"Clear mulligatawny's about the best thing I know to begin a dinner upon. Some fellows like Palestine soup. That's a mistake."
"The greatest minds," said Cornelius to the Poet Laureate, "condescend to the meanest things——"
"'Gad!" said Tennyson, "if you call such a dinner as this mean, I wonder what you'd call respectable."
Cornelius felt snubbed. But he presently rallied and went on again. It was between the courses.
"Pray, Mr. Carlyle," he asked, with the sweetest smile, "what was the favourite soup of Herr Teufelsdröckh?"
"Who?" asked the Philosopher. "Beg your pardon, Herr how much?"
"From your own work, Mr. Carlyle," Jack sang out from his end. It was remarkable to notice how anxiously he followed the conversation.
"Oh, ah! quite so," said Mr. Carlyle. "Well, you see, the fact is that—Jack Dunquerque knows."
This was disconcerting too, and the more because everybody began to laugh. What did they laugh at?
The dinner went on. Gilead Beck, silent and grave, sat at the head of the table, watching his guests. He ought, he said to himself, to be a proud man that day. But there were one or two crumpled rose-leaves in his bed. One thing was that he could not for the life of him remember each man's works, so as to address him in honeyed tones of adulation. And he also rightly judged that the higher a man's position in the world of letters, the more you must pile up the praise. No doubt the lamented George the Fourth, the Fourteenth Louis, and John Stuart Mill, grew at last to believe in the worth of the praise-painting which surrounded their names.