‘But this we all knew
That a Scotchman can do—
Make a small piece of metal go awfully far.’
Then there was Lord Eldon, whose nearness was proverbial, and whose unwillingness to spend displayed itself markedly in his commissariat department. An anonymous epigram professed to record an ‘Inquest Extraordinary’:
‘Found dead, a rat—no case could sure be harder:
Verdict—Confined a week in Eldon’s larder.’
We are also told that, when Eldon and Sir Arthur Pigott quarrelled over the proper pronunciation of the legal term ‘lien’—the former calling it ‘lion,’ and the latter ‘lean’—Jekyll produced the following:
‘Sir Arthur, Sir Arthur, why what do you mean
By saying the Chancellor’s lion is lean?
D’ye think that his kitchen’s so bad as all that,
That nothing within it can ever get fat?’
Of Lord Kenyon, another judge of like inhospitable tendencies, someone said that in his house it was always Lent in the kitchen and Passion Week in the parlour. On another occasion it was remarked that ‘in his lordship’s kitchen the fire is dull, but the spits are always bright;’ to which Jekyll, pretending to be angry, replied, ‘Spits! in the name of common-sense, don’t talk about his spits—for nothing turns on them!’ When his lordship died, the words ‘Mors Janua Vita’ were by an error of the undertaker painted on the coffin; but, someone commenting on the substitution of ‘Vita’ for ‘Vitæ,’ Lord Ellenborough protested that there was no mistake. Kenyon, he declared, had directed that it should be ‘Vita,’ so that his estate might be saved the expense of a diphthong.
Most people know the story of Foote and Lord Stormont, the latter of whom had asked the former to dinner, and had placed before him wine served in the smallest of decanters and dispensed in the smallest of glasses. The peer enlarged upon the growth and age of the liquor; whereupon the player, holding up one of the glasses, demurely said, ‘It is very little of its age!’ This recalls an experience of Theodore Hook, when invited to dine with an unnamed nobleman, at the Star and Garter, Richmond. There were four of the party, and when covers were removed it was found that the fare consisted of four loin chops, four mealy potatoes, and a pint of sherry. These things despatched, the peer asked Hook for a song, and the wit responded with, of all things in the world, the National Anthem, which he gave correctly until, arriving at the line ‘Happy and glorious,’ he added—as if under the influence of drink—‘A pint between four of us—God save the King!’ A different form of stinginess, it would seem, was shown by Brigham Young, when (if we may believe the tale) he gave as a reason for marrying a certain male-garbed lady-doctor, that he would be able to have her clothes ‘made down’ for his boys.
The mean host has always been a special target for the scorn of his fellows. It was a Greek satirist who related how
‘A miser in his chamber saw a mouse,
And cry’d, dismay’d, “What dost thou in my house?”
She, with a laugh, “Good landlord, have no fear,
’Tis not for board, but lodging, I came here.”’
And since then the flood of banter has rolled on. Herrick complains of an unknown person that he invited him home to eat, and showed him there much plate but little meat. Garrick (who had evidently again forgotten the mote and the beam) wrote of a certain nobleman who had built a big mansion: