Shaftesbury reveals to us an illustration of George the First’s reign. “In latter days,” he says, “it has become the fashion to eat with less ceremony and method. Every one chooses to carve for himself. The learned manner of dissection is out of request; and a certain method of cookery has been introduced, by which the anatomical science of the table is entirely set aside. Ragoûts and fricassées are the reigning dishes, in which every thing is so dismembered, and thrown out of all order and form, that no part of the mess can properly be divided or distinguished from another.” But we have come to a period that demands a chapter to itself; and even with that implied space, we can hardly do justice to the Table Traits of the Last Century.
TABLE TRAITS OF THE LAST CENTURY.
When Mr. Chute intimated to Horace Walpole that his “temperance diet and milk” had rendered him stupid, Walpole protested pleasantly against such an idea. “I have such lamentable proofs,” he says, “every day, of the stupifying qualities of beef, ale, and wine, that I have contracted a most religious veneration for your spiritual nouriture. Only imagine that I here, (Houghton,) every day, see men who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant rock at Pratolino! I shudder when I see them brandish their knives, in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour one another. I should not stare at all more than I do, if yonder Alderman, at the end of the table, was to stick his fork into his jolly neighbour’s cheek, and cut a brave slice of brown and fat. Why, I’ll swear I see no difference between a country gentleman and a sirloin: whenever the first laughs, or the latter is cut, there run out just the same streams of gravy! Indeed, the sirloin does not ask quite so many questions. I have an aunt here, a family piece of goods, an old remnant of inquisitive hospitality and economy, who, to all intents and purposes, is as beefy as her neighbours.”
Certainly, I think it may be considered that, in diet and in principles, we have improved upon the fashion of one hundred and ten years ago;—and, perhaps, the improvement in principles is a consequence of that in diet. There was a profound meaning in the point of faith of some old religionists, that the stomach was the seat of the soul. However this may be, the “beefy” men of Walpole’s time had, occasionally, strange ideas touching honour. Old Nourse, for instance, challenged Lord Windsor, who refused to fight him, either with sword or pistols, on the plea that Nourse was too aged a man. Thereupon Nourse, in a fit of vexation and indigestion, went home from the coffee-house and cut his throat! “It was strange, yet very English,” says Walpole. Old Nourse must have had Japanese blood in him. At Jeddo, when a nobleman feels himself slighted, he walks home, takes the sharpest knife he can find, and rips himself open, from the umbilicus to the trachea!
Quite as certainly, strong diet and weak principles prevailed among our great-grandsires and their dames. Lady Townshend fell in love with the rebel Lord Kilmarnock, from merely seeing him at his trial. She forthwith cast off her old lover, Sir Harry Nisbett, and became “as yellow as a jonquil” for the new object of her versatile affection. She even took a French master, in order that she might forget the language of “the bloody English!” She was not so afflicted, but that she could bear the company of gay George Selwyn to dine with her; and he, believing that her passion was feigned, joked with her, on what was always a favourite topic with himself,—the approaching execution. Lady Townshend forthwith rushed from the table in rage and tears, and Mr. Selwyn finished the bottle with “Mrs. Dorcas, her woman,” who begged of him to help her to a sight of the execution! Mrs. Dorcas had a friend who had promised to protect her, and, added she, “I can lie in the Tower the night before!” This is a pretty dining-room interior of the last century. As for George Selwyn, that most celebrated of the diners-out of a hundred years ago, he said the pleasantest thing possible at dessert, after the execution of Lord Lovat. Some ladies asked him how he could be such a barbarian as to see the head cut off. “Nay,” said he, “if that was such a crime, I am sure I have made amends; for I went to see it sewed on again!” “George,” says Walpole, “never thinks but à la tête tranchée; he came to town t’other day to have a tooth drawn, and told the man that he would drop his handkerchief for the signal.”
Selwyn kept his powers bright by keeping good company; while Gray the poet was but indifferent society, from living reclusely, added to a natural turn for melancholy, and “a little too much dignity.” Young, a greater poet than Gray, was as brilliant in conversation as Selwyn himself, as long as, like Selwyn, he polished his wit by contact with the world. When he dined with Garrick, Quin, and George Anne Bellamy, he was the sprightliest of the four; but when he took to realizing the solitude he had epically praised, Young, too, became a proser. Quin loved good living as much as he did sparkling conversation; and Garrick, the other guest noticed above, has perfectly delineated Quin the epicure in the following epigram, as he subsequently did Quin, the man and brother of men, in his epitaph in Bath Abbey:—
“A plague on Egypt’s art! I say;
Embalm the dead, on senseless clay
Rich wines and spices waste!
Like sturgeon, or like brawn, shall I,