But after 1840 a change set in. Prince Albert was notoriously fond of luncheon, and Queen Victoria humoured him. They dined late, and the Luncheon at the Palace became a very real and fully recognized meal. At it the Queen sometimes received her friends, as witness the Royal Journal—"Mamma came to luncheon with her lady and gentleman." It could not have been pleasant for the "lady and gentleman," but it established the practice.
"Sunday luncheon" was always a thing apart. For some reason not altogether clear, but either because devotion long sustained makes a strong demand on the nervous system or because a digestive nap was the best way of employing Sunday afternoon, men who ate no luncheon on week-days devoured Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding on Sundays and had their appropriate reward. Bishop Wilberforce, whose frank self-communings are always such delightful reading, wrote in his diary for Sunday, October 27, 1861: "Preached in York Minster. Very large congregation. Back to Bishopthorpe. Sleepy, eheu, at afternoon service; must eat no luncheon on Sunday." When Luncheon had once firmly established itself, not merely as a meal but as an institution, Sunday luncheons in London became recognized centres of social life. Where there was even a moderate degree of intimacy a guest might drop in and be sure of mayonnaise, chicken, and welcome. I well remember an occasion of this kind when I saw social Presence of Mind exemplified, as I thought and think, on an heroic scale. Luncheon was over. It had not been a particularly bounteous meal; the guests had been many; the chicken had been eaten to the drumstick and the cutlets to the bone. Nothing remained but a huge Trifle, of chromatic and threatening aspect, on which no one had ventured to embark. Coffee was just coming, when the servant entered with an anxious expression, and murmured to the hostess that Monsieur Petitpois—a newly arrived French attaché—had come and seemed to expect luncheon. The hostess grasped the situation in an instant, and issued her commands with a promptitude and a directness which the Duke of Wellington could not have surpassed. "Clear everything away, but leave the Trifle. Then show M. Petitpois in." Enter Petitpois. "Delighted to see you. Quite right. Always at home at Sunday luncheon. Pray come and sit here and have some Trifle. It is our national Sunday dish." Poor young Petitpois, actuated by the same principle which made the Prodigal desire the husks, filled himself with sponge-cake, jam, and whipped cream; and went away looking rather pale. If he kept a journal, he no doubt noted the English Sunday as one of our most curious institutions, and the Trifle as its crowning horror.
Cardinal Manning, as all the world knows, never dined. "I never eat and I never drink," said the Cardinal. "I am sorry to say I cannot. I like dinner society very much. You see the world, and you hear things which you do not hear otherwise." Certainly that Cardinal was a fictitious personage, but he was drawn with fidelity from Cardinal Manning, who ate a very comfortable dinner at two o'clock, called it luncheon, and maintained his principle. There have always been some houses where the luncheons were much more famous than the dinners. Dinner, after all, is something of a ceremony: it requires forethought, care, and organization. Luncheon is more of a scramble, and, in the case of a numerous and scattered family, it is the pleasantest of reunions. "When all the daughters are married nobody eats luncheon," said Lothair to his solicitor, Mr. Putney Giles: but Mr. Putney Giles, "who always affected to know everything, and generally did," replied that, even though the daughters were married, "the famous luncheons at Crecy House would always go on and be a popular mode of their all meeting." When Lord Beaconsfield wrote that passage he was thinking of Chesterfield House, May Fair, some twenty years before Lord Burton bought it. Mr. Gladstone, who thought modern luxury rather disgusting, used to complain that nowadays life in a country house meant three dinners a day, and if you reckoned sandwiches and poached eggs at five o'clock tea, nearly four. Indeed, the only difference that I can perceive between a modern luncheon and a modern dinner is that at the former meal you don't have soup or a printed menu. But at a luncheon at the Mansion House you have both; so it is well for Lord Mayors that their reigns are brief.
One touch of personal reminiscence may close this study. While yet the Old Bailey stood erect and firm, as grim in aspect as in association, I used often, through the courtesy of a civic official, to share the luncheon of the judge and the aldermen, eaten during an interval in the trial, in a gloomy chamber behind the Bench. I still see, in my mind's eye, a learned judge, long since gone to his account, stuffing cold beef and pigeon pie, and quaffing London stout, black as Erebus and heavy as lead. After this repast he went back into Court (where he never allowed a window to be opened) and administered what he called justice through the long and lethargic afternoon. No one who had witnessed the performance could doubt the necessity for a Court of Criminal Appeal.
XXIV
TEA
Few, I fear, are the readers of Mrs. Sherwood. Yet in "The Fairchild Family" she gave us some pictures of English country life at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century which neither Jane Austen nor Mrs. Gaskell ever beat, and at least one scene of horror which is still unsurpassed. I cannot say as much for "Henry Milner, or the Story of a Little Boy who was not brought up according to the Fashions of this World." No, indeed—very far from it. And Henry now recurs to my mind only because, in narrating his history, Mrs. Sherwood archly introduces a sentence which may serve as a motto for this meditation. Like Bismarck (though unlike him in other respects), she was fond of parading scraps of a rather bald Latinity; and, in this particular instance, she combines simple scholarship with staid humour, making her hero exclaim to a tea-making lady, "Non possum vivere sine Te." The play on Te and Tea will be remarked as very ingenious. Barring the Latinity and the jest, I am at one with Mrs. Sherwood in the sentiment, "My heart leaps up when I behold" a teapot, like Wordsworth's when he beheld a rainbow; and the mere mention of tea in literature stirs in me thoughts which lie too deep for words. Thus I look forward with the keenest interest to