On the whole, looking over the multiform bill of fare, it presented a healthy and not discreditable array. If the service was not as faultless as a Sybarite luxury of taste might desire, or if absent, might criticise, it was not destitute of refinement, and while consciously susceptible of improvement, was as consciously guiltless of many of the sins so wittily summarized against it by Sidney Smith. There was, doubtless, veal too young for the goggle-eyed epicure, who had haunted the Trois Freres Provencaux, in Paris, for twoscores of years, and the dishonest debaucheries of European courts, with vicious diligence; there was manifestly beef too much done for the dyspeptically over-fed stomach, too critical to enjoy, too weak to digest, anything hearty; there was pork here and there in the place of pheasants’ hearts and nightingales’ tongues; there were plump joints, which stood where foreign-fed stomachs might have preferred to find some rare, unpronounceable dish, some New-found-land estray, smothered in the sudden tides of French sauces, and, there were, also certain culinary anachronisms that had, by an uncalculating liberality—so abundant in America—piled themselves thoughtlessly on the great half-shell,—a blue-pouted oyster, for example, in a month destitute of an r and of ar-oma, or sweetmeats and sweetbreads for breakfast. Still, there was a very lavish spread, out of which a reasonable foreigner or an un-Europeanized native might pick a good deal, before he churlishly finished his meal on vinegar, or pettishly gave himself up to sugared water.
CHAPTER XV.
THE BEGINNING OF STRIFE; OR, THE TAYLOR AND FILLMORE WEBBING.
1849–1853.
The Young Polka Dancer becomes Floor Manager.—The large Apples of Discord emptied on the Floor of Congress.—What they were; and the Pacific Trees from which they fell.—Of California, New Mexico, and Deseret.—General Taylor’s Death, and Mr. Fillmore’s suave Manners and smooth Appeals.—Wendell Phillips and J. Davis.—Political Nurses and Anodynes.—Kossuth and his Short Catechism.—How it did not take, and how he did.—A large Piece of Japanned Ware.—Deaths of Clay and Webster.—The Autumn Glory which they shed on a Stormy Season.
The young man who, in Texas and Mexico, had got through the polka to the delight of the spectators, and the discontent of the floor committee, became himself the general manager for the coming season; Millard Fillmore being first assistant.
Already, however, the apple of discord, or rather a whole barrelful of very red-faced Spitzenbergs, mixed with meal-colored russets, had been emptied into the Union, and rolled over the floor of Congress. The acquisitions, gained from Mexico by arms and the treaty of 1848, including the new gold weights handed up by California, disturbed the adjustments of Mr. Calhoun’s patent balances, which only worked well when a colored State was put on one side at the same moment that an uncolored one was put upon the other,—an operation about as difficult and just as natural, as that which regulates the number of children in a family to the number of bushels of wheat grown in any season, or to the number of windy days in the year. In 1850, three Territories pressed for admission as States, each carrying some of the fatal apples; California, with a Constitution excluding slavery; New Mexico, formed out of Texas, but disputing with her a boundary line; and Utah, then called Deseret, taking in all the women which could be drawn thither, and, by the aid of its dry air, absorbing them into the Smith and Young families. Texas herself, admitted into the Union in December, 1847, always swaggering with a rapier in her belt and a patch over her eye, bullied New Mexico lustily on one side, so as to make lustier claims upon the United States on the other,—a cock-eyed way of shooting that made one barrel with two diverging eyes over the sight do the work of a double-shooter. Petitions from the North for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and from the South for a more stringent fugitive-slave act, rolled very large Spitzenbergs and russets on the floor of Congress.
Looking from the legislative galleries upon the newly arrived heap, a Western stroller might have asked of his comrade, as the freshly landed Irishman demanded of his countrymen, at his first sight of a tortoise walking about, “Be these live snuff-boxes common in these America; be they or be they?” and might have received a like answer, “Be asy, and look on I tell ye, for I dunno’s they be, and I dunno as they be.”
Suddenly, however, Mr. Clay’s old established omnibus, belonging to the compromise line,—which generally took up all the passengers, rejoicing at their good luck, although apt to set them down very discontented at the end of the way,—drove in to carry off in one load all of these fretting, complaining subjects.
Just at this time, July 9, 1850, the large-hearted but short-headed President died, and the polite and urbane Fillmore,
“Washing his hands with invisible soap,
In imperceptible water,”