[121] History of Musick.
[122] Harl. MSS. 5910, vol. i. fol. 193. The reader will be amused with the spelling of this extract from the original manuscript, written when Addison was penning “Spectators,” and many classic English compositions were issuing from the press. Old Mr Bagford was a genuine antiquary, and despised new hats, new coats, and anything approaching the new style of spelling, with other changes then being introduced.
[123] Misson’s Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England. London, 1719.
[124] England is the country, par excellence, for gigantic dinners, amongst which agricultural repasts stand foremost; even that nuptial dinner of Camacho, at which honest Sancho Panza did such execution, would scarcely rank as a lunch beside the Homeric dinners of our farmers. In our times we have seen Soyer roast a whole ox for the Agricultural Society at Exeter; the details of this culinary feat are somewhat interesting: it was called a “baron with saddle back of beef à la magna charta, weighing 535 lbs., the joints being the whole length of the ox, rumps, rounds, loins, ribs, and shoulders to the neck. It was roasted in the open air within a temporary enclosure of brick work, the monster joint steaming and frizzling away over 216 jets of gas from pipes of an inch diameter, the whole being covered in with sheet iron; when in 5 hours the beef was dressed for 5 shillings.”—Hints for the Table.
[125] Various examples of it occur in the Banks Bills.
[126] Original Weekly Journal, March 29 to April 3, 1718.
[127] Banks Bills.
[128] Historical and Topographical Account of the Parish of Fulham, 1813, p. 271.
[129] Boswell’s Johnson, vol. iv. p. 60.