As a contrast to these notable repasts, I am reminded of a certain frugal meal enjoyed, once upon a time, by a couple of English artists, Stothard and Constable. I have said "once upon a time," but it was really in the year 1824, and in the summer, though the month and day are not recorded. The two artists went for an outing, walking from London to Combe Wood, where the hills and dells are clothed in copse and underwood, and you make your way through tangles of gorse and bramble and bracken-fern. They started early in the day, provided with some sandwiches for dinner. Before they reached their destination, Constable broke in upon the stock of provisions, eliciting a reproof from Stothard for his ill-regulated appetite. They arrived at a crystal spring. The water was low, and difficult to get at; but Constable took from his pocket a tin cup, which, unnoticed by his companion, he had bought at Putney. The day was hot, and the water intensely cold. "Hold it in your mouth, sir, some time before you swallow it," said Stothard. "A little brandy or rum now would be invaluable." "And you shall have some, sir," said Constable, "if you will retract what you said; for I have brought a bottle of rum from town-a thing you never thought of." Though Constable carried their fare, Stothard was the caterer. As they lay on the grass, enjoying their meal under the trees that shaded them from a midsummer sun, Stothard, looking up to the splendid colour of the foliage over their heads, said: "That's all glazing, sir." The defeat of the motion in favour of Parliamentary Reform, introduced into the House of Commons by Mr. Lambton, afterwards Earl of Durham, on April the seventeenth, 1821, was due, it is said, to a dinner. The debate was long and animated; and so many members desired to speak, that it was adjourned to the following night. The motion was then put, and carried by fifty-five to forty-three; but what caused general surprise was the absence of the mover, Mr. Lambton, and his principal supporters. It seems that they were all dining beneath the hospitable roof of Mr. Michael Angelo Taylor, and lingered too long over the attractions of the "soupe à la reine" and "Barnes's claret," with the result that the anti-reformers, observing the thinned ranks of their opponents, "snapped" a division; so that, when Lambton and Brougham hurried into the House, they were received with mocking laughter, and found that all was over. The occurrence suggested a squib in the "John Bull" newspaper, which has been attributed to Canning, entitled "Michael's Dinner"; it was adapted to the tune of "Soger Laddie." At this time the editor of "John Bull" was also its founder and principal contributor, Theodore Hook, whose brilliant talents and reckless courage had raised him to an influential position in the world of politics. He was the chief literary swashbuckler and swordsman of the Tory party during the stormy days of Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. Moreover, he was an indefatigable diner out; and his flow of humour, his high spirits, and his remarkable powers as an improvisatore, made him a welcome guest. The very last entry in his diary indicates the character of the society into which he had made his way: "To dinner to Lord Harrington's to meet the Duke of Wellington. There, Duke and Duchess of Bedford, Lord and Lady Southampton, Lord Londonderry, Lord Canterbury, Lord Lyndhurst, Lord Redesdale, Lord Charleville, Lord Strangford, Lord Stuart de Rothesay, Count D'Orsay, Lord Chesterfield, and Fitzroy Stanhope." In more than one of his clever but superficial works he has introduced some amusing satirical sketches of middle-class society and its heavy dinners; but they will not bear quotation. Here, however, is an anecdote which he records on the authority of the Marquis of Hertford-the Marquis of Monmouth of Lord Beaconsfield's "Coningsby": A Mr. H., having received a boar's head as a present from a German friend, chanced to mention the circumstance to the Marquis, adding: "And now I have got this wonderful delicacy, I declare I don't know how it is to be dressed." "Oh," said Lord Hertford, "send it to my cook, Champigny; he shall do it properly for you; it is really good eating." The banker accepted the offer, and in due time the head was returned, with much artistic garniture, and bearing evident marks of skilful and appropriate treatment. "Well," said the Marquis, the next time he met Mr. H., "how did the head turn out? My fellow says he devoted himself to it with enthusiasm; it was one of the finest specimens he had ever had the pleasure of manipulating." "I dare say he is right," answered Mr. H.; "but if so, there was a great deal of trouble and ingenuity thrown away; for it was so confoundedly tough, after all, that I for one could not get my teeth through it." "Tough, was it? You could not have dressed it sufficiently." "Why, of course, I never dressed it at all; your people dressed it, and dressed it well, too. Nothing could look better, but as to eating it However, some of them at table contrived to get it down, and said it had the true flavour." "My people!" repeated his lordship. "My man dressed it, certainly; but there's the cooking!" "What cooking?" enquired Mr. H. "It got no cooking but what he gave it; we eat it just as it was sent, of course. "What, raw?" shouted the Marquis, laughing. "Why, my good friend, Champigny only prepared the head for roasting; your man should have cooked it afterwards." "Then why the deuce didn't the fool say so?" enquired the discomfited banker. Hook, according to his biographer "Ingoldsby" Barham-" was much sought after by lords and ladies who had a dinner to give or a Christmas party to manage." In short, he was a professional diner-out; and, in return for his dinner and his wines, was expected to amuse the company. Lord Beaconsfield introduces him in "Coningsby," under the pseudonym of Lucian Gay, as one whom Nature had intended for a scholar and a wit, but Necessity had made a scribbler and a buffoon. His conversational powers he characterises as brilliant, and adds that he possessed all the resources of good fellowship. A constant guest at the tables of the nobility, Whig as well as Conservative, he was frequently an inmate of their country seats and admitted to their social penetralia. At Hatfield House, where he provided private and confidential dinners for the admirers of amateur theatricals; at the late Lord Canterbury's, the Marquis of Hertford's, Sir Robert Peel's, Sir Francis Burdett's, he dined well and oft. To his remarkable facility as an improvisatore, Charles Greville bears this testimony. In his diary, under the date of August the fifteenth, 1834, he records a dinner at Farquhar's, at which, among others, he met Mrs. Norton, her sister, Mrs. Blackwood, and Theodore Hook. After dinner he displayed his powers of improvisation, and was very brilliant. Each lady gave him a subject, such as "The Goodwood Cup," "The Tithe Bill;' "could not think of anything," but he dashed off and sang stanzas innu one merable and very droll, with ingenious rhymes and excellent hits; "his eye begetting occasion for his excellent wit," for at every word of interruption or admiration, every look or motion, he indulged in a digression, always returning to one of the themes imposed upon him. "It is a tour de force," adds Greville, "in which I believe he stands alone, and it is certainly wonderfully well worth hearing and uncommonly amusing." The diary of Charles Greville, Clerk of the Council to George the Fourth and William the Fourth, from which I make the foregoing extracts, may be taken as our guide to not a few dinners of more than average importance, though he describes them with provoking brevity, and inconsiderately omits the menus, oblivious of their historical and ethical significance. Thus he records a Royal dinner: Host, George the Fourth; place, the Pavilion, Brighton; but brands it as cold, and the evening afterwards as dull beyond all dulness. "They say," he adds, "the King is anxious that form and ceremony should be banished, and, if so, it only proves how impossible it is that form and ceremony should not always inhabit a palace. The rooms are not furnished for society, and, in fact, society cannot flourish without ease; and who can feel at ease who is under the eternal constraint which etiquette and respect impose? The King was in good looks and good spirits, and, after dinner, cut his jokes with all the coarse merriment which is his characteristic." This may amuse the reader :-April, 1829. "Dined at the Covent Garden Theatrical Fund dinner. The Duke of Clarence could not come, so they put Lord Blessington in the chair, who made an ass of himself. Among other toasts he was to give 'The memory of the Duke of York,' who was the founder of the institution. He prefaced this with a speech, but gave the health, etc.; on which Fawcett, the comedian, who sat opposite, called out in an agony, 'the memory, my lord!' He corrected himself; but in a minute after said again 'the health.' 'The memory,' my lord!' again roared Fawcett. It was supremely ridiculous." On one occasion Hook met at dinner Moore, Fitzgerald, and Luttrell, and one can well believe that the talk of these men must have lent a piquant flavour to the dishes and enhanced the aroma of the wines. Macaulay was an inveterate diner-out; repast with a series of quotations from not for the sake of "the viands" (as the "Almanach des Gourmands;" that Lord Lytton calls them), but for the curious mirror of the vulgar luxury and enjoyment he found in talking and leisure which prevailed in Paris after the being talked to; some people sourly say austere sullenness of the Republic, and that his chief enjoyment lay in the immediately prior to the parvenu magformer direction. At Holland House he nificence of the Empire. His wonderful was one of the most frequent of guests. memory retained the choice bits of unHe thoroughly appreciated the the fine conscious humour and extravagance with qualities of its noble owner, who was which Grimaud de la Reynière has studded somewhat obscured to the general vision his eight volumes; and he loved to describe by the effulgence of his gifted but the portentous ceremonies of a Parisian imperious wife. The pleasures of the banquet, from those complicated inconcultured and refined society which they veniences of arrangement,"que les personnes assembled under their historic roof never bien avisées ont l'attention d'abréger en palled upon him; and in the brilliant mettant d'avance le nom de chaque conversation which Lady Holland so convive sur chaque couvert, dans l'ordre de skilfully initiated and so gracefully kept leur appétit connu ou présumé," to the going, he was, as we all know, a principal" visite de digestion" on the morrow, the factor. He was himself a pattern host. Oa his own account, it is true, he was no epicure; and his nephew tells us that at any time he would have been amply satisfied by a dinner such as is served at a decent seaside lodging-house. This was a sad moral defect; but happily his conscientious views of the obligations of hospitality prevented his guests from suffering by it. He generally selected, by a half-conscious preference, dishes of established character and traditional fame. His dissenting friends he treated to a fillet of veal, which he maintained to be the recognised Sunday dinner in good old Nonconformist families." On Michaelmas Day he would have been wretched had no goose smoked on the board. At Christmas, he never forgot the old historic turkey. "If he was entertaining a couple of schoolboys who could construe the fourth satire of Juvenal, he would reward them for their proficiency with a dish of mullet that might have passed muster on the table of an augur or an Emperor's freedman. ... With regard to the contents of his cellar, Macaulay prided himself on being able to say with Mr. John Thorpe,* Mine is famous good stuff, to be sure,' and if he were taken to task for his extravagance, he would reply, in the words used by another of his favourite characters in fiction, † that there was a great deal of good eating and drinking in seven hundred a year, if people knew how to manage it." Sometimes he would flavour a domestic * In Miss Austin's "Northanger Abbey." + In Miss Ferrier's "Marriage.' length of which was supposed to be proportioned to the excellence of the entertainments. He would enumerate every item of the dinner from the "potage brûlant, tel qu'il doit être," on to the "biscuit d'ivrogne," not forgetting the imperative declaration that "tout bon mangeur a fini son dîner après le rôti." He reminded his hearers that, according to De la Reynière, oysters, after the sixth dozen, ceased to whet the appetite; and repeated, with unfailing relish, the closing portion of the description of a grand entertainment given under the Consulate: "Ceux qui veulent faire grandement les choses, finissent par parfumer la bouche de leurs convives (ou plutôt de leurs amis, car c'est ainsi que s'appellent les convives d'un déjeûner), avec deux ou trois tasses de glaces; ou se la rince ensuite avec un grand verre de marasquin; et puis chacun se retire en hâte chez soi-pour aller manger la soupe." But his favourite quotation was admirable passage which prescribes the period-varying from four to six weeks according to the excellence of the dinnerwherein the guests may speak no evil of their host (ah, how much happier would be Society if this rule were generally proclaimed and acted upon 1) who has, moreover, the privilege of holding them to longer silence by issuing fresh invitations before the "truce of God" (as one may justly term it) has expired: "On conviendra que, de toutes les manières d'empêcher de mal parler de soi, celle-ci n'est pas le moins aimable." the It was characteristic of Macaulay that he loved to assemble round him the contemporaries of his University period. Thus: "To the 'Clarendon' at seven, where I had ordered dinner for a party of ex- Smollett's Humphrey Clinker': that one Fellows of the dear old College. We wit in a company, like a knuckle of ham had an excellent dinner. The Dean of in soup, gives a flavour, but two are too Durham's favourite dish, Filet de boeuf many." He dines with Earl Grey in sauté au vin de Madère aux Truffes,' was Downing Street. "At eight we went to there. We all tried it, applauded it, and dinner. Lord Howick took his father's drank his health in champagne recom- place, and we feasted very luxuriously. At mended by him." And again: "Lord nine Lord Grey came from the house with Mayor's Day; and I had a dinner as well Lord Durham, Lord Holland, and the as the Lord Mayor." The guests consisted Duke of Richmond. They dined on the exclusively of old Fellows and scholars of remains of our dinner with great expediTrinity, and he had got some College ale tion, as they had to go to a Cabinet Council sent up from Cambridge. "I did my best at ten." He dines at Lyttleton's, in Grosas host. The dinner was well cooked, the venor Place, and meets Lords Brougham audit ale perfect. We had so much to say and Plunket, and many more lords and about auld lang syne that great powers of commoners. "Lyttleton, till last year, lived conversation were not wanted, I have in Portman Square. When he changed been at parties of men celebrated for wit his residence his servants gave him warnand eloquence which were much less lively. ing. They could not, they said, consent to Everybody seemed to be pleased." go into such an unheard of part of the world as Grosvenor Place. He gave me a dinner of dinners." He dines with Lord Althorp, and with Sir James Graham, and each Minister regales him with turtle, turbot, venison, and game. I shall take note of a few of the dinners at which Macaulay assisted, for the sake of the reminiscences they call up of men and events. He had already won his spurs in the lists of literature when, in 1826, he dined at Sydney Smith's remote Yorkshire parsonage. At Edinburgh he dines with Jeffrey, at his house in Moray Place, and speaks of the great critic's conversation as "very much like his countenance and his voice of immense variety; sometimes plain and unpretending even to flatness, sometimes whimsically brilliant and rhetorical almost beyond the license of private discourse. He has many interesting anecdotes, and tells them very well." He dines at Bowood, Lord Lansdowne's seat, and has "oceans of beer and mountains of potatoes" for dinner. In January, 1834, he dines with his sisters, and stays late. "He talked almost uninterruptedly for six hours. In the evening he made a great many impromptu charades in verse." In May, 1831, he eats his first dinner at Holland House. Among the guests were Lord John Russell-Allen, warden of Dulwich College, a great friend of the HollandsLords Holland, Alvanley, Mahon-afterwards Earl Stanhope-and others. He attends a Holland House dinner, at which Earl Grey, Lords Brougham and Palmerston, Luttrell, and himself are the only guests. Allen sat at the end of the table, carving, and simultaneously sparring with Lady Holland, who, because the dinner was not so good as usual-the French "chef" being ill-kept up a continual lamentation during the whole repast. "The soup was too salt; the cutlets were not exactly 'comme il faut'; and the pudding was hardly enough boiled." Later, he dines at Lord Essex's in Belgrave Square. Never was there such a contrast! Macaulay had been led to understand that his lordship's cuisine was superintended by the first French artists; and that he would find there all the luxuries of the "Almanach des Gourmands." But no, his lordship was a true Englishman; and there was not a dish on his table which Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley, or Miss Burney's Sir Hugh Tyrold-in her "Camilla might not have set before his guests. "A huge haunch of venison on the side-board; He dines at Marshall's, where the great a magnificent piece of beef at the bottom attraction was the presence of the two wits, of the table; and before my Lord himself Rogers and Sydney Smith. "To see them smoked, not a 'dindon aux truffes,' but a together was a novelty, and a novelty not fat wastel goose, stuffed with sage and the less curious because their mutual hos-onions. I was disappointed," says Macaulay, tility is well known, and the hard hits" but very agreeably, for my tastes are, which they have given to each other are in everybody's mouth. They were very civil, however. But I was struck by the truth of what Matthew Bramble says in fear, incurably vulgar." I When he dines for the first time with that famous society of men of light and leading, "The Club," at the Thatched House, Lord Holland is in the chair; and among the I have brought my record down as near members present are the Bishop of London, to the present day as seems desirable, or, Lord Mahon, Phillips the painter, Dean at any rate, is convenient. In these later Milman, Elphinstone, Sir Charles Grey, Victorian years the art of dining has been and Hudson Gurney. Lastly, he goes to and is cultivated on a very extensive scale ; Buckingham Palace. "The Queen was most so that the menus of the middle class now gracious to me. She talked much about display a taste, a variety, a refinement, my book-the 'History of England'-and and an attention to hygienic conditions, owned that she had nothing to say for her such as a century ago would hardly have poor ancestor, James the Second. Not been found in "patrician" menus. That your Majesty's ancestor,' said I, 'your the dinner has not suffered in historical Majesty's predecessor.' I hope this was not importance is tolerably evident. It is still an uncourtly correction. I meant it as a the great consecrating rite, the sacred compliment, and she seemed to take it so." eeremony, which confirms the appointment Boyle Farm, at Thames Ditton, in the of an Indian viceroy or an Australian days of the ex-Chancellor, Lord St. governor-general; which expresses the Leonards, was the scene of many a de- national gratitude to a great traveller or a lightful dinner, at which the famous lawyer popular actor; which testifies to the reassembled the most distinguished of his putation of a sound divine, or a fortunate contemporaries. The house maintained, speculator; which sustains the appeal for in fact, a tradition of hospitality; for in aid of a deserving charity. If we want the Walpole period, Mrs. Walsingham and to do honour to a man, or show our her daughter, Miss Boyle-an amateur sympathy with a cause, we straightway artist of some distinction-entertained ask ourselves and others to dinner. In their friends at Boyle Farm with frequent truth, politics, literature, art, society, all liberality. Miss Boyle married, first, Lord gravitate towards the dinner-table. And de Ros, and, second, Lord Henry Fitz- thus I am minded of the height and gerald, and still resided at Boyle Farm, breadth of my subject, and of the small where, in 1827, her son, Lord Henry de portion of it which I have been able to Ros, and four other young men of fashion, explore in this and preceding articles. Lords Alvanley, Castlereagh, Chesterfield, Alas, I have been unable to treat at any and Robert Grosvenor each subscribing length of legal dinners, ecclesiastical five hundred pounds-gave a most gorgeous dinners, theatrical dinners, official dinners, féte, which was celebrated by Moore in his Scotch and Irish dinners! There would poem, "A Summer Fête," dedicated to the be something to be said, too, about Oriental Hon. Mrs. Norton, one of the beautiful dinners, American dinners, colonial dinners, women to whom it owed its crowning and dinners in the savage wild-which attraction. "Pavilions on the banks of are rather exciting, when one runs the the river; a large dinner tent on the lawn, risk of being one's self the principal dish! capable of holding four hundred and fifty; The materials are abundant, and the field and a select table for fifty, laid in the con- is wide, since everybody dines-that is, servatory. Gondolas floated on the everybody who can afford it—or at least water, containing the best singers of the partakes of a meal which, with more or less Italian Opera; and in a boat Vestris and justification, everybody calls dinner. Of Fanny Ayton, the one singing Italian, the course there is the true dinner as well as other English.... This was long remem- the false dinner, as these articles have incibered," says Croker, "as the Dandies' Fête." dentally shown. May my readers always Very attractive were the dinners which enjoy the good, the true, and the beautiful! Grote, the historian, and his accomplished wife, gave to their many distinguished friends at East Burnham Park, from 1838 to 1852, and afterwards at Popple's Park, in the house which was humorously named "History Hut," because built with the profits arising from Grote's monumental work, the "History of Greece." Here, Hallam, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Baron Bunsen, De Tocqueville, Macaulay, and other men of light and leading, partook of Mrs. Grote's refined hospitality. CATHERINE MAIDMENT'S BURDEN. A STORY IN TWELVE CHAPTERS. CHAPTER V. THE day after Catherine Maidment's interview with him, Mr. Stewart Carr sat alone in his library. It was a very hot |