‘A little house would best accord
With you, my very little lord!
And then exactly matched would be
Your house and hospitality!’
Much in the same way, Richard Graves wrote of the master of a house which was well kept but not open to company:
‘If one may judge by rooms so neat,
It costs you more in mops than meat!’
Note, again, Egerton Warburton’s versification of a remark attributed to Lord Alvanley. A gentleman had drawn attention to the fact that his house was furnished à la Louis Quatorze:
‘“Then I wish,” said a guest, “when you ask us to eat,
You would furnish your board à la Louis Dixhuit.
The eye, can it feast when the stomach is starving?
Pray less of your gilding and more of your carving.”’
John Headley, describing dinner at one Lady Anne’s, tells us that
‘A silver service loads the board,
Of eatables a slender hoard;’
and the sarcasm reminds one of the address with which Theodore Hook once bore himself under somewhat similar circumstances. Invited to dine with an old lady, he was horrified when the servant, lifting the cover, displayed a couple of chops. ‘Mr. Hook,’ said the hostess, ‘you see your dinner.’ ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ observed Hook; ‘but where’s yours?’
The niggardliness which displays itself in smaller subscriptions to public or private objects than the donor’s means will justify has naturally met with keen reproach. Herrick has a quatrain directed against the failing; and everyone remembers the lines about the man who declared that at the sound of woe his hand was always open:
‘Your hand is open, to be sure,
But there is nothing in it.’