"I say," replied the Jemadar, "that you are beginning to talk most infernal nonsense, and that I must be off, as I have an engagement at three to play a match at billiards. In the meantime, you'll oblige me by settling with Mrs Stewart for the ices."
COOKERY AND CIVILISATION.[12]
It is only after passing through an ordeal cruelly insidious, tolerably severe, and rather protracted, that we feel conscientiously entitled to assert our ability to dine every day of every week at the Reform Club, without jeopardy to those immutable principles which are incorruptible by Whigs and indestructible by Rats. A sneer, perhaps, is curling with "beautiful disdain" the lips of some Conservative Achilles. Let us nip his complacent sense of invulnerability in the bud. To eat and to err are equally attributes of humanity. Looking at ourselves in the mirror of honest criticism, we behold features as unchangeable as sublunary vicissitudes will allow.
"Time writes no wrinkles on our azure brow."
Witness it! ye many years of wondrous alternation—of lurid tempest and sunny calm—of disastrous rout and triumphant procession—of shouting pæan and wailing dirge—witness the imperturbable tenor of our way! Attest it, thou goodly array of the tomes of Maga, laden and sparkling, now as ever, with wisdom and wit, science and fancy!—attest the unwavering fidelity of our career! All this is very true; but the secret annals of the good can never be free from temptations, and never are in reality unblotted by peccadilloes. The fury of the demagogue has been our laughing-stock—the versatility of trimming politicians, our scorn. We have crouched before none of the powers which have been, or be; neither have we been carried off our feet by the whirlwinds of popular passion. Yet it is difficult to resist a good dinner. The victories of Miltiades robbed Themistocles of sleep. The triumphs of Soyer are apt to affect us, "with a difference," after the same fashion.
There was, we remember, a spirit of surly independence within us on visiting, for the first time, the "high capital" of Whiggery, where the Tail at present
"New rubb'd with balm, expatiate and confer
Their State affairs."
To admire any thing was not our mood: