When you are helped to anything at a dinner table, do not wait, with your plate untouched, until others have begun to eat. This stiff-piece of mannerism is often occurring in the country, and indeed among all persons who are not thoroughly bred. As soon as your plate is placed before you, you should take up your knife and arrange the table furniture around you, if you do not actually eat.
As to the instruments by which the operation of dining is conducted, it is a matter of much consequence that entire propriety should be observed as to their use. We have said nothing about the use of silver forks, because we do not write for savages; and where, excepting among savages, shall we find any who at present eat with other than a French fork?. There are occasionally to be found some ancients, gentlemen of the old school, as it is termed, who persist in preferring steel, and who will insist on calling for a steel fork if there is none on the table. They consider the modem custom an affectation, and deem that all affectation should be avoided. They tread upon the pride of Plato, with more pride. There is often affectation in shunning affectation. It is better in things not material to submit to the established habits, especially when, as in the present case, the balance of convenience is decidedly on the part of fashion. The ordinary custom among well bred persons, is as follows:—soup is taken with a spoon. Some foolish fashionables employ a fork! They might as well make use of a broomstick. The fish which follows is eaten with a fork, a knife not being used at all. The fork is held in the right hand, and a piece of bread in the left. For any dish in which cutting is not indispensable, the same arrangement is correct. When you have upon your plate, before the dessert, anything partially liquid, or any sauces, you must not take them up with a knife, but with a piece of bread, which is to be saturated with the juices, and then lifted to the mouth. If such an article forms part of the dessert, you should eat it with a spoon. In carving, steel instruments alone are employed. For fowls a peculiar knife is used, having the blade short and the handle very long. For fish a broad and pierced silver blade is used.
A dinner—we allude to dinner-parties—in this country, is generally despatched with too much hurry. We do not mean, that persons commonly eat too fast, but that the courses succeed one another too precipitately. Dinner is the last operation of the day, and there is no subsequent business which demands haste. It is usually intended, especially when there are no ladies, to sit at the table till nine, ten, or eleven o’clock, and it is more agreeable that the eating should be prolonged through a considerable portion of the entire time. The conveniences of digestion also require more deliberation, and it would therefore not be unpleasant if an interval of a quarter of an hour or half an hour were allowed to intervene between the meats and the dessert.
At dinner, avoid taking upon your plate too many things at once. One variety of meat and one kind of vegetable is the maximum. When you take another sort of meat, or any dish not properly a vegetable, you always change your plate.
The fashion of dining inordinately late in this country is foolish. It is borrowed from England without any regard to the difference in circumstances between the two nations. In London, the whole system of daily duties is much later. The fact of parliament’s sitting during the evening and not in the morning, tends to remove the active part of the day to a much more advanced hour. When persons rise at ten or two o’clock, it is not to be expected that they should dine till eight or twelve in the evening. There is nothing of this sort in France. There they dine at three, or earlier. We have known some fashionable dinners in different cities in this country at so late an hour as eight or nine o’clock. This is absurd, where the persons have all breakfasted at eight in the morning. From four o’clock till five varies the proper hour for a dinner party here.
Never talk about politics at a dinner table or in a drawing room.
When you are going into a company it is of advantage to run over in your mind, beforehand, the topics of conversation which you intend to bring up, and to arrange the manner in which you will introduce them. You may also refresh your general ideas upon the subjects, and run through the details of the few very brief and sprightly anecdotes which you are going to repeat; and also have in readiness one or two brilliant phrases or striking words which you will use upon occasion. Further than this it is dangerous to make much preparation. If you commit to memory long speeches with the design of delivering them, your conversation will become formal, and you will be negligent of the observations of your company. It will tend also to impair that habit of readiness and quickness which it is necessary to cultivate in order to be agreeable.
You must be very careful that you do not repeat the same anecdotes or let off the same good things twice to the same person. Richard Sharpe, the “conversationist” as he was called in London, kept a regular book of entry, in which he recorded where and before whom he had uttered severally his choice sayings. The celebrated Bubb Doddington prepared a manuscript book of original facetiæ, which he was accustomed to read over when he expected any distinguished company, trusting to an excellent memory to preserve him from iteration.
If you accompany your wife to a ball, be very careful not to dance with her.
The lady who gives a ball dances but little, and always selects her partners.