these prince primates that when, on the occasion of his death, the municipal officers went to place the seals on his property, they found the library sealed up exactly as it had been done many years before at the time of the decease of his predecessor. Such, however, was not the case with the wine-cellars. What the archiepiscopal wine is at Salzbourg, I do not know, but if it be half as good as that drank by the monks of Mölk, on the Danube, why the archbishops may stand excused. Besides, they only drank it during their leisure hours,—of which, as Hayne remarks, archbishops have generally four-and-twenty daily.

But to return nearer home, and to our own authors:—Dr. Arne may be reckoned among these, and it is of him, I think, that a pleasant story is told, showing how he wittily procured a dinner in an emergency, which certainly did not promise to achieve such a consummation. The doctor was with a party of composers and musicians in a provincial town, where a musical festival was being celebrated, and at which they were prominent performers. They proceeded to an inn to dine; they were accommodated with a room, but were told that every eatable thing in the house was already engaged. All despaired in their hunger, save the “Mus. Doc.” who, cutting off two or three ends of catgut, went out upon the stairs, and observing a waiter carrying a joint to a company in an adjacent room, contrived to drop the bits of catgut on the meat, while he addressed two or three questions to the waiter. He then returned to his companions, to whom he intimated that dinner would soon be ready. They smiled grimly at what they thought was a sorry joke, and soon after, some confusion being heard in the room to which the joint which he had ornamented had been conveyed, he reiterated the assurance that dinner was coming, and thereupon he left the room. On the stairs he encountered the waiter bearing away the joint, with a look of disgust in his face. “Whither so fast, friend, with that haunch of mutton?” was his query. “I am taking it back to the kitchen, Sir; the gentlemen cannot touch it. Only look, Sir,” said William, with his nose in the direction of the bits of catgut; “its enough to turn one’s stomach!” “William,” said Arne gravely, “fiddlers have very strong stomachs; bring the mutton to our room.” The thing was done, the haunch was eaten, the hungry guests were delighted, but William had ever afterwards a contempt for musical people; he classed them with those barbarians whom he had heard the company speak of where he waited, who not only ate grubs, but declared that they liked them.

Martial was often as hardly put to it to secure a dinner as any of the authors I have hitherto named. He was fond of a good dinner, ut solent poetæ; and he knew nothing better than a hare, followed by a dish of thrushes. The thrush appears to have been a favourite bird in the estimation of the poets. The latter, may have loved to hear them sing, but they loved them better in a pie. Homer wrote a poem on the thrush; and Horace has said, in a line, as much in its favour as the Chian could have said in his long and lost poem,—“nil melius turdo.” Martial was, at all events, a better fed and better weighted man than the poet Philetas of Cos, who was so thin that he walked abroad with leaden balls to his feet, in order that he might not be carried away by the wind. The poet Archestratus, when he was captured by the enemy, was put in a pair of scales, and was found of the weight of an obolus. Perhaps this was the value of his poetry! It was the value of nearly all that was written by a gastronomic authoress in France; I allude to Madame de Genlis, who boasts in her Memoirs, that having been courteously received by a certain German, she returned the courtesy by teaching him how to cook seven different dishes after the French fashion.

The authors of France have exhibited much caprice in their gastronomic practice; often professing in one direction, and acting in its opposite. Thus Lamartine was a vegetarian until he entered his teens. He remains so in opinion, but he does violence to his taste, and eats good dinners for the sake of conforming to the rules of society! This course in an author, who is for the moment rigidly Republican when all the world around him is Monarchical, is singular enough. Lamartine’s vegetarian taste was fostered by his mother, who took him when a child to the shambles, and disgusted him with the sight of butchers in activity on slaughtering days. He for a long time led about a pet lamb by a ribbon, and went into strong fits at a hint from his mother’s cook, that it was time to turn the said pet into useful purposes, and make tendrons d’agneau of him. Lamartine would no more have thought of eating his lamb, than Emily Norton would have dreamed of breakfasting on collops cut from her dear white doe of Rylston. The poet still maintains, that it is cruel and sinful to kill one animal in order that another may dine; but, with a sigh for the victim, he can eat heartily of what is killed, and even put his fork into the breast of lamb without compunction,—but all for conformity! He knows that if he were to confine himself to turnips, he should enjoy better health and have a longer tenure of life; but then he thinks of the usages of society, sacrifices himself to custom, and gets an indigestion upon truffled turkey.

Moore, in his early days in London, used to dine somewhere in Marylebone with French refugee priests, for something less than a shilling. Dr. Johnson dined still cheaper, at the “Pine Apple,” in New-street, Covent Garden—namely, for eightpence. They who drank wine paid fourpence more for the luxury, but the lexicographer seldom took wine at his own expense; and sixpenny-worth of meat, one of bread, and a penny for the waiter, sufficed to purchase viands and comfort for the author of the “Vanity of Human Wishes.” Boyce the versifier was of quite another kidney; when he lay in bed, not only starving, but stark naked, a compassionate friend gave him half-a-guinea, which he spent in truffles and mushrooms, eating the same in bed under the blankets. There was something atrociously sublime about Boyce. Famine had pretty well done for him, when some one sent him a slice of roast beef, but Boyce refused to eat it, because there was no catchup to render it palatable.

It must have been a sight of gastronomic pleasure to have seen Wilkes and Johnson together over a fillet of veal, with abundance of butter, gravy, stuffing, and a squeeze of lemon. The philosopher and the patriot were then on a level with other hungry and appreciating men. Shallow with his short-legged hen, and Sir Roger de Coverley over hasty-pudding, are myths; not so Pope with stewed regicide lampreys, Charles Lamb before roast pig, or Lord Eldon next to liver and bacon, or Theodore Hook bending to vulgar pea-soup. These were rich realities, and the principal performers in them had not the slightest idea of affecting refinement upon such subjects. Goldsmith, when he could get it, had a weakness for haunch of venison; and Dr. Young was so struck with a broiled bladebone on which Pope regaled him, that he concluded it was a foreign dish, and anxiously inquired how it was prepared. Ben Jonson takes his place among the lovers of mutton, while Herrick wandering dinnerless about Westminster, Nahum Tate enduring sanctuary and starvation in the Mint, Savage wantonly incurring hunger, and Otway strangled by it, introduce us to authors with whom “dining with Duke Humphrey,” was so frequent a process, that each shadowy meal was but as a station towards death.

When Goldsmith “tramped” it in Italy, his flute ceased to be his bread-winner as it had been in France; the fellow-countrymen of Palestrina were deaf to “Barbara Allen,” pierced from memory through the vents of an Irish reed. Goldsmith, therefore, dropped his flute, and took up philosophy; not as a dignity; he played it as he had done his flute, for bread and a pillow. He knocked at the gate of a college instead of at the door of a cottage, made his bow, gave out a thesis, supported it in a Latin which must have set on edge the teeth of his hearers, and, having carried his exhibition to a successful end, was awarded the trifling and customary honorarium, with which he purchased bread and strength for the morrow. No saint in the howling wilderness lived a harder life than Goldsmith during his struggling years in London; the table traits, even of his days of triumph, were sometimes coloured unpleasingly. I am not sure if Goldsmith was present at the supper at Sir Joshua’s, when Miss Reynolds, after the repast, was called upon as usual to give a toast, and not readily remembering one, was asked to give the ugliest man of her acquaintance, and thereon she gave “Dr. Goldsmith;” the name was no sooner uttered than Mrs. Cholmondeley rushed across the room, and shook hands with Reynolds’s sister, by way of approval. What a sample of the manners of the day, and how characteristic the remark of Johnson, who was present, and whose wit, at his friend’s expense, was rewarded by a roar, that “thus the ancients, on the commencement of their friendships, used to sacrifice a beast between them!” Cuzzoni, when found famishing, spent the guinea given her in charity, in a bottle of tokay and a penny roll. So Goldsmith, according to Mrs. Thrale, was “drinking himself drunk with Madeira,” with the guinea sent to rescue him from hunger by Johnson. But let us be just to poor Oliver. If he squandered the eleemosynary guinea of a friend, he refused roast beef and daily pay, offered him by Parson Scott, Lord Sandwich’s chaplain, if he would write against his conscience, and in support of government; and he could be generous in his turn to friends who needed the exercise of generosity. When Goldsmith went into the suburban gardens of London to enjoy his “shoemakers’ holiday,” he generally had Peter Barlow with him. Now Peter’s utmost limit of profligacy was the sum of fifteen-pence for his dinner; his share would sometimes amount to five shillings, but Goldsmith always magnificently paid the difference. Perhaps there are few of the sons of song who dined so beggarly, and achieved such richness of fame, as Butler, Otway, Goldsmith, Chatterton, and, in a less degree of reputation, but not of suffering, poor Gerald Griffin, who wrestled with starvation till he began to despair. Chatterton did despair, as he sat without food, hope, and humility; and we know what came of it. Butler, the sturdy son of a Worcestershire farmer, after he had astonished his contemporaries by his “Hudibras,” lived known but to a few, and upon the charity or at the tables of them. But he did not, like the heartless though sorely-tried Savage, slander the good-natured friends at whose tables he drew the support of his life. As for Otway, whether he perished of suffocation by the roll which he devoured too greedily after long fasting, or whether he died of the cold draught of water, drank when he was overheated, it is certain that he died in extreme penury at the “Bull” on Tower Hill,—the coarse frequenters of the low public-house were in noisy revelry round their tables, while the body of the dead poet lay, awaiting the grave, in the room adjacent.

The table life of Peter Pindar was a far more joyous one than that of much greater poets. At Truro he was noted for his frugal fare, and he never departed from the observance of frugality of living throughout his career. He would sometimes, we are told, when visiting country patients, and when he happened to be detained, go into the kitchen and cook his own beefsteak, in order to show a country cook how a steak was done in London,—the only place, he said, where it was properly cooked. He laughed at the faculty as he did at the king, and set the whole profession mad by sanctioning the plentiful use of water, declaring that physic was an uncertain thing, and maintaining that in most cases all that was required on the doctor’s part was “to watch nature, and when she was going right, to give her a shove behind.” He was accustomed to analyse the drugs which he had prescribed for his patients, before he would allow the latter to swallow them, and he gave a decided county bias against pork by remarking of a certain apothecary that he was too fond of bleeding the patients who resorted to him, and too proud of his large breed of pigs. The inference was certainly not in favour of pork. Peter’s practical jokes in connexion with the table were no jokes to the chief object of them. Thus, when a pompous Cornish member of parliament issued invitations for as pompous a dinner to personages of corresponding pomposity, “Peter,” recollecting that the senator had an aunt who was a laundress, sent her an invitation in her nephew’s name, and the old lady, happy and proud, excited universal surprise, and very particular horror in the bosom of the parliament-man, by making her appearance in the august and hungry assembly, who welcomed her about as warmly as if she had been a “boule asphyxiatre” of the new French artillery practice.