He was a right sensible man who wrote as follows; and his theory and advice will apply as well in Gotham as elsewhere: "As to extensive dinner-giving, we can be but hungry, eat, and be happy. I would have a great deal more hospitality practiced among us than is at all common; more hospitality, I mean, and less show. Properly considered, 'the quality of dinner,' like that of mercy, 'is twice blessed—it blesses him that gives, and him that takes.' A dinner with friendliness is the best of all friendly meetings; a pompous entertainment, where 'no love is,' is the least satisfactory.
"I own myself to being no worse nor better than my neighbors, in giving foolish and expensive dinners. I rush off to the confectioner's for sweets, et cetera; hire sham butlers and attendants; have a fellow going round the table with 'still' and 'dry' champagne, just as if I knew his name, and it was my custom to drink those wines every day of my life. Now if we receive great men or ladies at our house, I will lay a wager that they will select mutton and gooseberry-tart for their dinner; forsaking altogether the 'entrées' which the men in white gloves are handing round in the plated dishes. Asking those who have great establishments of their own to French dinners and delicacies, is like inviting a grocer to a meal of figs, or a pastry-cook to a banquet of raspberry tarts. They have had enough of them. Great folks, if they like you, take no account of your feasts, and grand preparations. No; they eat mutton, like men."
As to giving large dinners, morever, Mr. Brown reasons like a philosopher. In the right way of giving a dinner, he contends, "every man who now gives one dinner might give two, and take in a host of friends and relations," who are now excluded from his forced hospitality. "Our custom," he says "is not hospitality nor pleasure, but to be able to cut off a certain number of our really best acquaintances from our dining-list." Again, these large, ostentatious dinners are scarcely ever pleasant, so far as regards society: "You may chance to get near a pleasant neighbor and neighboress, when your corner of the table is possibly comfortable. But there can be no general conversation. Twenty people around one board can not engage together in talk. You want even a speaking-trumpet to communicate from your place with the lady of the house." The sensible conclusion of the whole matter is: "I would recommend, with all my power, that if we give dinners they should be more simple, more frequent, and contain fewer persons. A man and woman may look as if they were really glad to see ten people; but in a 'great dinner,' an ostentatious dinner, they abdicate their position as host and hostess, and are mere creatures in the hands of the sham butlers, sham footmen, and tall confectioner's emissaries who crowd the room, and are guests at their own table, where they are helped last, and of which they occupy the top and bottom. I have marked many a lady watching with timid glances the large artificial major-domo who officiates 'for that night only,' and thought to myself, 'Ah, my dear madam, how much happier might we all be, if there were but half the splendor, half the made-dishes, and half the company assembled!'"
To our conception there is something rather tickling to the fancy in the following sage advice as to how to conduct one's self in case of fire: "Whatever may be the heat of the moment, keep cool. Let nothing put you out, but find something to put out the fire. Keep yourself collected, and then collect your family. After putting on your shoes and stockings, call out for pumps and hose to the fireman. Don't think about saving your watch and rings, for while you stand wringing your hands, you may be neglecting the turn-cock, who is a jewel of the first water at such a moment. Bid him with all your might turn on the main!"
Punch once drew an admirable picture of a London "Peter Funk," a sort of character not altogether unknown in the metropolis of the western world:
"The amount that prodigal man must spend every year would drive Rothschild into the work-house. Nothing is too good or too common, too expensive or too cheap, for him. One moment he will buy a silver candelabra, the next a silver thimble. In the morning he will add a hundred-guinea dressing-case to his enormous property, and in the afternoon amuse himself by bidding a shilling for a little trumpery pen-knife. Why he must have somewhere about fifty thousand pen-knives already.
"The article he has the greatest hankering for, are razors: and yet, to look at his unshorn beard, you would fancy that he never shaved from one month's end to another. The hairs stick out on his chin like the wires on the drum of a musical-box. It is most amusing to watch him when the razors are handed round. He will snatch one off the tray, draw the edge across his nail, breathe upon it, then hold it up to the light, and after wiping it in the gentlest manner upon the cuff of his coat, bid for it as ravenously as if he would not lose the scarce article for all the wealth of the Indies. What he does with all the articles he buys we can not tell. Saint Paul's would not be large enough to contain all the rubbish he has been accumulating these last ten years. His collection of side-boards alone would fill Hyde-Park, and he must possess by this time more dumb waiters than there are real waiters in England."