XX

XXWINE AND WATERThe second and third words are added to the title in deference to the weather. One must be a hardened toper if, with the thermometer at 93 in the shade, one can find comfort in the thought of undiluted wine. Rather I would take pattern from Thackeray's friend the Bishop, with his "rounded episcopal apron." "He put water into his wine. Let us respect the moderation of the Established Church." But water is an after-thought, incidental and ephemeral. It was on wine that I was meditating when the mercury rushed up and put more temperate thoughts into my head, and it was Sir Victor Horsley who set me on thinking about wine. Sir Victor has been discoursing at Ontario about the mischiefs of Alcohol, and the perennial controversy has revived in all its accustomed vigour. Once every five years some leading light of the medical profession declares with much solemnity that Alcohol is a poison, that Wine is the foundation of death, and that Gingerbeer orToast-and-Water or Zoedone or Kopps or some kindred potion is the true and the sole elixir of life. Sir Oracle always chooses August or September for the delivery of his dogma, and immediately there ensues a correspondence which suitably replaces "Ought Women to Propose?" "Do We Believe?" and "What is Wrong?" Enthusiastic teetotallers fill the columns of the press with letters which in their dimensions rival the Enormous Gooseberry and in their demands on our credulity exceed the Sea Serpent. To these reply the advocates of Alcohol, with statistical accounts of patriarchs who always breakfasted on half-and-half, and near and dear relations who were rescued from the jaws of death by a timely exhibition of gin and bitters. And so the game goes merrily on till October recalls us to common sense.Thus far, the gem of this autumn's correspondence is, I think, the following instance contributed by an opponent of Sir Victor Horsley:—"A British officer lay on his camp-bed in India suffering from cholera. His medical attendants had concluded that nothing more could be done for him, and that his seizure must end fatally. His friends visited him to shake his hand and to offer their sympathetic good-byes, including his dearest regimental chum, who, deciding to keep his emotion down by assuming a cheerful demeanour,remarked, 'Well, old chap, we all must go sometime and somehow. Is there anything you would like me to get you?' Hardly able to speak, the sufferer indicated, 'I'll take a drop of champagne with you, as a last friendly act, if I can get it down.' With difficulty he took a little, and still lives to tell the story."Since the "affecting instance of Colonel Snobley" we have had nothing quite so rich as that—unless, indeed, it was the thrill of loyal rejoicing which ran round the nation when, just before Christmas 1871, it was announced that our present Sovereign, then in the throes of typhoid, had called for a glass of beer. Then, like true Britons, reared on malt and hops, we felt that all was well, and addressed ourselves to our Christmas turkey with the comfortable assurance that the Prince of Wales had turned the corner. Reared on malt and hops, I said; but many other ingredients went to the system on which some of us were reared. "That poor creature, small beer" at meal-time, was reinforced by a glass of port wine at eleven, by brandy and water if ever one looked squeamish, by mulled claret at bedtime in cold weather, by champagne on all occasions of domestic festivity, and by hot elderberry wine if one had a cold in the head. Poison? quotha. It was like Fontenelle's coffee, and, even though some of us have not yet turned eighty, at any rate we were notcut off untimely nor hurried into a drunkard's grave. And then think of the men whom the system produced! Thackeray (who knew what he was talking about) said that "our intellect ripens with good cheer and throws off surprising crops under the influence of that admirable liquid, claret." But all claret, according to Dr. Johnson, would be port if it could; and a catena of port wine-drinkers could contain some of the most famous names of the last century. Mr. Gladstone, to whom the other pleasures of the table meant nothing, was a stickler for port, a believer in it, a judge of it. The only feeble speech which, in my hearing, he ever made was made after dining at an otherwise hospitable house where wine was not suffered to appear. Lord Tennyson, until vanquished by Sir Andrew Clark, drank his bottle of port every day, and drank it undecanted, for, as he justly observed, a decanter holds only eight glasses, but a black bottle nine. Mr. Browning, if he could have his own way, drank port all through dinner as well as after it. Sir Moses Montefiore, who, as his kinsfolk said, got up to par—or, in other words, completed his hundred years,—had drunk a bottle of port every day since he came to man's estate. Dr. Charles Sumner, the last Prince-Bishop of Winchester, so comely and benign that he was called "The Beauty of Holiness," lent ecclesiastical sanctionto the same tradition by not only drinking port himself but distributing it with gracious generosity to impoverished clergy. But, if I were to sing all the praises of port, I should have no room for other wines.Sherry—but no. Just now it is a point of literary honour not to talk about sherry;[7]so, Dante-like, I do not reason about that particular wine, but gaze and pass on—only remarking, as I pass, that Mr. Ruskin's handsome patrimony was made out of sherry, and that this circumstance lent a peculiar zest to his utterances from the professorial chair at Oxford about the immorality of Capital and "the sweet poison of misusèd wine." An enthusiastic clergyman who wore the Blue Ribbon had been urging on Archbishop Benson his own strong convictions about the wickedness of wine-drinking. That courtly prelate listened with tranquil sympathy till the orator stopped for breath, and then observed, in suavest accents, "And yet I always think that good claret tastes very like a good creature of God." There are many who, in the depths of their conscience, agree with his Grace; and they would drink claret and nothing but claret if they could get it at dinner. Far distant are the days when Lord Alvanley said, "The little wine I drink I drink atdinner,—but the great deal of wine I drink I drink after dinner." Nowadays no one drinks any after dinner. The King killed after-dinner drinking when he introduced cigarettes. But, for some inexplicable reason, men who have good claret will not produce it at dinner. They wait till the air is poisoned and the palate deadened with tobacco, and then complain that nobody drinks claret. The late Lord Granville (who had spent so many years of his life in taking the chair at public dinners that his friends called him Pére La Chaise) once told me that, where you are not sure of your beverages, it was always safest to drink hock. So little was drunk in England that it was not worth while to adulterate it. Since those days the still wines of Mosel have flooded the country, and it is difficult to repress the conviction that the principal vineyards must belong to the Medical Faculty, so persistently and so universally do they prescribe those rather dispiriting vintages.But, after all said and done, when we in the twentieth century say Wine, we mean champagne, even as our fathers meant port. And in champagne we have seen a silent but epoch-making revolution. I well remember the champagne of my youth; a liquid esteemed more precious than gold, and dribbled out into saucer-shaped glasses half-way through dinner on occasions of high ceremony. It was thick and sticky; in colour asort of brick-dust red, and it scarcely bubbled, let alone foaming or sparkling."How sad, and bad, and mad it was,—And oh! how it was sweet!"Nowadays, we are told, more champagne is drunk in Russia than is grown in France. And the "foaming grape," which Tennyson glorified, is so copiously diluted that it ranks only immediately above small beer in the scale of alcoholic strength. Mr. Finching, the wine-merchant in "Little Dorrit," thought it "weak but palatable," and Lord St. Jerome in "Lothair" was esteemed by the young men a "patriot," "because he always gave his best champagne at his ball suppers." Such patriotism as that, at any rate, is not the refuge of a scoundrel.Wine and Water.I return to my beginnings, and, as I ponder the innocuous theme, all sorts of apt citations come crowding on the Ear of Memory. Bards of every age and clime have sung the praises of wine, but songs in praise of water are more difficult to find. Once on a time, when a Maid of Honour had performed a rather mild air on the piano, Queen Victoria asked her what it was called. "A German Drinking-Song, ma'am." "Drinking-Song! One couldn't drink a cup of tea to it." A kindred feebleness seems to have beset all the poets who have tried to hymn the praises of water; nor was it overcometill some quite recent singer, who had not forgotten his Pindar, thus improved on the immortalAriston men hudor:—"Pure water is the best of giftsThat man to man can bring;But what am I, that I should haveThe best of anything?"Let Princes revel at the Pump,Let Peers enjoy their tea;[8]But whisky, beer, or even wineIs good enough for me."XXIDINNER"We may live without poetry, music, and art;We may live without conscience and live without heart;We may live without friends; we may live without books;But civilized man cannot live without Cooks."He may live without lore—what is knowledge but grieving?He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving?He may live without love—what is passion but pining?But where is the man that can live without dining?"The poet who wrote those feeling lines acted up to what he professed, and would, I think, have been interested in our present subject; for he it was who, in the mellow glory of his literary and social fame, said: "It is many years since I felt hungry; but, thank goodness, I am still greedy." In my youth there used to be a story of a High Sheriff who, having sworn to keep the jury in a trial for felony locked up without food or drink till they had agreed upon their verdict, was told that one of them was faint and had asked for a glass of water. The High Sheriff went to the Judge and requested his directions. The Judge,after due reflection, ruled as follows: "You have sworn not to give the jury food or drink till they have agreed upon their verdict. A glass of water certainly is not food; and, for my own part, I shouldn't call it drink. Yes; you can give the man a glass of water."In a like spirit, I suppose that most of us would regard wine as being, if not of the essence, at least an inseparable accident, of Dinner; but the subject of wine has been so freely handled in a previous chapter that, though it is by no means exhausted, we will to-day treat it only incidentally, and as it presents itself in connexion with the majestic theme of Dinner.The great Lord Holland, famed in Memoirs, was greater in nothing than in his quality of host; and, like all the truly great, he manifested all his noblest attributes on the humblest occasions. Thus, he was once entertaining a schoolboy, who had come to spend a whole holiday at Holland House, and, in the openness of his heart, he told the urchin that he might have what he liked for dinner. "Young in years, but in sage counsels old," as the divine Milton says, the Westminster boy demanded, not sausages and strawberry cream, but a roast duck with green peas, and an apricot tart. The delighted host brushed away a tear of sensibility, and said, "My boy, if in all the important questions of your life you decide as wisely as you have decided now, you will be agreat and a good man." The prophecy was verified, and surely the incident deserved to be embalmed in verse; but, somehow, the poets always seem to have fought shy of Dinner. Byron, as might be expected, comes nearest to the proper inspiration when he writes of"A roast and a ragout,And fish, and soup, by some side dishes back'd."But even this is tepid. Owen Meredith, in the poem from which I have already quoted, gives some portion of a menu in metre. Sydney Smith, as we all know, wrote a recipe for a salad in heroic couplets. Prior, I think, describes a City Feast, bringing in "swan and bustard" to rhyme with "tart and custard." The late Mr. Mortimer Collins is believed to have been the only writer who ever put "cutlet" into a verse. When Rogers wrote "the rich relics of a well-spent hour" he was not—though he ought to have been—thinking of dinner. Shakespeare and Spenser, and Milton and Wordsworth, and Shelley and Tennyson deal only with fragments and fringes of the great subject. They mention a joint or a dish, a vintage or a draught, but do not harmonize and co-ordinate even such slight knowledge of gastronomy as they may be supposed to have possessed. In fact, the subject was too great for them, and they wisely left it to the more adequate medium of prose. Among the prose-poets who have had the truefeeling for Dinner, Thackeray stands supreme. When he describes it facetiously, as in "The Little Dinner at Timmins's" or "A Dinner in the City," he is good; but he is far, far better when he treats a serious theme seriously, as in "Memorials of Gormandizing" and "Greenwich Whitebait."I assign the first place to Thackeray because his eulogy is more finished, more careful, more delicate; but Sir Walter had a fine, free style, a certain broadness of effect, in describing a dinner which places him high in the list. Those venison pasties and spatchcocked eels and butts of Rhenish wine and stoups of old Canary which figure so largely in the historical novels still make my mouth water. The dinner which Rob Roy gave Bailie Nicol Jarvie, though of necessity cold, was well conceived; and, barring the solan goose, I should have deeply enjoyed the banquet at which the Antiquary entertained Sir Arthur Wardour. The imaginary feast which Caleb Balderstone prepared for the Lord Keeper was so good that it deserved to be real. Dickens, the supreme exponent of High Tea, knew very little about Dinner, though I remember a good meal of thebourgeoistype at the house of the Patriarch in "Little Dorrit." Lord Lytton dismissed even a bad dinner all too curtly when he said that "the soup was cold, the ice was hot, and everything in the house was sour except the vinegar." JamesPayn left in his one unsuccessful book, "Melibœus in London," the best account, because the simplest, of a Fish-dinner at Greenwich; in that special department he is run close by Lord Beaconsfield in "Tancred"; but it is no disgrace to be equalled or even surpassed by the greatest man who ever described a dinner. With Lord Beaconsfield gastronomy was an instinct; it breathes in every page of his Letters to his Sister. He found a roast swan "very white and good." He dined out "to meet some truffles—very agreeable company." At Sir Robert Peel's he reported "the second course really remarkable," and noted the startling fact that Sir Robert "boldly attacked his turbot with his knife." It was he, I believe, who said of a rival Chancellor of the Exchequer that his soup was made from "deferred stock." 'Twere long to trace the same generous enthusiasm for Dinner through all Lord Beaconsfield's Novels. He knew the Kitchen of the Past as well as of the Present. Lady Annabel's Bill of Fare in "Venetia" is a monument of culinary scholarship. Is there anything in fiction more moving than the agony of thechefat Lord Montacute's coming of age? "It was only by the most desperate personal exertions that I rescued thesoufflés. It was an affair of the Bridge of Arcola." And, if it be objected that all these scenes belong to a rather remote past, let us take this vignette of the fashionable solicitor in "Lothair," Mr. PutneyGiles, as he sits down to dinner after a day of exciting work: "It is a pleasent thing to see an opulent and prosperous man of business, sanguine and full of health and a little overworked, at that royal meal, Dinner. How he enjoys his soup! And how curious in his fish! How critical in hisentrée, and how nice in his Welsh mutton! His exhausted brain rallies under the glass of dry sherry, and he realizes all his dreams with the aid of claret that has the true flavour of the violet." "Doctors," said Thackeray, who knew and loved them, "notoriously dine well. When my excellent friend Sangrado takes a bumper, and saying, with a shrug and a twinkle of his eye,Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor, tosses off the wine, I always ask the butler for a glass of that bottle." That tradition of medical gastronomy dates from a remote period of our history. "Culina," by far the richest Cookery-book ever composed, was edited and given to the world in 1810 by a doctor—"A. Hunter, M.D., F.R.S." Dr. William Kitchener died in 1827, but not before his "Cook's Oracle" and "Peptic Precepts" had secured him an undying fame. In our own days, Sir Henry Thompson's "Octaves" were the most famous dinners in London, both as regards food and wine; and his "Food and Feeding" is the best guide-book to greediness I know. But here I feel that I am descending into details. "Dear Bob, I have seen the mahoganies of many men."But to-day I am treating of Dinner rather than of dinners—of the abstract Idea which has its real existence in a higher sphere,—not of the concrete forms in which it is embodied on this earth. Perhaps further on I may have a word to say about "Dinners."XXIIDINNERSSero sed serio.It is the motto of the House of Cecil; and the late Lord Salisbury, long detained by business at the Foreign Office and at length sitting down to his well-earned dinner, used to translate it—"Unpunctual, but hungry." Such a formula may suitably introduce the subject of our present meditations; and, although that subject is not temporary or ephemeral, but rather belongs to all time, still at this moment it is specially opportune. Sir James Crichton-Browne has been frightening us to death with dark tales of physical degeneration, and he has been heartless enough to do so just when we are reeling under the effects of Sir Victor Horsley's attack on Alcohol. Burke, in opposing a tax on gin, pleaded that "mankind have in every age called in some material assistance to their moral consolation." These modern men of science tell us that we must by no means call in gin or any of its more genteel kinsfolk in the great family of Alcohol. Water hardly seems to meet the case—besides, it has typhoid germs in it. Tea and coffee are"nerve-stimulants," and must therefore be avoided by a neurotic generation. Physical degeneracy, then, must be staved off with food; food, in a sound philosophy of life, means Dinner; and Dinner, the ideal or abstraction, reveals itself to man in the concrete form of Dinners.Having thus formulated my theme, I part company, here and now, with poets and romancists and all that dreamy crew, and betake myself, like Mr. Gradgrind, to facts. In loftier phrase, I pursue the historic method, and narrate, with the accuracy of Freeman, though, alas! without the brilliancy of Froude, some of the actual dinners on which mankind has lived. Creasy wrote of the "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World"—the Fifteen Decisive Dinners of the World would be a far more interesting theme; but the generous catalogue unrolls its scroll, and "fifteen" would have to be multiplied by ten or a hundred before the tale was told. A friend of mine had a pious habit of pasting into an album theMenuof every dinner at which he had enjoyed himself. Studying the album retrospectively, he used to put an asterisk against the most memorable of these records. There were three asterisks against theMenuof a dinner given by Lord Lyons at the British Embassy at Paris. "Quails and Roman Punch," said my friend with tears in his voice. "You can't get beyond that." This evidently had been one of the Fifteen Decisive Dinners ofhis gastronomic world. Did not the poet Young exclaim, in one of his most pietistic "Night Thoughts,""The undevout Gastronomer is mad"?Or, has an unintended "G" crept into the line?I treasure among my relics the "Bill of Fare" (for in those days we talked English) of a Tavern Dinner for seven persons, triumphantly eaten in 1751. Including vegetables and dessert, and excluding beverages, it comprises thirty-eight items; and the total cost was £81, 11s. 6d. (without counting the Waiter). Twenty years later than the date of this heroic feast Dr. Johnson, who certainly could do most things which required the use of a pen, vaunted in his overweening pride that he could write a cookery-book, and not only this, but "a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written; it should be a book on philosophical principles." The philosophical principles must have been those of the Stoic school if they could induce his readers or his guests to endure patiently such a dinner as he gave poor Bozzy on Easter-day, 1773—"a very good soup, a boiled leg of lamb and spinach, a veal pie, and a rice pudding." One is glad to know that the soup was good; for, as Sir Henry Thompson said in "Food and Feeding," "therationaleof the initial soup has been often discussed," and the best opinion is that the function of the soup is tofortify the digestion against what is to come. A man who is to dine on boiled lamb, veal pie, and rice pudding needs all the fortifying he can get. With some of us it would indeed be a "decisive" dinner—the last which we should consume on this planet.True enjoyment, as well as true virtue, lies in the Golden Mean; and, as we round the corner where the eighteenth century meets the nineteenth, we begin to encounter a system of dining less profligately elaborate than the Tavern Dinner of 1751, and yet less poisonously crude than Dr. Johnson's Easter Dinner of 1773. The first Earl of Dudley (who died in 1833) disdained kickshaws, and, with manly simplicity, demanded only "a good soup, a small turbot, a neck of venison, ducklings with green peas (or chicken with asparagus), and an apricot tart." Even more meagre was the repast which Macaulay deemed sufficient for his own wants and those of a friend: "Ellis came to dinner at seven. I gave him a lobster curry, woodcock, and maccaroni." From such frugality, bordering on asceticism, it is a relief to turn to the more bounteous hospitality of Sir Robert Peel, of whose dinner the youthful Disraeli wrote: "It was curiously sumptuous; every delicacy of the season, and the second course, of dried salmon, olives, caviare, woodcock pie,foiegras, and every combination of cured herring, &c., was really remarkable." Yes, indeed! "on dine remarquablement chez vous."After all, the social life of the capital naturally takes its tone and manner from the august centre round which it moves. If the Court dines well, so do those who frequent it. The legs of mutton and apple dumplings which satisfied the simple taste of George III. read now like a horrid dream. Perhaps, as the digestion and the brain are so closely connected, they helped to drive him mad. His sons ate more reasonably; and, in a later generation, gastronomic science in high places was quickened by the thoughtful intelligence of Prince Albert directing the practical skill of Francatelli and Moret. Here is a brief abstract or epitome of Queen Victoria's dinner on the 21st of September 1841. It begins modestly with two soups; it goes on, more daringly, to four kinds of fish; four also are the joints, followed (not, as now, preceded) by eightentrées. Then come chickens and partridges; vegetables, savouries, and sweets to the number of fifteen: and, lest any one should still suffer from the pangs of unsatiated desire, there were thoughtfully placed on the sideboard Roast Beef, Roast Mutton, Haunch of Venison, Hashed Venison, andRiz au consommé. But those were famous days. Fifty-four years had sped their course, and Her Majesty's Christmas Dinner in the year 1895 shows a lamentable shrinkage. Three soups indeed there were, but only one fish, and that a Fried Sole, which can be produced by kitchens less than Royal. To thissucceeded a beggarly array of fourentrées, three joints, and two sorts of game; but theMenurecovers itself a little in seven sweet dishes; while the sideboard displayed the "Boar's Head, Baron of Beef, and Woodcock Pie," which supplied the thrifty Journalist with appropriate copy at every Christmas of Her Majesty's long reign.When Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli had succeeded in "dishing the Whigs" by establishing Household Suffrage, they and their colleagues went with a light heart and a good conscience to dine at the Ship Hotel, Greenwich, on the 14th of August 1867. That was, in some senses, a "decisive" dinner, for it sealed the destruction of the old Conservatism and inaugurated the reign of Tory Democracy. The triumphant Ministers had turtle soup, eleven kinds of fish, twoentrées, a haunch of venison, poultry, ham, grouse, leverets, five sweet dishes, and two kinds of ice. Eliminating the meat, this is very much the same sort of dinner as that at which Cardinal Wiseman was entertained by his co-religionists when he assumed the Archbishopric of Westminster, and I remember that his Life, by Mr. Wilfred Ward, records the dismay with which his "maigre" fare inspired more ascetic temperaments. "He kept the table of a Roman Cardinal, and surprised some Puseyite guests by four courses of fish in Lent." There is something very touching in the exculpatory language of his friend and disciple Father Faber—"Thedear Cardinal had a Lobster-salad side to his character."Ever since the days of Burns, the "chiel amang ye takin' notes" has been an unpopular character, and not without reason, as the following extract shows. Mr. John Evelyn Denison (afterwards Lord Eversley) was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1865, and on the eve of the opening of the Session he dined, according to custom, with Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister and Leader of the House. Lord Palmerston was in his eighty-first year and gouty. Political issues of the gravest importance hung on his life. The Speaker, like aruséold politician as he was, kept a cold grey eye on Palmerston's performance at dinner, regarding it, rightly, as an index to his state of health; and this was what he reported about his host's capacities: "His dinner consisted of turtle soup, fish, patties, fricandeau, a thirdentrée, a slice of roast mutton, a second slice, a slice of hard-looking ham. In the second course, pheasant, pudding, jelly. At dessert, dressed oranges and half a large pear. He drank seltzer water only, but late in the dinner one glass of sweet champagne, and, I think, a glass of sherry at dessert." This was one of the "decisive" dinners, for Palmerston died in the following October. The only wonder is that he lived so long. The dinner which killed the Duke of Wellington was a cold pie and a salad."I am not one who much or oft delight" tomingle the serious work of Dinner with the frivolities of Literature; but other people, more prone to levity, are fond of constructing Bills of Fare out of Shakespeare; and our National Bard is so copious in good eating and drinking that a dozenMenusmight be bodied forth from his immortal page. The most elaborate of these attempts took place in New York on the 23rd of April 1860. The Bill of Fare lies before me as I write. It contains twenty-four items, and an appropriate quotation is annexed to each. The principal joint was Roast Lamb, and to this is attached the tag—"InnocentAs is the sucking lamb."When the late Professor Thorold Rogers, an excellent Shakespearean, saw this citation, he exclaimed, "That was an opportunity missed. They should have put—'So young, and so untender!'"XXIIILUNCHEON"Munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon!"So sings, or says, Robert Browning in his ditty of the Pied Piper, and it is to be remarked that he was not driven to invent the word "nuncheon" by the necessity of finding a rhyme for "luncheon," for "puncheon" was ready to his hand, and "nuncheon" was not a creation, but an archaism, defined by Johnson as "food eaten between meals." Let no one who perpends the amazing dinners eaten by our forefathers accuse those good men of gluttony. Let us rather bethink ourselves of their early and unsatisfying breakfasts, their lives of strenuous labour, their ignorance of five o'clock tea; and then thank the goodness and the grace which on our birth have smiled, and have given us more frequent meals and less ponderous dinners. Lord John Russell (1792-1878) published anonymously in 1820 a book of Essays and Sketches "by a Gentleman who has left his Lodgings." On the usages of polite society at the time no one was better qualified to speak, for Woburn Abbeywas his home, and at Bowood and Holland House he was an habitual guest; and this is his testimony to the dining habits of society: "The great inconvenience of a London life is the late hour of dinner. To pass the dayimpransusand then to sit down to a great dinner at eight o'clock is entirely against the first dictates of common sense and common stomachs. Women, however, are not so irrational as men, and generally sit down to a substantial luncheon at three or four; if men would do the same, the meal at night might be lightened of many of its weighty dishes and conversation would be no loser." So far, Luncheon (or Nuncheon) would seem to be exclusively a ladies' meal; and yet Dr. Kitchener could not have been prescribing for ladies only when he gave his surprising directions for a luncheon "about twelve," which might "consist of a bit of roasted Poultry, a basin of Beef Tea or Eggs poached or boiled in the shell, Fish plainly dressed, or a Sandwich; stale Bread, and half a pint of good Home-brewed Beer, or Toast and Water, with about one fourth or one-third part of its measure of Wine, of which Port is preferred, or one-seventh of Brandy."In Miss Austen's books, Luncheon is dismissed under the cursory appellation of "Cold Meat," and Madeira and water seems to have been its accompaniment; but more prodigal methods soon began to creep in. The repast which Sam Weller pronounced "a wery good notion of a lunch"consisted of veal pie, bread, knuckle of ham, cold beef, beer, and cold punch; and let it be observed in passing that, had he used the word "lunch" in polite society, the omission of the second syllable would have been severely reprehended by a generation which still spoke of the "omnibus" and had only just discontinued "cabriolet." The verb "to lunch" was even more offensive than the substantive from which it was derived; and Lord Beaconsfield, describing the Season of 1832, says that "ladies were luncheoning on Perigord pie, or coursing in whirling britskas." To Perigord pies as a luncheon dish for the luxurious and eupeptic may be added venison pasties—"Now broach me a cask of Malvoisie,Bring pasty from the doe,"said the Duchess in "Coningsby." "That has been my luncheon—a poetic repast." And Lady St. Jerome, when she took Lothair to a picnic, fed him with lobster sandwiches and Chablis. Fiction is ever the mirror of fact; and a lady still living, who published her Memoirs only a year or two ago, remembers the Lady Holland who patronized Macaulay "sitting at a beautiful luncheon of cold turkey and summer salad."But, in spite of all these instances, Luncheon was down to 1840 or thereabouts a kind of clandestine and unofficial meal. The ladies wanted something to keep them up. It was nicer for thechildren than having their dinner in the nursery. Papa would be kept at the House by an impending division, and must get a snack when he could—and so on and so forth. If a man habitually sate down to luncheon, and ate it through, he was contemned as unversed in the science of feeding. "Luncheon is a reflection on Breakfast and an insult to Dinner;" and moreover it stamped the eater as an idler. No one who had anything to do could find time for a square meal in the middle of the day. When Mr. Gladstone was at the Board of Trade, his only luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit which Mrs. Gladstone brought down to the office and forced on the reluctant Vice-President.But after 1840 a change set in. Prince Albert was notoriously fond of luncheon, and Queen Victoria humoured him. They dined late, and the Luncheon at the Palace became a very real and fully recognized meal. At it the Queen sometimes received her friends, as witness the Royal Journal—"Mamma came to luncheon with her lady and gentleman." It could not have been pleasant for the "lady and gentleman," but it established the practice."Sunday luncheon" was always a thing apart. For some reason not altogether clear, but either because devotion long sustained makes a strong demand on the nervous system or because a digestive nap was the best way of employingSunday afternoon, men who ate no luncheon on week-days devoured Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding on Sundays and had their appropriate reward. Bishop Wilberforce, whose frank self-communings are always such delightful reading, wrote in his diary for Sunday, October 27, 1861: "Preached in York Minster. Very large congregation. Back to Bishopthorpe. Sleepy,eheu, at afternoon service;musteat no luncheon on Sunday." When Luncheon had once firmly established itself, not merely as a meal but as an institution, Sunday luncheons in London became recognized centres of social life. Where there was even a moderate degree of intimacy a guest might drop in and be sure of mayonnaise, chicken, and welcome. I well remember an occasion of this kind when I saw social Presence of Mind exemplified, as I thought and think, on an heroic scale. Luncheon was over. It had not been a particularly bounteous meal; the guests had been many; the chicken had been eaten to the drumstick and the cutlets to the bone. Nothing remained but a huge Trifle, of chromatic and threatening aspect, on which no one had ventured to embark. Coffee was just coming, when the servant entered with an anxious expression, and murmured to the hostess that Monsieur Petitpois—a newly arrived French attaché—had come and seemed to expect luncheon. The hostess grasped the situation in an instant, and issuedher commands with a promptitude and a directness which the Duke of Wellington could not have surpassed. "Clear everything away, but leave the Trifle. Then show M. Petitpois in." Enter Petitpois. "Delighted to see you. Quite right. Always at home at Sunday luncheon. Pray come and sit here and have some Trifle. It is our national Sunday dish." Poor young Petitpois, actuated by the same principle which made the Prodigal desire the husks, filled himself with sponge-cake, jam, and whipped cream; and went away looking rather pale. If he kept a journal, he no doubt noted the English Sunday as one of our most curious institutions, and the Trifle as its crowning horror.Cardinal Manning, as all the world knows, never dined. "I never eat and I never drink," said the Cardinal. "I am sorry to say I cannot. I like dinner society very much. You see the world, and you hear things which you do not hear otherwise." Certainly that Cardinal was a fictitious personage, but he was drawn with fidelity from Cardinal Manning, who ate a very comfortable dinner at two o'clock, called it luncheon, and maintained his principle. There have always been some houses where the luncheons were much more famous than the dinners. Dinner, after all, is something of a ceremony: it requires forethought, care, and organization. Luncheon is more of a scramble, and, in the case of a numerousand scattered family, it is the pleasantest of reunions. "When all the daughters are married nobody eats luncheon," said Lothair to his solicitor, Mr. Putney Giles: but Mr. Putney Giles, "who always affected to know everything, and generally did," replied that, even though the daughters were married, "the famous luncheons at Crecy House would always go on and be a popular mode of their all meeting." When Lord Beaconsfield wrote that passage he was thinking of Chesterfield House, May Fair, some twenty years before Lord Burton bought it. Mr. Gladstone, who thought modern luxury rather disgusting, used to complain that nowadays life in a country house meant three dinners a day, and if you reckoned sandwiches and poached eggs at five o'clock tea, nearly four. Indeed, the only difference that I can perceive between a modern luncheon and a modern dinner is that at the former meal you don't have soup or a printedmenu. But at a luncheon at the Mansion House you have both; so it is well for Lord Mayors that their reigns are brief.One touch of personal reminiscence may close this study. While yet the Old Bailey stood erect and firm, as grim in aspect as in association, I used often, through the courtesy of a civic official, to share the luncheon of the judge and the aldermen, eaten during an interval in the trial, in a gloomy chamber behind the Bench. I still see,in my mind's eye, a learned judge, long since gone to his account, stuffing cold beef and pigeon pie, and quaffing London stout, black as Erebus and heavy as lead. After this repast he went back into Court (where he never allowed a window to be opened) and administered what he called justice through the long and lethargic afternoon. No one who had witnessed the performance could doubt the necessity for a Court of Criminal Appeal.XXIVTEAFew, I fear, are the readers of Mrs. Sherwood. Yet in "The Fairchild Family" she gave us some pictures of English country life at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century which neither Jane Austen nor Mrs. Gaskell ever beat, and at least one scene of horror which is still unsurpassed. I cannot say as much for "Henry Milner, or the Story of a Little Boy who was not brought up according to the Fashions of this World." No, indeed—very far from it. And Henry now recurs to my mind only because, in narrating his history, Mrs. Sherwood archly introduces a sentence which may serve as a motto for this meditation. Like Bismarck (though unlike him in other respects), she was fond of parading scraps of a rather bald Latinity; and, in this particular instance, she combines simple scholarship with staid humour, making her hero exclaim to a tea-making lady, "Non possum vivere sine Te." The play onTeandTeawill be remarked as very ingenious. Barring the Latinity and the jest, I am at one with Mrs. Sherwood in the sentiment, "My heart leaps up when I behold"a teapot, like Wordsworth's when he beheld a rainbow; and the mere mention of tea in literature stirs in me thoughts which lie too deep for words. Thus I look forward with the keenest interest toTHE BOOK OF TEABy Okakura-Kakuzowhich the publishers promise at an early date. Solemn indeed, as befits the subject, is the preliminary announcement:—"This book in praise of tea, written by a Japanese, will surely find sympathetic readers in England, where the custom of tea-drinking has become so important a part of the national daily life. Mr. Kakuzo shows that the English are still behind the Japanese in their devotion to tea. In England afternoon tea is variously regarded as a fashionable and luxurious aid to conversation, a convenient way of passing the time, or a restful and refreshing pause in the day's occupation, but in Japan tea-drinking is ennobled into Teaism, and the English cup of tea seems trivial by comparison."This is the right view of Tea. The wrong view was lately forced into sad prominence in the Coroner's Court:—Dangers of Tea-Drinking"In summing up at a Hackney inquest on Saturday, Dr. Wynn Westcott, the coroner, commentedon the fact that deceased, a woman of twenty-nine, had died suddenly after a meal of steak, tomatoes, and tea. One of the most injudicious habits, he said, was to drink tea with a meat meal. Tea checked the flow of the gastric juice which was necessary to digestion. He was sorry if that went against teetotal doctrines, but if people must be teetotallers they had best drink water and not tea with their meals."My present purpose is to enquire whether the right or the wrong view has more largely predominated in English history and literature. If, after the manner of a German commentator, I were to indulge in "prolegomena" about the history, statistics, and chemical analysis of Tea, I should soon overflow my limits; and I regard a painfully well-known couplet in which "tea" rhymes with "obey" as belonging to that class of quotations which no self-respecting writer can again resuscitate. Perhaps a shade, though only a shade, less hackneyed is Cowper's tribute to the divine herb:—"Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urnThrows up a steamy column, and the cups,That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,So let us welcome peaceful evening in."But this really leaves the problem unsolved. Cowper drank tea, and drank it in the evening;but whether he "had anything with it," as the phrase is, remains uncertain. Bread and butter, I think, he must have had, or toast, or what Thackeray scoffs at as the "blameless muffin"; but I doubt about eggs, and feel quite sure that he did not mingle meat and tea. So much for 1795, and I fancy that the practice of 1816 (when "Emma" was published) was not very different. When Mrs. Bates went to spend the evening with Mr. Woodhouse there was "vast deal of chat, and backgammon, and tea was made downstairs"; but, though the passage is a little obscure, I am convinced that the "biscuits and baked apples" were not served with the tea, but came in later with the ill-fated "fricassee of sweetbread and asparagus." Lord Beaconsfield, who was born in 1804, thus describes the evening meal at "Hurstley"—a place drawn in detail from his early home in Buckinghamshire: "Then they were summoned to tea.... The curtains were drawn and the room lighted; an urn hissed; there were piles of bread and butter, and a pyramid of buttered toast." And, when the family from the Hall went to tea at the Rectory, they found "the tea-equipage a picture of abundance and refinement. Such pretty china, and such various and delicious cakes! White bread, and brown bread, and plum cakes, and seed cakes, and no end of cracknels, and toasts, dry or buttered." Still here is no mention of animalfoods, and even Dr. Wynn Westcott would have found nothing to condemn. The same refined tradition meets us in "Cranford," which, as we all know from its reference to "Pickwick," describes the social customs of 1836-7. Mrs. Jameson was the Queen of Society in Cranford, and, when she gave a tea-party, the herb was reinforced only by "very thin bread and butter," and Miss Barker was thought rather vulgar—"a tremendous word in Cranford"—because she gave seed cake as well. Even in "Pickwick" itself, though that immortal book does not pretend to depict the manners of polite society, the tea served in the sanctum of the "Marquis of Granby" at Dorking was flanked by nothing more substantial than a plate of hot buttered toast.Impressive, therefore, almost startling, is the abrupt transition from these ill-supported teas (which, according to Dr. Wynn Westcott, were hygienically sound) to the feast, defiant of all gastronomic law, which Mrs. Snagsby spread for Mr. and Mrs. Chadband—"Dainty new bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin slices of ham, tongue, and German sausage, delicate little rows of anchovies nestling in parsley, new-laid eggs brought up warm in a napkin, and hot buttered toast." German sausage washed down with tea! What, oh what, would the Coroner say? And what must be the emotions of the waiters at the House of Commons, with their traditions of Bellamy'sveal pies and Mr. Disraeli's port, when they see the Labour Members sit down to a refection of Tea and Brawn? But, it may be urged, Medical Science is always shifting its ground, and what is the elixir of life to-day may be labelled Poison to-morrow. Thus Thackeray, using his keenest art to stigmatize the unwholesome greediness of a City Dinner, describes the surfeited guests adjourning after dinner to the Tea Room, and there "drinking slops and eating buttered muffins until the grease trickled down their faces." This was written in 1847; but in 1823 the great Dr. Kitchener, both physician and gastronomer, pronounces thus—"Tea after Dinner assists Digestion, quenches Thirst, and thereby exhilarates the Spirits," and he suggests as an acceptable alternative "a little warmed Milk, with a teaspoonful of Rum, a bit of Sugar, and a little Nutmeg." Truly our forefathers must have had remarkable digestions."These be black Vespers' pageants." I have spoken so far of Tea in the evening. When did people begin to drink Tea in the morning? I seem to remember that, in our earlier romancists and dramatists, Coffee is the beverage for breakfast. Certainly it is so—and inimitably described as well—in Lord Beaconsfield's account of a Yorkshire breakfast in "Sybil." At Holland House, which was the very ark and sanctuary of luxury, Macaulay in 1831 breakfasted on "verygood coffee and very good tea, and very good eggs, butter kept in the midst of ice, and hot rolls." Here the two liquids are proffered, but meat is rigidly excluded, and Dr. Wynn Westcott's law of life observed. But nine years later the character of breakfast had altered, and altered in an unwholesome direction. The increasing practice of going to Scotland for the shooting season had familiarized Englishmen with the more substantial fare of the Scotch breakfast, and since that time the unhallowed combination of meat and tea has been the law of our English breakfast-table. Sir Thomas in the "Ingoldsby Legends," on the morning of his mysterious disappearance, had eaten for breakfast some bacon, an egg, a little broiled haddock, and a slice of cold beef."And then—let me see!—he had two, perhaps three,Cups (with sugar and cream) of strong gunpowder tea,With a spoonful in each of some choiceeau de vie,Which with nine out of ten would perhaps disagree."The same trait may be remembered in the case of Mrs. Finching, who, though she had cold fowl and broiled ham for breakfast, "measured out a spoonful or two of some brown liquid that smelt like brandy and put it into her tea, saying that she was obliged to be careful to follow the directions of her medical man, though the flavour was anything but agreeable."Time passes, and the subject expands. Wehave spoken of Tea in the morning and Tea in the evening. To these must be added, if the topic were to be treated with scientific completeness, that early cup which opens our eyes, as each new day dawns, on this world of opportunity and wonder, and that last dread draught with which the iron nerves of Mr. Gladstone were composed to sleep after a late night in the House of Commons. But I have no space for these divagations, and must crown this imperfect study of Tea with the true, though surprising, statement that I myself—moi qui vous parle—have known the inventor of Five o'Clock Tea. This was Anna Maria Stanhope, daughter of the third Earl of Harrington and wife of the seventh Duke of Bedford. She died at an advanced age—rouged and curled and trim to the last—in 1857; but not before her life's work was accomplished and Five o'Clock Tea established among the permanent institutions of our free and happy country. Surely she is worthier of a place in the Positivist Kalendar of those who have benefited Humanity than Hippocrates, Harvey, or Arkwright; and yet Sir Algernon West writes thus in his book of "Recollections": "Late in the 'forties and in the 'fifties, Five o'Clock Teas were just coming into vogue, the old Duchess of Bedford's being, as I considered, very dreary festivities." Such is gratitude, and such is fame.

XXWINE AND WATERThe second and third words are added to the title in deference to the weather. One must be a hardened toper if, with the thermometer at 93 in the shade, one can find comfort in the thought of undiluted wine. Rather I would take pattern from Thackeray's friend the Bishop, with his "rounded episcopal apron." "He put water into his wine. Let us respect the moderation of the Established Church." But water is an after-thought, incidental and ephemeral. It was on wine that I was meditating when the mercury rushed up and put more temperate thoughts into my head, and it was Sir Victor Horsley who set me on thinking about wine. Sir Victor has been discoursing at Ontario about the mischiefs of Alcohol, and the perennial controversy has revived in all its accustomed vigour. Once every five years some leading light of the medical profession declares with much solemnity that Alcohol is a poison, that Wine is the foundation of death, and that Gingerbeer orToast-and-Water or Zoedone or Kopps or some kindred potion is the true and the sole elixir of life. Sir Oracle always chooses August or September for the delivery of his dogma, and immediately there ensues a correspondence which suitably replaces "Ought Women to Propose?" "Do We Believe?" and "What is Wrong?" Enthusiastic teetotallers fill the columns of the press with letters which in their dimensions rival the Enormous Gooseberry and in their demands on our credulity exceed the Sea Serpent. To these reply the advocates of Alcohol, with statistical accounts of patriarchs who always breakfasted on half-and-half, and near and dear relations who were rescued from the jaws of death by a timely exhibition of gin and bitters. And so the game goes merrily on till October recalls us to common sense.Thus far, the gem of this autumn's correspondence is, I think, the following instance contributed by an opponent of Sir Victor Horsley:—"A British officer lay on his camp-bed in India suffering from cholera. His medical attendants had concluded that nothing more could be done for him, and that his seizure must end fatally. His friends visited him to shake his hand and to offer their sympathetic good-byes, including his dearest regimental chum, who, deciding to keep his emotion down by assuming a cheerful demeanour,remarked, 'Well, old chap, we all must go sometime and somehow. Is there anything you would like me to get you?' Hardly able to speak, the sufferer indicated, 'I'll take a drop of champagne with you, as a last friendly act, if I can get it down.' With difficulty he took a little, and still lives to tell the story."Since the "affecting instance of Colonel Snobley" we have had nothing quite so rich as that—unless, indeed, it was the thrill of loyal rejoicing which ran round the nation when, just before Christmas 1871, it was announced that our present Sovereign, then in the throes of typhoid, had called for a glass of beer. Then, like true Britons, reared on malt and hops, we felt that all was well, and addressed ourselves to our Christmas turkey with the comfortable assurance that the Prince of Wales had turned the corner. Reared on malt and hops, I said; but many other ingredients went to the system on which some of us were reared. "That poor creature, small beer" at meal-time, was reinforced by a glass of port wine at eleven, by brandy and water if ever one looked squeamish, by mulled claret at bedtime in cold weather, by champagne on all occasions of domestic festivity, and by hot elderberry wine if one had a cold in the head. Poison? quotha. It was like Fontenelle's coffee, and, even though some of us have not yet turned eighty, at any rate we were notcut off untimely nor hurried into a drunkard's grave. And then think of the men whom the system produced! Thackeray (who knew what he was talking about) said that "our intellect ripens with good cheer and throws off surprising crops under the influence of that admirable liquid, claret." But all claret, according to Dr. Johnson, would be port if it could; and a catena of port wine-drinkers could contain some of the most famous names of the last century. Mr. Gladstone, to whom the other pleasures of the table meant nothing, was a stickler for port, a believer in it, a judge of it. The only feeble speech which, in my hearing, he ever made was made after dining at an otherwise hospitable house where wine was not suffered to appear. Lord Tennyson, until vanquished by Sir Andrew Clark, drank his bottle of port every day, and drank it undecanted, for, as he justly observed, a decanter holds only eight glasses, but a black bottle nine. Mr. Browning, if he could have his own way, drank port all through dinner as well as after it. Sir Moses Montefiore, who, as his kinsfolk said, got up to par—or, in other words, completed his hundred years,—had drunk a bottle of port every day since he came to man's estate. Dr. Charles Sumner, the last Prince-Bishop of Winchester, so comely and benign that he was called "The Beauty of Holiness," lent ecclesiastical sanctionto the same tradition by not only drinking port himself but distributing it with gracious generosity to impoverished clergy. But, if I were to sing all the praises of port, I should have no room for other wines.Sherry—but no. Just now it is a point of literary honour not to talk about sherry;[7]so, Dante-like, I do not reason about that particular wine, but gaze and pass on—only remarking, as I pass, that Mr. Ruskin's handsome patrimony was made out of sherry, and that this circumstance lent a peculiar zest to his utterances from the professorial chair at Oxford about the immorality of Capital and "the sweet poison of misusèd wine." An enthusiastic clergyman who wore the Blue Ribbon had been urging on Archbishop Benson his own strong convictions about the wickedness of wine-drinking. That courtly prelate listened with tranquil sympathy till the orator stopped for breath, and then observed, in suavest accents, "And yet I always think that good claret tastes very like a good creature of God." There are many who, in the depths of their conscience, agree with his Grace; and they would drink claret and nothing but claret if they could get it at dinner. Far distant are the days when Lord Alvanley said, "The little wine I drink I drink atdinner,—but the great deal of wine I drink I drink after dinner." Nowadays no one drinks any after dinner. The King killed after-dinner drinking when he introduced cigarettes. But, for some inexplicable reason, men who have good claret will not produce it at dinner. They wait till the air is poisoned and the palate deadened with tobacco, and then complain that nobody drinks claret. The late Lord Granville (who had spent so many years of his life in taking the chair at public dinners that his friends called him Pére La Chaise) once told me that, where you are not sure of your beverages, it was always safest to drink hock. So little was drunk in England that it was not worth while to adulterate it. Since those days the still wines of Mosel have flooded the country, and it is difficult to repress the conviction that the principal vineyards must belong to the Medical Faculty, so persistently and so universally do they prescribe those rather dispiriting vintages.But, after all said and done, when we in the twentieth century say Wine, we mean champagne, even as our fathers meant port. And in champagne we have seen a silent but epoch-making revolution. I well remember the champagne of my youth; a liquid esteemed more precious than gold, and dribbled out into saucer-shaped glasses half-way through dinner on occasions of high ceremony. It was thick and sticky; in colour asort of brick-dust red, and it scarcely bubbled, let alone foaming or sparkling."How sad, and bad, and mad it was,—And oh! how it was sweet!"Nowadays, we are told, more champagne is drunk in Russia than is grown in France. And the "foaming grape," which Tennyson glorified, is so copiously diluted that it ranks only immediately above small beer in the scale of alcoholic strength. Mr. Finching, the wine-merchant in "Little Dorrit," thought it "weak but palatable," and Lord St. Jerome in "Lothair" was esteemed by the young men a "patriot," "because he always gave his best champagne at his ball suppers." Such patriotism as that, at any rate, is not the refuge of a scoundrel.Wine and Water.I return to my beginnings, and, as I ponder the innocuous theme, all sorts of apt citations come crowding on the Ear of Memory. Bards of every age and clime have sung the praises of wine, but songs in praise of water are more difficult to find. Once on a time, when a Maid of Honour had performed a rather mild air on the piano, Queen Victoria asked her what it was called. "A German Drinking-Song, ma'am." "Drinking-Song! One couldn't drink a cup of tea to it." A kindred feebleness seems to have beset all the poets who have tried to hymn the praises of water; nor was it overcometill some quite recent singer, who had not forgotten his Pindar, thus improved on the immortalAriston men hudor:—"Pure water is the best of giftsThat man to man can bring;But what am I, that I should haveThe best of anything?"Let Princes revel at the Pump,Let Peers enjoy their tea;[8]But whisky, beer, or even wineIs good enough for me."

WINE AND WATER

The second and third words are added to the title in deference to the weather. One must be a hardened toper if, with the thermometer at 93 in the shade, one can find comfort in the thought of undiluted wine. Rather I would take pattern from Thackeray's friend the Bishop, with his "rounded episcopal apron." "He put water into his wine. Let us respect the moderation of the Established Church." But water is an after-thought, incidental and ephemeral. It was on wine that I was meditating when the mercury rushed up and put more temperate thoughts into my head, and it was Sir Victor Horsley who set me on thinking about wine. Sir Victor has been discoursing at Ontario about the mischiefs of Alcohol, and the perennial controversy has revived in all its accustomed vigour. Once every five years some leading light of the medical profession declares with much solemnity that Alcohol is a poison, that Wine is the foundation of death, and that Gingerbeer orToast-and-Water or Zoedone or Kopps or some kindred potion is the true and the sole elixir of life. Sir Oracle always chooses August or September for the delivery of his dogma, and immediately there ensues a correspondence which suitably replaces "Ought Women to Propose?" "Do We Believe?" and "What is Wrong?" Enthusiastic teetotallers fill the columns of the press with letters which in their dimensions rival the Enormous Gooseberry and in their demands on our credulity exceed the Sea Serpent. To these reply the advocates of Alcohol, with statistical accounts of patriarchs who always breakfasted on half-and-half, and near and dear relations who were rescued from the jaws of death by a timely exhibition of gin and bitters. And so the game goes merrily on till October recalls us to common sense.

Thus far, the gem of this autumn's correspondence is, I think, the following instance contributed by an opponent of Sir Victor Horsley:—

"A British officer lay on his camp-bed in India suffering from cholera. His medical attendants had concluded that nothing more could be done for him, and that his seizure must end fatally. His friends visited him to shake his hand and to offer their sympathetic good-byes, including his dearest regimental chum, who, deciding to keep his emotion down by assuming a cheerful demeanour,remarked, 'Well, old chap, we all must go sometime and somehow. Is there anything you would like me to get you?' Hardly able to speak, the sufferer indicated, 'I'll take a drop of champagne with you, as a last friendly act, if I can get it down.' With difficulty he took a little, and still lives to tell the story."

Since the "affecting instance of Colonel Snobley" we have had nothing quite so rich as that—unless, indeed, it was the thrill of loyal rejoicing which ran round the nation when, just before Christmas 1871, it was announced that our present Sovereign, then in the throes of typhoid, had called for a glass of beer. Then, like true Britons, reared on malt and hops, we felt that all was well, and addressed ourselves to our Christmas turkey with the comfortable assurance that the Prince of Wales had turned the corner. Reared on malt and hops, I said; but many other ingredients went to the system on which some of us were reared. "That poor creature, small beer" at meal-time, was reinforced by a glass of port wine at eleven, by brandy and water if ever one looked squeamish, by mulled claret at bedtime in cold weather, by champagne on all occasions of domestic festivity, and by hot elderberry wine if one had a cold in the head. Poison? quotha. It was like Fontenelle's coffee, and, even though some of us have not yet turned eighty, at any rate we were notcut off untimely nor hurried into a drunkard's grave. And then think of the men whom the system produced! Thackeray (who knew what he was talking about) said that "our intellect ripens with good cheer and throws off surprising crops under the influence of that admirable liquid, claret." But all claret, according to Dr. Johnson, would be port if it could; and a catena of port wine-drinkers could contain some of the most famous names of the last century. Mr. Gladstone, to whom the other pleasures of the table meant nothing, was a stickler for port, a believer in it, a judge of it. The only feeble speech which, in my hearing, he ever made was made after dining at an otherwise hospitable house where wine was not suffered to appear. Lord Tennyson, until vanquished by Sir Andrew Clark, drank his bottle of port every day, and drank it undecanted, for, as he justly observed, a decanter holds only eight glasses, but a black bottle nine. Mr. Browning, if he could have his own way, drank port all through dinner as well as after it. Sir Moses Montefiore, who, as his kinsfolk said, got up to par—or, in other words, completed his hundred years,—had drunk a bottle of port every day since he came to man's estate. Dr. Charles Sumner, the last Prince-Bishop of Winchester, so comely and benign that he was called "The Beauty of Holiness," lent ecclesiastical sanctionto the same tradition by not only drinking port himself but distributing it with gracious generosity to impoverished clergy. But, if I were to sing all the praises of port, I should have no room for other wines.

Sherry—but no. Just now it is a point of literary honour not to talk about sherry;[7]so, Dante-like, I do not reason about that particular wine, but gaze and pass on—only remarking, as I pass, that Mr. Ruskin's handsome patrimony was made out of sherry, and that this circumstance lent a peculiar zest to his utterances from the professorial chair at Oxford about the immorality of Capital and "the sweet poison of misusèd wine." An enthusiastic clergyman who wore the Blue Ribbon had been urging on Archbishop Benson his own strong convictions about the wickedness of wine-drinking. That courtly prelate listened with tranquil sympathy till the orator stopped for breath, and then observed, in suavest accents, "And yet I always think that good claret tastes very like a good creature of God." There are many who, in the depths of their conscience, agree with his Grace; and they would drink claret and nothing but claret if they could get it at dinner. Far distant are the days when Lord Alvanley said, "The little wine I drink I drink atdinner,—but the great deal of wine I drink I drink after dinner." Nowadays no one drinks any after dinner. The King killed after-dinner drinking when he introduced cigarettes. But, for some inexplicable reason, men who have good claret will not produce it at dinner. They wait till the air is poisoned and the palate deadened with tobacco, and then complain that nobody drinks claret. The late Lord Granville (who had spent so many years of his life in taking the chair at public dinners that his friends called him Pére La Chaise) once told me that, where you are not sure of your beverages, it was always safest to drink hock. So little was drunk in England that it was not worth while to adulterate it. Since those days the still wines of Mosel have flooded the country, and it is difficult to repress the conviction that the principal vineyards must belong to the Medical Faculty, so persistently and so universally do they prescribe those rather dispiriting vintages.

But, after all said and done, when we in the twentieth century say Wine, we mean champagne, even as our fathers meant port. And in champagne we have seen a silent but epoch-making revolution. I well remember the champagne of my youth; a liquid esteemed more precious than gold, and dribbled out into saucer-shaped glasses half-way through dinner on occasions of high ceremony. It was thick and sticky; in colour asort of brick-dust red, and it scarcely bubbled, let alone foaming or sparkling.

"How sad, and bad, and mad it was,—And oh! how it was sweet!"

Nowadays, we are told, more champagne is drunk in Russia than is grown in France. And the "foaming grape," which Tennyson glorified, is so copiously diluted that it ranks only immediately above small beer in the scale of alcoholic strength. Mr. Finching, the wine-merchant in "Little Dorrit," thought it "weak but palatable," and Lord St. Jerome in "Lothair" was esteemed by the young men a "patriot," "because he always gave his best champagne at his ball suppers." Such patriotism as that, at any rate, is not the refuge of a scoundrel.

Wine and Water.I return to my beginnings, and, as I ponder the innocuous theme, all sorts of apt citations come crowding on the Ear of Memory. Bards of every age and clime have sung the praises of wine, but songs in praise of water are more difficult to find. Once on a time, when a Maid of Honour had performed a rather mild air on the piano, Queen Victoria asked her what it was called. "A German Drinking-Song, ma'am." "Drinking-Song! One couldn't drink a cup of tea to it." A kindred feebleness seems to have beset all the poets who have tried to hymn the praises of water; nor was it overcometill some quite recent singer, who had not forgotten his Pindar, thus improved on the immortalAriston men hudor:—

"Pure water is the best of giftsThat man to man can bring;

But what am I, that I should haveThe best of anything?

"Let Princes revel at the Pump,Let Peers enjoy their tea;[8]

But whisky, beer, or even wineIs good enough for me."

XXIDINNER"We may live without poetry, music, and art;We may live without conscience and live without heart;We may live without friends; we may live without books;But civilized man cannot live without Cooks."He may live without lore—what is knowledge but grieving?He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving?He may live without love—what is passion but pining?But where is the man that can live without dining?"The poet who wrote those feeling lines acted up to what he professed, and would, I think, have been interested in our present subject; for he it was who, in the mellow glory of his literary and social fame, said: "It is many years since I felt hungry; but, thank goodness, I am still greedy." In my youth there used to be a story of a High Sheriff who, having sworn to keep the jury in a trial for felony locked up without food or drink till they had agreed upon their verdict, was told that one of them was faint and had asked for a glass of water. The High Sheriff went to the Judge and requested his directions. The Judge,after due reflection, ruled as follows: "You have sworn not to give the jury food or drink till they have agreed upon their verdict. A glass of water certainly is not food; and, for my own part, I shouldn't call it drink. Yes; you can give the man a glass of water."In a like spirit, I suppose that most of us would regard wine as being, if not of the essence, at least an inseparable accident, of Dinner; but the subject of wine has been so freely handled in a previous chapter that, though it is by no means exhausted, we will to-day treat it only incidentally, and as it presents itself in connexion with the majestic theme of Dinner.The great Lord Holland, famed in Memoirs, was greater in nothing than in his quality of host; and, like all the truly great, he manifested all his noblest attributes on the humblest occasions. Thus, he was once entertaining a schoolboy, who had come to spend a whole holiday at Holland House, and, in the openness of his heart, he told the urchin that he might have what he liked for dinner. "Young in years, but in sage counsels old," as the divine Milton says, the Westminster boy demanded, not sausages and strawberry cream, but a roast duck with green peas, and an apricot tart. The delighted host brushed away a tear of sensibility, and said, "My boy, if in all the important questions of your life you decide as wisely as you have decided now, you will be agreat and a good man." The prophecy was verified, and surely the incident deserved to be embalmed in verse; but, somehow, the poets always seem to have fought shy of Dinner. Byron, as might be expected, comes nearest to the proper inspiration when he writes of"A roast and a ragout,And fish, and soup, by some side dishes back'd."But even this is tepid. Owen Meredith, in the poem from which I have already quoted, gives some portion of a menu in metre. Sydney Smith, as we all know, wrote a recipe for a salad in heroic couplets. Prior, I think, describes a City Feast, bringing in "swan and bustard" to rhyme with "tart and custard." The late Mr. Mortimer Collins is believed to have been the only writer who ever put "cutlet" into a verse. When Rogers wrote "the rich relics of a well-spent hour" he was not—though he ought to have been—thinking of dinner. Shakespeare and Spenser, and Milton and Wordsworth, and Shelley and Tennyson deal only with fragments and fringes of the great subject. They mention a joint or a dish, a vintage or a draught, but do not harmonize and co-ordinate even such slight knowledge of gastronomy as they may be supposed to have possessed. In fact, the subject was too great for them, and they wisely left it to the more adequate medium of prose. Among the prose-poets who have had the truefeeling for Dinner, Thackeray stands supreme. When he describes it facetiously, as in "The Little Dinner at Timmins's" or "A Dinner in the City," he is good; but he is far, far better when he treats a serious theme seriously, as in "Memorials of Gormandizing" and "Greenwich Whitebait."I assign the first place to Thackeray because his eulogy is more finished, more careful, more delicate; but Sir Walter had a fine, free style, a certain broadness of effect, in describing a dinner which places him high in the list. Those venison pasties and spatchcocked eels and butts of Rhenish wine and stoups of old Canary which figure so largely in the historical novels still make my mouth water. The dinner which Rob Roy gave Bailie Nicol Jarvie, though of necessity cold, was well conceived; and, barring the solan goose, I should have deeply enjoyed the banquet at which the Antiquary entertained Sir Arthur Wardour. The imaginary feast which Caleb Balderstone prepared for the Lord Keeper was so good that it deserved to be real. Dickens, the supreme exponent of High Tea, knew very little about Dinner, though I remember a good meal of thebourgeoistype at the house of the Patriarch in "Little Dorrit." Lord Lytton dismissed even a bad dinner all too curtly when he said that "the soup was cold, the ice was hot, and everything in the house was sour except the vinegar." JamesPayn left in his one unsuccessful book, "Melibœus in London," the best account, because the simplest, of a Fish-dinner at Greenwich; in that special department he is run close by Lord Beaconsfield in "Tancred"; but it is no disgrace to be equalled or even surpassed by the greatest man who ever described a dinner. With Lord Beaconsfield gastronomy was an instinct; it breathes in every page of his Letters to his Sister. He found a roast swan "very white and good." He dined out "to meet some truffles—very agreeable company." At Sir Robert Peel's he reported "the second course really remarkable," and noted the startling fact that Sir Robert "boldly attacked his turbot with his knife." It was he, I believe, who said of a rival Chancellor of the Exchequer that his soup was made from "deferred stock." 'Twere long to trace the same generous enthusiasm for Dinner through all Lord Beaconsfield's Novels. He knew the Kitchen of the Past as well as of the Present. Lady Annabel's Bill of Fare in "Venetia" is a monument of culinary scholarship. Is there anything in fiction more moving than the agony of thechefat Lord Montacute's coming of age? "It was only by the most desperate personal exertions that I rescued thesoufflés. It was an affair of the Bridge of Arcola." And, if it be objected that all these scenes belong to a rather remote past, let us take this vignette of the fashionable solicitor in "Lothair," Mr. PutneyGiles, as he sits down to dinner after a day of exciting work: "It is a pleasent thing to see an opulent and prosperous man of business, sanguine and full of health and a little overworked, at that royal meal, Dinner. How he enjoys his soup! And how curious in his fish! How critical in hisentrée, and how nice in his Welsh mutton! His exhausted brain rallies under the glass of dry sherry, and he realizes all his dreams with the aid of claret that has the true flavour of the violet." "Doctors," said Thackeray, who knew and loved them, "notoriously dine well. When my excellent friend Sangrado takes a bumper, and saying, with a shrug and a twinkle of his eye,Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor, tosses off the wine, I always ask the butler for a glass of that bottle." That tradition of medical gastronomy dates from a remote period of our history. "Culina," by far the richest Cookery-book ever composed, was edited and given to the world in 1810 by a doctor—"A. Hunter, M.D., F.R.S." Dr. William Kitchener died in 1827, but not before his "Cook's Oracle" and "Peptic Precepts" had secured him an undying fame. In our own days, Sir Henry Thompson's "Octaves" were the most famous dinners in London, both as regards food and wine; and his "Food and Feeding" is the best guide-book to greediness I know. But here I feel that I am descending into details. "Dear Bob, I have seen the mahoganies of many men."But to-day I am treating of Dinner rather than of dinners—of the abstract Idea which has its real existence in a higher sphere,—not of the concrete forms in which it is embodied on this earth. Perhaps further on I may have a word to say about "Dinners."

DINNER

"We may live without poetry, music, and art;

We may live without conscience and live without heart;

We may live without friends; we may live without books;

But civilized man cannot live without Cooks.

"He may live without lore—what is knowledge but grieving?

He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving?

He may live without love—what is passion but pining?

But where is the man that can live without dining?"

The poet who wrote those feeling lines acted up to what he professed, and would, I think, have been interested in our present subject; for he it was who, in the mellow glory of his literary and social fame, said: "It is many years since I felt hungry; but, thank goodness, I am still greedy." In my youth there used to be a story of a High Sheriff who, having sworn to keep the jury in a trial for felony locked up without food or drink till they had agreed upon their verdict, was told that one of them was faint and had asked for a glass of water. The High Sheriff went to the Judge and requested his directions. The Judge,after due reflection, ruled as follows: "You have sworn not to give the jury food or drink till they have agreed upon their verdict. A glass of water certainly is not food; and, for my own part, I shouldn't call it drink. Yes; you can give the man a glass of water."

In a like spirit, I suppose that most of us would regard wine as being, if not of the essence, at least an inseparable accident, of Dinner; but the subject of wine has been so freely handled in a previous chapter that, though it is by no means exhausted, we will to-day treat it only incidentally, and as it presents itself in connexion with the majestic theme of Dinner.

The great Lord Holland, famed in Memoirs, was greater in nothing than in his quality of host; and, like all the truly great, he manifested all his noblest attributes on the humblest occasions. Thus, he was once entertaining a schoolboy, who had come to spend a whole holiday at Holland House, and, in the openness of his heart, he told the urchin that he might have what he liked for dinner. "Young in years, but in sage counsels old," as the divine Milton says, the Westminster boy demanded, not sausages and strawberry cream, but a roast duck with green peas, and an apricot tart. The delighted host brushed away a tear of sensibility, and said, "My boy, if in all the important questions of your life you decide as wisely as you have decided now, you will be agreat and a good man." The prophecy was verified, and surely the incident deserved to be embalmed in verse; but, somehow, the poets always seem to have fought shy of Dinner. Byron, as might be expected, comes nearest to the proper inspiration when he writes of

"A roast and a ragout,

And fish, and soup, by some side dishes back'd."

But even this is tepid. Owen Meredith, in the poem from which I have already quoted, gives some portion of a menu in metre. Sydney Smith, as we all know, wrote a recipe for a salad in heroic couplets. Prior, I think, describes a City Feast, bringing in "swan and bustard" to rhyme with "tart and custard." The late Mr. Mortimer Collins is believed to have been the only writer who ever put "cutlet" into a verse. When Rogers wrote "the rich relics of a well-spent hour" he was not—though he ought to have been—thinking of dinner. Shakespeare and Spenser, and Milton and Wordsworth, and Shelley and Tennyson deal only with fragments and fringes of the great subject. They mention a joint or a dish, a vintage or a draught, but do not harmonize and co-ordinate even such slight knowledge of gastronomy as they may be supposed to have possessed. In fact, the subject was too great for them, and they wisely left it to the more adequate medium of prose. Among the prose-poets who have had the truefeeling for Dinner, Thackeray stands supreme. When he describes it facetiously, as in "The Little Dinner at Timmins's" or "A Dinner in the City," he is good; but he is far, far better when he treats a serious theme seriously, as in "Memorials of Gormandizing" and "Greenwich Whitebait."

I assign the first place to Thackeray because his eulogy is more finished, more careful, more delicate; but Sir Walter had a fine, free style, a certain broadness of effect, in describing a dinner which places him high in the list. Those venison pasties and spatchcocked eels and butts of Rhenish wine and stoups of old Canary which figure so largely in the historical novels still make my mouth water. The dinner which Rob Roy gave Bailie Nicol Jarvie, though of necessity cold, was well conceived; and, barring the solan goose, I should have deeply enjoyed the banquet at which the Antiquary entertained Sir Arthur Wardour. The imaginary feast which Caleb Balderstone prepared for the Lord Keeper was so good that it deserved to be real. Dickens, the supreme exponent of High Tea, knew very little about Dinner, though I remember a good meal of thebourgeoistype at the house of the Patriarch in "Little Dorrit." Lord Lytton dismissed even a bad dinner all too curtly when he said that "the soup was cold, the ice was hot, and everything in the house was sour except the vinegar." JamesPayn left in his one unsuccessful book, "Melibœus in London," the best account, because the simplest, of a Fish-dinner at Greenwich; in that special department he is run close by Lord Beaconsfield in "Tancred"; but it is no disgrace to be equalled or even surpassed by the greatest man who ever described a dinner. With Lord Beaconsfield gastronomy was an instinct; it breathes in every page of his Letters to his Sister. He found a roast swan "very white and good." He dined out "to meet some truffles—very agreeable company." At Sir Robert Peel's he reported "the second course really remarkable," and noted the startling fact that Sir Robert "boldly attacked his turbot with his knife." It was he, I believe, who said of a rival Chancellor of the Exchequer that his soup was made from "deferred stock." 'Twere long to trace the same generous enthusiasm for Dinner through all Lord Beaconsfield's Novels. He knew the Kitchen of the Past as well as of the Present. Lady Annabel's Bill of Fare in "Venetia" is a monument of culinary scholarship. Is there anything in fiction more moving than the agony of thechefat Lord Montacute's coming of age? "It was only by the most desperate personal exertions that I rescued thesoufflés. It was an affair of the Bridge of Arcola." And, if it be objected that all these scenes belong to a rather remote past, let us take this vignette of the fashionable solicitor in "Lothair," Mr. PutneyGiles, as he sits down to dinner after a day of exciting work: "It is a pleasent thing to see an opulent and prosperous man of business, sanguine and full of health and a little overworked, at that royal meal, Dinner. How he enjoys his soup! And how curious in his fish! How critical in hisentrée, and how nice in his Welsh mutton! His exhausted brain rallies under the glass of dry sherry, and he realizes all his dreams with the aid of claret that has the true flavour of the violet." "Doctors," said Thackeray, who knew and loved them, "notoriously dine well. When my excellent friend Sangrado takes a bumper, and saying, with a shrug and a twinkle of his eye,Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor, tosses off the wine, I always ask the butler for a glass of that bottle." That tradition of medical gastronomy dates from a remote period of our history. "Culina," by far the richest Cookery-book ever composed, was edited and given to the world in 1810 by a doctor—"A. Hunter, M.D., F.R.S." Dr. William Kitchener died in 1827, but not before his "Cook's Oracle" and "Peptic Precepts" had secured him an undying fame. In our own days, Sir Henry Thompson's "Octaves" were the most famous dinners in London, both as regards food and wine; and his "Food and Feeding" is the best guide-book to greediness I know. But here I feel that I am descending into details. "Dear Bob, I have seen the mahoganies of many men."But to-day I am treating of Dinner rather than of dinners—of the abstract Idea which has its real existence in a higher sphere,—not of the concrete forms in which it is embodied on this earth. Perhaps further on I may have a word to say about "Dinners."

XXIIDINNERSSero sed serio.It is the motto of the House of Cecil; and the late Lord Salisbury, long detained by business at the Foreign Office and at length sitting down to his well-earned dinner, used to translate it—"Unpunctual, but hungry." Such a formula may suitably introduce the subject of our present meditations; and, although that subject is not temporary or ephemeral, but rather belongs to all time, still at this moment it is specially opportune. Sir James Crichton-Browne has been frightening us to death with dark tales of physical degeneration, and he has been heartless enough to do so just when we are reeling under the effects of Sir Victor Horsley's attack on Alcohol. Burke, in opposing a tax on gin, pleaded that "mankind have in every age called in some material assistance to their moral consolation." These modern men of science tell us that we must by no means call in gin or any of its more genteel kinsfolk in the great family of Alcohol. Water hardly seems to meet the case—besides, it has typhoid germs in it. Tea and coffee are"nerve-stimulants," and must therefore be avoided by a neurotic generation. Physical degeneracy, then, must be staved off with food; food, in a sound philosophy of life, means Dinner; and Dinner, the ideal or abstraction, reveals itself to man in the concrete form of Dinners.Having thus formulated my theme, I part company, here and now, with poets and romancists and all that dreamy crew, and betake myself, like Mr. Gradgrind, to facts. In loftier phrase, I pursue the historic method, and narrate, with the accuracy of Freeman, though, alas! without the brilliancy of Froude, some of the actual dinners on which mankind has lived. Creasy wrote of the "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World"—the Fifteen Decisive Dinners of the World would be a far more interesting theme; but the generous catalogue unrolls its scroll, and "fifteen" would have to be multiplied by ten or a hundred before the tale was told. A friend of mine had a pious habit of pasting into an album theMenuof every dinner at which he had enjoyed himself. Studying the album retrospectively, he used to put an asterisk against the most memorable of these records. There were three asterisks against theMenuof a dinner given by Lord Lyons at the British Embassy at Paris. "Quails and Roman Punch," said my friend with tears in his voice. "You can't get beyond that." This evidently had been one of the Fifteen Decisive Dinners ofhis gastronomic world. Did not the poet Young exclaim, in one of his most pietistic "Night Thoughts,""The undevout Gastronomer is mad"?Or, has an unintended "G" crept into the line?I treasure among my relics the "Bill of Fare" (for in those days we talked English) of a Tavern Dinner for seven persons, triumphantly eaten in 1751. Including vegetables and dessert, and excluding beverages, it comprises thirty-eight items; and the total cost was £81, 11s. 6d. (without counting the Waiter). Twenty years later than the date of this heroic feast Dr. Johnson, who certainly could do most things which required the use of a pen, vaunted in his overweening pride that he could write a cookery-book, and not only this, but "a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written; it should be a book on philosophical principles." The philosophical principles must have been those of the Stoic school if they could induce his readers or his guests to endure patiently such a dinner as he gave poor Bozzy on Easter-day, 1773—"a very good soup, a boiled leg of lamb and spinach, a veal pie, and a rice pudding." One is glad to know that the soup was good; for, as Sir Henry Thompson said in "Food and Feeding," "therationaleof the initial soup has been often discussed," and the best opinion is that the function of the soup is tofortify the digestion against what is to come. A man who is to dine on boiled lamb, veal pie, and rice pudding needs all the fortifying he can get. With some of us it would indeed be a "decisive" dinner—the last which we should consume on this planet.True enjoyment, as well as true virtue, lies in the Golden Mean; and, as we round the corner where the eighteenth century meets the nineteenth, we begin to encounter a system of dining less profligately elaborate than the Tavern Dinner of 1751, and yet less poisonously crude than Dr. Johnson's Easter Dinner of 1773. The first Earl of Dudley (who died in 1833) disdained kickshaws, and, with manly simplicity, demanded only "a good soup, a small turbot, a neck of venison, ducklings with green peas (or chicken with asparagus), and an apricot tart." Even more meagre was the repast which Macaulay deemed sufficient for his own wants and those of a friend: "Ellis came to dinner at seven. I gave him a lobster curry, woodcock, and maccaroni." From such frugality, bordering on asceticism, it is a relief to turn to the more bounteous hospitality of Sir Robert Peel, of whose dinner the youthful Disraeli wrote: "It was curiously sumptuous; every delicacy of the season, and the second course, of dried salmon, olives, caviare, woodcock pie,foiegras, and every combination of cured herring, &c., was really remarkable." Yes, indeed! "on dine remarquablement chez vous."After all, the social life of the capital naturally takes its tone and manner from the august centre round which it moves. If the Court dines well, so do those who frequent it. The legs of mutton and apple dumplings which satisfied the simple taste of George III. read now like a horrid dream. Perhaps, as the digestion and the brain are so closely connected, they helped to drive him mad. His sons ate more reasonably; and, in a later generation, gastronomic science in high places was quickened by the thoughtful intelligence of Prince Albert directing the practical skill of Francatelli and Moret. Here is a brief abstract or epitome of Queen Victoria's dinner on the 21st of September 1841. It begins modestly with two soups; it goes on, more daringly, to four kinds of fish; four also are the joints, followed (not, as now, preceded) by eightentrées. Then come chickens and partridges; vegetables, savouries, and sweets to the number of fifteen: and, lest any one should still suffer from the pangs of unsatiated desire, there were thoughtfully placed on the sideboard Roast Beef, Roast Mutton, Haunch of Venison, Hashed Venison, andRiz au consommé. But those were famous days. Fifty-four years had sped their course, and Her Majesty's Christmas Dinner in the year 1895 shows a lamentable shrinkage. Three soups indeed there were, but only one fish, and that a Fried Sole, which can be produced by kitchens less than Royal. To thissucceeded a beggarly array of fourentrées, three joints, and two sorts of game; but theMenurecovers itself a little in seven sweet dishes; while the sideboard displayed the "Boar's Head, Baron of Beef, and Woodcock Pie," which supplied the thrifty Journalist with appropriate copy at every Christmas of Her Majesty's long reign.When Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli had succeeded in "dishing the Whigs" by establishing Household Suffrage, they and their colleagues went with a light heart and a good conscience to dine at the Ship Hotel, Greenwich, on the 14th of August 1867. That was, in some senses, a "decisive" dinner, for it sealed the destruction of the old Conservatism and inaugurated the reign of Tory Democracy. The triumphant Ministers had turtle soup, eleven kinds of fish, twoentrées, a haunch of venison, poultry, ham, grouse, leverets, five sweet dishes, and two kinds of ice. Eliminating the meat, this is very much the same sort of dinner as that at which Cardinal Wiseman was entertained by his co-religionists when he assumed the Archbishopric of Westminster, and I remember that his Life, by Mr. Wilfred Ward, records the dismay with which his "maigre" fare inspired more ascetic temperaments. "He kept the table of a Roman Cardinal, and surprised some Puseyite guests by four courses of fish in Lent." There is something very touching in the exculpatory language of his friend and disciple Father Faber—"Thedear Cardinal had a Lobster-salad side to his character."Ever since the days of Burns, the "chiel amang ye takin' notes" has been an unpopular character, and not without reason, as the following extract shows. Mr. John Evelyn Denison (afterwards Lord Eversley) was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1865, and on the eve of the opening of the Session he dined, according to custom, with Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister and Leader of the House. Lord Palmerston was in his eighty-first year and gouty. Political issues of the gravest importance hung on his life. The Speaker, like aruséold politician as he was, kept a cold grey eye on Palmerston's performance at dinner, regarding it, rightly, as an index to his state of health; and this was what he reported about his host's capacities: "His dinner consisted of turtle soup, fish, patties, fricandeau, a thirdentrée, a slice of roast mutton, a second slice, a slice of hard-looking ham. In the second course, pheasant, pudding, jelly. At dessert, dressed oranges and half a large pear. He drank seltzer water only, but late in the dinner one glass of sweet champagne, and, I think, a glass of sherry at dessert." This was one of the "decisive" dinners, for Palmerston died in the following October. The only wonder is that he lived so long. The dinner which killed the Duke of Wellington was a cold pie and a salad."I am not one who much or oft delight" tomingle the serious work of Dinner with the frivolities of Literature; but other people, more prone to levity, are fond of constructing Bills of Fare out of Shakespeare; and our National Bard is so copious in good eating and drinking that a dozenMenusmight be bodied forth from his immortal page. The most elaborate of these attempts took place in New York on the 23rd of April 1860. The Bill of Fare lies before me as I write. It contains twenty-four items, and an appropriate quotation is annexed to each. The principal joint was Roast Lamb, and to this is attached the tag—"InnocentAs is the sucking lamb."When the late Professor Thorold Rogers, an excellent Shakespearean, saw this citation, he exclaimed, "That was an opportunity missed. They should have put—'So young, and so untender!'"

DINNERS

Sero sed serio.It is the motto of the House of Cecil; and the late Lord Salisbury, long detained by business at the Foreign Office and at length sitting down to his well-earned dinner, used to translate it—"Unpunctual, but hungry." Such a formula may suitably introduce the subject of our present meditations; and, although that subject is not temporary or ephemeral, but rather belongs to all time, still at this moment it is specially opportune. Sir James Crichton-Browne has been frightening us to death with dark tales of physical degeneration, and he has been heartless enough to do so just when we are reeling under the effects of Sir Victor Horsley's attack on Alcohol. Burke, in opposing a tax on gin, pleaded that "mankind have in every age called in some material assistance to their moral consolation." These modern men of science tell us that we must by no means call in gin or any of its more genteel kinsfolk in the great family of Alcohol. Water hardly seems to meet the case—besides, it has typhoid germs in it. Tea and coffee are"nerve-stimulants," and must therefore be avoided by a neurotic generation. Physical degeneracy, then, must be staved off with food; food, in a sound philosophy of life, means Dinner; and Dinner, the ideal or abstraction, reveals itself to man in the concrete form of Dinners.

Having thus formulated my theme, I part company, here and now, with poets and romancists and all that dreamy crew, and betake myself, like Mr. Gradgrind, to facts. In loftier phrase, I pursue the historic method, and narrate, with the accuracy of Freeman, though, alas! without the brilliancy of Froude, some of the actual dinners on which mankind has lived. Creasy wrote of the "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World"—the Fifteen Decisive Dinners of the World would be a far more interesting theme; but the generous catalogue unrolls its scroll, and "fifteen" would have to be multiplied by ten or a hundred before the tale was told. A friend of mine had a pious habit of pasting into an album theMenuof every dinner at which he had enjoyed himself. Studying the album retrospectively, he used to put an asterisk against the most memorable of these records. There were three asterisks against theMenuof a dinner given by Lord Lyons at the British Embassy at Paris. "Quails and Roman Punch," said my friend with tears in his voice. "You can't get beyond that." This evidently had been one of the Fifteen Decisive Dinners ofhis gastronomic world. Did not the poet Young exclaim, in one of his most pietistic "Night Thoughts,"

"The undevout Gastronomer is mad"?

Or, has an unintended "G" crept into the line?

I treasure among my relics the "Bill of Fare" (for in those days we talked English) of a Tavern Dinner for seven persons, triumphantly eaten in 1751. Including vegetables and dessert, and excluding beverages, it comprises thirty-eight items; and the total cost was £81, 11s. 6d. (without counting the Waiter). Twenty years later than the date of this heroic feast Dr. Johnson, who certainly could do most things which required the use of a pen, vaunted in his overweening pride that he could write a cookery-book, and not only this, but "a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written; it should be a book on philosophical principles." The philosophical principles must have been those of the Stoic school if they could induce his readers or his guests to endure patiently such a dinner as he gave poor Bozzy on Easter-day, 1773—"a very good soup, a boiled leg of lamb and spinach, a veal pie, and a rice pudding." One is glad to know that the soup was good; for, as Sir Henry Thompson said in "Food and Feeding," "therationaleof the initial soup has been often discussed," and the best opinion is that the function of the soup is tofortify the digestion against what is to come. A man who is to dine on boiled lamb, veal pie, and rice pudding needs all the fortifying he can get. With some of us it would indeed be a "decisive" dinner—the last which we should consume on this planet.

True enjoyment, as well as true virtue, lies in the Golden Mean; and, as we round the corner where the eighteenth century meets the nineteenth, we begin to encounter a system of dining less profligately elaborate than the Tavern Dinner of 1751, and yet less poisonously crude than Dr. Johnson's Easter Dinner of 1773. The first Earl of Dudley (who died in 1833) disdained kickshaws, and, with manly simplicity, demanded only "a good soup, a small turbot, a neck of venison, ducklings with green peas (or chicken with asparagus), and an apricot tart." Even more meagre was the repast which Macaulay deemed sufficient for his own wants and those of a friend: "Ellis came to dinner at seven. I gave him a lobster curry, woodcock, and maccaroni." From such frugality, bordering on asceticism, it is a relief to turn to the more bounteous hospitality of Sir Robert Peel, of whose dinner the youthful Disraeli wrote: "It was curiously sumptuous; every delicacy of the season, and the second course, of dried salmon, olives, caviare, woodcock pie,foiegras, and every combination of cured herring, &c., was really remarkable." Yes, indeed! "on dine remarquablement chez vous."

After all, the social life of the capital naturally takes its tone and manner from the august centre round which it moves. If the Court dines well, so do those who frequent it. The legs of mutton and apple dumplings which satisfied the simple taste of George III. read now like a horrid dream. Perhaps, as the digestion and the brain are so closely connected, they helped to drive him mad. His sons ate more reasonably; and, in a later generation, gastronomic science in high places was quickened by the thoughtful intelligence of Prince Albert directing the practical skill of Francatelli and Moret. Here is a brief abstract or epitome of Queen Victoria's dinner on the 21st of September 1841. It begins modestly with two soups; it goes on, more daringly, to four kinds of fish; four also are the joints, followed (not, as now, preceded) by eightentrées. Then come chickens and partridges; vegetables, savouries, and sweets to the number of fifteen: and, lest any one should still suffer from the pangs of unsatiated desire, there were thoughtfully placed on the sideboard Roast Beef, Roast Mutton, Haunch of Venison, Hashed Venison, andRiz au consommé. But those were famous days. Fifty-four years had sped their course, and Her Majesty's Christmas Dinner in the year 1895 shows a lamentable shrinkage. Three soups indeed there were, but only one fish, and that a Fried Sole, which can be produced by kitchens less than Royal. To thissucceeded a beggarly array of fourentrées, three joints, and two sorts of game; but theMenurecovers itself a little in seven sweet dishes; while the sideboard displayed the "Boar's Head, Baron of Beef, and Woodcock Pie," which supplied the thrifty Journalist with appropriate copy at every Christmas of Her Majesty's long reign.

When Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli had succeeded in "dishing the Whigs" by establishing Household Suffrage, they and their colleagues went with a light heart and a good conscience to dine at the Ship Hotel, Greenwich, on the 14th of August 1867. That was, in some senses, a "decisive" dinner, for it sealed the destruction of the old Conservatism and inaugurated the reign of Tory Democracy. The triumphant Ministers had turtle soup, eleven kinds of fish, twoentrées, a haunch of venison, poultry, ham, grouse, leverets, five sweet dishes, and two kinds of ice. Eliminating the meat, this is very much the same sort of dinner as that at which Cardinal Wiseman was entertained by his co-religionists when he assumed the Archbishopric of Westminster, and I remember that his Life, by Mr. Wilfred Ward, records the dismay with which his "maigre" fare inspired more ascetic temperaments. "He kept the table of a Roman Cardinal, and surprised some Puseyite guests by four courses of fish in Lent." There is something very touching in the exculpatory language of his friend and disciple Father Faber—"Thedear Cardinal had a Lobster-salad side to his character."

Ever since the days of Burns, the "chiel amang ye takin' notes" has been an unpopular character, and not without reason, as the following extract shows. Mr. John Evelyn Denison (afterwards Lord Eversley) was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1865, and on the eve of the opening of the Session he dined, according to custom, with Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister and Leader of the House. Lord Palmerston was in his eighty-first year and gouty. Political issues of the gravest importance hung on his life. The Speaker, like aruséold politician as he was, kept a cold grey eye on Palmerston's performance at dinner, regarding it, rightly, as an index to his state of health; and this was what he reported about his host's capacities: "His dinner consisted of turtle soup, fish, patties, fricandeau, a thirdentrée, a slice of roast mutton, a second slice, a slice of hard-looking ham. In the second course, pheasant, pudding, jelly. At dessert, dressed oranges and half a large pear. He drank seltzer water only, but late in the dinner one glass of sweet champagne, and, I think, a glass of sherry at dessert." This was one of the "decisive" dinners, for Palmerston died in the following October. The only wonder is that he lived so long. The dinner which killed the Duke of Wellington was a cold pie and a salad.

"I am not one who much or oft delight" tomingle the serious work of Dinner with the frivolities of Literature; but other people, more prone to levity, are fond of constructing Bills of Fare out of Shakespeare; and our National Bard is so copious in good eating and drinking that a dozenMenusmight be bodied forth from his immortal page. The most elaborate of these attempts took place in New York on the 23rd of April 1860. The Bill of Fare lies before me as I write. It contains twenty-four items, and an appropriate quotation is annexed to each. The principal joint was Roast Lamb, and to this is attached the tag—

"Innocent

As is the sucking lamb."

When the late Professor Thorold Rogers, an excellent Shakespearean, saw this citation, he exclaimed, "That was an opportunity missed. They should have put—

'So young, and so untender!'"

XXIIILUNCHEON"Munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon!"So sings, or says, Robert Browning in his ditty of the Pied Piper, and it is to be remarked that he was not driven to invent the word "nuncheon" by the necessity of finding a rhyme for "luncheon," for "puncheon" was ready to his hand, and "nuncheon" was not a creation, but an archaism, defined by Johnson as "food eaten between meals." Let no one who perpends the amazing dinners eaten by our forefathers accuse those good men of gluttony. Let us rather bethink ourselves of their early and unsatisfying breakfasts, their lives of strenuous labour, their ignorance of five o'clock tea; and then thank the goodness and the grace which on our birth have smiled, and have given us more frequent meals and less ponderous dinners. Lord John Russell (1792-1878) published anonymously in 1820 a book of Essays and Sketches "by a Gentleman who has left his Lodgings." On the usages of polite society at the time no one was better qualified to speak, for Woburn Abbeywas his home, and at Bowood and Holland House he was an habitual guest; and this is his testimony to the dining habits of society: "The great inconvenience of a London life is the late hour of dinner. To pass the dayimpransusand then to sit down to a great dinner at eight o'clock is entirely against the first dictates of common sense and common stomachs. Women, however, are not so irrational as men, and generally sit down to a substantial luncheon at three or four; if men would do the same, the meal at night might be lightened of many of its weighty dishes and conversation would be no loser." So far, Luncheon (or Nuncheon) would seem to be exclusively a ladies' meal; and yet Dr. Kitchener could not have been prescribing for ladies only when he gave his surprising directions for a luncheon "about twelve," which might "consist of a bit of roasted Poultry, a basin of Beef Tea or Eggs poached or boiled in the shell, Fish plainly dressed, or a Sandwich; stale Bread, and half a pint of good Home-brewed Beer, or Toast and Water, with about one fourth or one-third part of its measure of Wine, of which Port is preferred, or one-seventh of Brandy."In Miss Austen's books, Luncheon is dismissed under the cursory appellation of "Cold Meat," and Madeira and water seems to have been its accompaniment; but more prodigal methods soon began to creep in. The repast which Sam Weller pronounced "a wery good notion of a lunch"consisted of veal pie, bread, knuckle of ham, cold beef, beer, and cold punch; and let it be observed in passing that, had he used the word "lunch" in polite society, the omission of the second syllable would have been severely reprehended by a generation which still spoke of the "omnibus" and had only just discontinued "cabriolet." The verb "to lunch" was even more offensive than the substantive from which it was derived; and Lord Beaconsfield, describing the Season of 1832, says that "ladies were luncheoning on Perigord pie, or coursing in whirling britskas." To Perigord pies as a luncheon dish for the luxurious and eupeptic may be added venison pasties—"Now broach me a cask of Malvoisie,Bring pasty from the doe,"said the Duchess in "Coningsby." "That has been my luncheon—a poetic repast." And Lady St. Jerome, when she took Lothair to a picnic, fed him with lobster sandwiches and Chablis. Fiction is ever the mirror of fact; and a lady still living, who published her Memoirs only a year or two ago, remembers the Lady Holland who patronized Macaulay "sitting at a beautiful luncheon of cold turkey and summer salad."But, in spite of all these instances, Luncheon was down to 1840 or thereabouts a kind of clandestine and unofficial meal. The ladies wanted something to keep them up. It was nicer for thechildren than having their dinner in the nursery. Papa would be kept at the House by an impending division, and must get a snack when he could—and so on and so forth. If a man habitually sate down to luncheon, and ate it through, he was contemned as unversed in the science of feeding. "Luncheon is a reflection on Breakfast and an insult to Dinner;" and moreover it stamped the eater as an idler. No one who had anything to do could find time for a square meal in the middle of the day. When Mr. Gladstone was at the Board of Trade, his only luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit which Mrs. Gladstone brought down to the office and forced on the reluctant Vice-President.But after 1840 a change set in. Prince Albert was notoriously fond of luncheon, and Queen Victoria humoured him. They dined late, and the Luncheon at the Palace became a very real and fully recognized meal. At it the Queen sometimes received her friends, as witness the Royal Journal—"Mamma came to luncheon with her lady and gentleman." It could not have been pleasant for the "lady and gentleman," but it established the practice."Sunday luncheon" was always a thing apart. For some reason not altogether clear, but either because devotion long sustained makes a strong demand on the nervous system or because a digestive nap was the best way of employingSunday afternoon, men who ate no luncheon on week-days devoured Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding on Sundays and had their appropriate reward. Bishop Wilberforce, whose frank self-communings are always such delightful reading, wrote in his diary for Sunday, October 27, 1861: "Preached in York Minster. Very large congregation. Back to Bishopthorpe. Sleepy,eheu, at afternoon service;musteat no luncheon on Sunday." When Luncheon had once firmly established itself, not merely as a meal but as an institution, Sunday luncheons in London became recognized centres of social life. Where there was even a moderate degree of intimacy a guest might drop in and be sure of mayonnaise, chicken, and welcome. I well remember an occasion of this kind when I saw social Presence of Mind exemplified, as I thought and think, on an heroic scale. Luncheon was over. It had not been a particularly bounteous meal; the guests had been many; the chicken had been eaten to the drumstick and the cutlets to the bone. Nothing remained but a huge Trifle, of chromatic and threatening aspect, on which no one had ventured to embark. Coffee was just coming, when the servant entered with an anxious expression, and murmured to the hostess that Monsieur Petitpois—a newly arrived French attaché—had come and seemed to expect luncheon. The hostess grasped the situation in an instant, and issuedher commands with a promptitude and a directness which the Duke of Wellington could not have surpassed. "Clear everything away, but leave the Trifle. Then show M. Petitpois in." Enter Petitpois. "Delighted to see you. Quite right. Always at home at Sunday luncheon. Pray come and sit here and have some Trifle. It is our national Sunday dish." Poor young Petitpois, actuated by the same principle which made the Prodigal desire the husks, filled himself with sponge-cake, jam, and whipped cream; and went away looking rather pale. If he kept a journal, he no doubt noted the English Sunday as one of our most curious institutions, and the Trifle as its crowning horror.Cardinal Manning, as all the world knows, never dined. "I never eat and I never drink," said the Cardinal. "I am sorry to say I cannot. I like dinner society very much. You see the world, and you hear things which you do not hear otherwise." Certainly that Cardinal was a fictitious personage, but he was drawn with fidelity from Cardinal Manning, who ate a very comfortable dinner at two o'clock, called it luncheon, and maintained his principle. There have always been some houses where the luncheons were much more famous than the dinners. Dinner, after all, is something of a ceremony: it requires forethought, care, and organization. Luncheon is more of a scramble, and, in the case of a numerousand scattered family, it is the pleasantest of reunions. "When all the daughters are married nobody eats luncheon," said Lothair to his solicitor, Mr. Putney Giles: but Mr. Putney Giles, "who always affected to know everything, and generally did," replied that, even though the daughters were married, "the famous luncheons at Crecy House would always go on and be a popular mode of their all meeting." When Lord Beaconsfield wrote that passage he was thinking of Chesterfield House, May Fair, some twenty years before Lord Burton bought it. Mr. Gladstone, who thought modern luxury rather disgusting, used to complain that nowadays life in a country house meant three dinners a day, and if you reckoned sandwiches and poached eggs at five o'clock tea, nearly four. Indeed, the only difference that I can perceive between a modern luncheon and a modern dinner is that at the former meal you don't have soup or a printedmenu. But at a luncheon at the Mansion House you have both; so it is well for Lord Mayors that their reigns are brief.One touch of personal reminiscence may close this study. While yet the Old Bailey stood erect and firm, as grim in aspect as in association, I used often, through the courtesy of a civic official, to share the luncheon of the judge and the aldermen, eaten during an interval in the trial, in a gloomy chamber behind the Bench. I still see,in my mind's eye, a learned judge, long since gone to his account, stuffing cold beef and pigeon pie, and quaffing London stout, black as Erebus and heavy as lead. After this repast he went back into Court (where he never allowed a window to be opened) and administered what he called justice through the long and lethargic afternoon. No one who had witnessed the performance could doubt the necessity for a Court of Criminal Appeal.

LUNCHEON

"Munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon!"

So sings, or says, Robert Browning in his ditty of the Pied Piper, and it is to be remarked that he was not driven to invent the word "nuncheon" by the necessity of finding a rhyme for "luncheon," for "puncheon" was ready to his hand, and "nuncheon" was not a creation, but an archaism, defined by Johnson as "food eaten between meals." Let no one who perpends the amazing dinners eaten by our forefathers accuse those good men of gluttony. Let us rather bethink ourselves of their early and unsatisfying breakfasts, their lives of strenuous labour, their ignorance of five o'clock tea; and then thank the goodness and the grace which on our birth have smiled, and have given us more frequent meals and less ponderous dinners. Lord John Russell (1792-1878) published anonymously in 1820 a book of Essays and Sketches "by a Gentleman who has left his Lodgings." On the usages of polite society at the time no one was better qualified to speak, for Woburn Abbeywas his home, and at Bowood and Holland House he was an habitual guest; and this is his testimony to the dining habits of society: "The great inconvenience of a London life is the late hour of dinner. To pass the dayimpransusand then to sit down to a great dinner at eight o'clock is entirely against the first dictates of common sense and common stomachs. Women, however, are not so irrational as men, and generally sit down to a substantial luncheon at three or four; if men would do the same, the meal at night might be lightened of many of its weighty dishes and conversation would be no loser." So far, Luncheon (or Nuncheon) would seem to be exclusively a ladies' meal; and yet Dr. Kitchener could not have been prescribing for ladies only when he gave his surprising directions for a luncheon "about twelve," which might "consist of a bit of roasted Poultry, a basin of Beef Tea or Eggs poached or boiled in the shell, Fish plainly dressed, or a Sandwich; stale Bread, and half a pint of good Home-brewed Beer, or Toast and Water, with about one fourth or one-third part of its measure of Wine, of which Port is preferred, or one-seventh of Brandy."

In Miss Austen's books, Luncheon is dismissed under the cursory appellation of "Cold Meat," and Madeira and water seems to have been its accompaniment; but more prodigal methods soon began to creep in. The repast which Sam Weller pronounced "a wery good notion of a lunch"consisted of veal pie, bread, knuckle of ham, cold beef, beer, and cold punch; and let it be observed in passing that, had he used the word "lunch" in polite society, the omission of the second syllable would have been severely reprehended by a generation which still spoke of the "omnibus" and had only just discontinued "cabriolet." The verb "to lunch" was even more offensive than the substantive from which it was derived; and Lord Beaconsfield, describing the Season of 1832, says that "ladies were luncheoning on Perigord pie, or coursing in whirling britskas." To Perigord pies as a luncheon dish for the luxurious and eupeptic may be added venison pasties—

"Now broach me a cask of Malvoisie,Bring pasty from the doe,"

said the Duchess in "Coningsby." "That has been my luncheon—a poetic repast." And Lady St. Jerome, when she took Lothair to a picnic, fed him with lobster sandwiches and Chablis. Fiction is ever the mirror of fact; and a lady still living, who published her Memoirs only a year or two ago, remembers the Lady Holland who patronized Macaulay "sitting at a beautiful luncheon of cold turkey and summer salad."

But, in spite of all these instances, Luncheon was down to 1840 or thereabouts a kind of clandestine and unofficial meal. The ladies wanted something to keep them up. It was nicer for thechildren than having their dinner in the nursery. Papa would be kept at the House by an impending division, and must get a snack when he could—and so on and so forth. If a man habitually sate down to luncheon, and ate it through, he was contemned as unversed in the science of feeding. "Luncheon is a reflection on Breakfast and an insult to Dinner;" and moreover it stamped the eater as an idler. No one who had anything to do could find time for a square meal in the middle of the day. When Mr. Gladstone was at the Board of Trade, his only luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit which Mrs. Gladstone brought down to the office and forced on the reluctant Vice-President.

But after 1840 a change set in. Prince Albert was notoriously fond of luncheon, and Queen Victoria humoured him. They dined late, and the Luncheon at the Palace became a very real and fully recognized meal. At it the Queen sometimes received her friends, as witness the Royal Journal—"Mamma came to luncheon with her lady and gentleman." It could not have been pleasant for the "lady and gentleman," but it established the practice.

"Sunday luncheon" was always a thing apart. For some reason not altogether clear, but either because devotion long sustained makes a strong demand on the nervous system or because a digestive nap was the best way of employingSunday afternoon, men who ate no luncheon on week-days devoured Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding on Sundays and had their appropriate reward. Bishop Wilberforce, whose frank self-communings are always such delightful reading, wrote in his diary for Sunday, October 27, 1861: "Preached in York Minster. Very large congregation. Back to Bishopthorpe. Sleepy,eheu, at afternoon service;musteat no luncheon on Sunday." When Luncheon had once firmly established itself, not merely as a meal but as an institution, Sunday luncheons in London became recognized centres of social life. Where there was even a moderate degree of intimacy a guest might drop in and be sure of mayonnaise, chicken, and welcome. I well remember an occasion of this kind when I saw social Presence of Mind exemplified, as I thought and think, on an heroic scale. Luncheon was over. It had not been a particularly bounteous meal; the guests had been many; the chicken had been eaten to the drumstick and the cutlets to the bone. Nothing remained but a huge Trifle, of chromatic and threatening aspect, on which no one had ventured to embark. Coffee was just coming, when the servant entered with an anxious expression, and murmured to the hostess that Monsieur Petitpois—a newly arrived French attaché—had come and seemed to expect luncheon. The hostess grasped the situation in an instant, and issuedher commands with a promptitude and a directness which the Duke of Wellington could not have surpassed. "Clear everything away, but leave the Trifle. Then show M. Petitpois in." Enter Petitpois. "Delighted to see you. Quite right. Always at home at Sunday luncheon. Pray come and sit here and have some Trifle. It is our national Sunday dish." Poor young Petitpois, actuated by the same principle which made the Prodigal desire the husks, filled himself with sponge-cake, jam, and whipped cream; and went away looking rather pale. If he kept a journal, he no doubt noted the English Sunday as one of our most curious institutions, and the Trifle as its crowning horror.

Cardinal Manning, as all the world knows, never dined. "I never eat and I never drink," said the Cardinal. "I am sorry to say I cannot. I like dinner society very much. You see the world, and you hear things which you do not hear otherwise." Certainly that Cardinal was a fictitious personage, but he was drawn with fidelity from Cardinal Manning, who ate a very comfortable dinner at two o'clock, called it luncheon, and maintained his principle. There have always been some houses where the luncheons were much more famous than the dinners. Dinner, after all, is something of a ceremony: it requires forethought, care, and organization. Luncheon is more of a scramble, and, in the case of a numerousand scattered family, it is the pleasantest of reunions. "When all the daughters are married nobody eats luncheon," said Lothair to his solicitor, Mr. Putney Giles: but Mr. Putney Giles, "who always affected to know everything, and generally did," replied that, even though the daughters were married, "the famous luncheons at Crecy House would always go on and be a popular mode of their all meeting." When Lord Beaconsfield wrote that passage he was thinking of Chesterfield House, May Fair, some twenty years before Lord Burton bought it. Mr. Gladstone, who thought modern luxury rather disgusting, used to complain that nowadays life in a country house meant three dinners a day, and if you reckoned sandwiches and poached eggs at five o'clock tea, nearly four. Indeed, the only difference that I can perceive between a modern luncheon and a modern dinner is that at the former meal you don't have soup or a printedmenu. But at a luncheon at the Mansion House you have both; so it is well for Lord Mayors that their reigns are brief.

One touch of personal reminiscence may close this study. While yet the Old Bailey stood erect and firm, as grim in aspect as in association, I used often, through the courtesy of a civic official, to share the luncheon of the judge and the aldermen, eaten during an interval in the trial, in a gloomy chamber behind the Bench. I still see,in my mind's eye, a learned judge, long since gone to his account, stuffing cold beef and pigeon pie, and quaffing London stout, black as Erebus and heavy as lead. After this repast he went back into Court (where he never allowed a window to be opened) and administered what he called justice through the long and lethargic afternoon. No one who had witnessed the performance could doubt the necessity for a Court of Criminal Appeal.

XXIVTEAFew, I fear, are the readers of Mrs. Sherwood. Yet in "The Fairchild Family" she gave us some pictures of English country life at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century which neither Jane Austen nor Mrs. Gaskell ever beat, and at least one scene of horror which is still unsurpassed. I cannot say as much for "Henry Milner, or the Story of a Little Boy who was not brought up according to the Fashions of this World." No, indeed—very far from it. And Henry now recurs to my mind only because, in narrating his history, Mrs. Sherwood archly introduces a sentence which may serve as a motto for this meditation. Like Bismarck (though unlike him in other respects), she was fond of parading scraps of a rather bald Latinity; and, in this particular instance, she combines simple scholarship with staid humour, making her hero exclaim to a tea-making lady, "Non possum vivere sine Te." The play onTeandTeawill be remarked as very ingenious. Barring the Latinity and the jest, I am at one with Mrs. Sherwood in the sentiment, "My heart leaps up when I behold"a teapot, like Wordsworth's when he beheld a rainbow; and the mere mention of tea in literature stirs in me thoughts which lie too deep for words. Thus I look forward with the keenest interest toTHE BOOK OF TEABy Okakura-Kakuzowhich the publishers promise at an early date. Solemn indeed, as befits the subject, is the preliminary announcement:—"This book in praise of tea, written by a Japanese, will surely find sympathetic readers in England, where the custom of tea-drinking has become so important a part of the national daily life. Mr. Kakuzo shows that the English are still behind the Japanese in their devotion to tea. In England afternoon tea is variously regarded as a fashionable and luxurious aid to conversation, a convenient way of passing the time, or a restful and refreshing pause in the day's occupation, but in Japan tea-drinking is ennobled into Teaism, and the English cup of tea seems trivial by comparison."This is the right view of Tea. The wrong view was lately forced into sad prominence in the Coroner's Court:—Dangers of Tea-Drinking"In summing up at a Hackney inquest on Saturday, Dr. Wynn Westcott, the coroner, commentedon the fact that deceased, a woman of twenty-nine, had died suddenly after a meal of steak, tomatoes, and tea. One of the most injudicious habits, he said, was to drink tea with a meat meal. Tea checked the flow of the gastric juice which was necessary to digestion. He was sorry if that went against teetotal doctrines, but if people must be teetotallers they had best drink water and not tea with their meals."My present purpose is to enquire whether the right or the wrong view has more largely predominated in English history and literature. If, after the manner of a German commentator, I were to indulge in "prolegomena" about the history, statistics, and chemical analysis of Tea, I should soon overflow my limits; and I regard a painfully well-known couplet in which "tea" rhymes with "obey" as belonging to that class of quotations which no self-respecting writer can again resuscitate. Perhaps a shade, though only a shade, less hackneyed is Cowper's tribute to the divine herb:—"Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urnThrows up a steamy column, and the cups,That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,So let us welcome peaceful evening in."But this really leaves the problem unsolved. Cowper drank tea, and drank it in the evening;but whether he "had anything with it," as the phrase is, remains uncertain. Bread and butter, I think, he must have had, or toast, or what Thackeray scoffs at as the "blameless muffin"; but I doubt about eggs, and feel quite sure that he did not mingle meat and tea. So much for 1795, and I fancy that the practice of 1816 (when "Emma" was published) was not very different. When Mrs. Bates went to spend the evening with Mr. Woodhouse there was "vast deal of chat, and backgammon, and tea was made downstairs"; but, though the passage is a little obscure, I am convinced that the "biscuits and baked apples" were not served with the tea, but came in later with the ill-fated "fricassee of sweetbread and asparagus." Lord Beaconsfield, who was born in 1804, thus describes the evening meal at "Hurstley"—a place drawn in detail from his early home in Buckinghamshire: "Then they were summoned to tea.... The curtains were drawn and the room lighted; an urn hissed; there were piles of bread and butter, and a pyramid of buttered toast." And, when the family from the Hall went to tea at the Rectory, they found "the tea-equipage a picture of abundance and refinement. Such pretty china, and such various and delicious cakes! White bread, and brown bread, and plum cakes, and seed cakes, and no end of cracknels, and toasts, dry or buttered." Still here is no mention of animalfoods, and even Dr. Wynn Westcott would have found nothing to condemn. The same refined tradition meets us in "Cranford," which, as we all know from its reference to "Pickwick," describes the social customs of 1836-7. Mrs. Jameson was the Queen of Society in Cranford, and, when she gave a tea-party, the herb was reinforced only by "very thin bread and butter," and Miss Barker was thought rather vulgar—"a tremendous word in Cranford"—because she gave seed cake as well. Even in "Pickwick" itself, though that immortal book does not pretend to depict the manners of polite society, the tea served in the sanctum of the "Marquis of Granby" at Dorking was flanked by nothing more substantial than a plate of hot buttered toast.Impressive, therefore, almost startling, is the abrupt transition from these ill-supported teas (which, according to Dr. Wynn Westcott, were hygienically sound) to the feast, defiant of all gastronomic law, which Mrs. Snagsby spread for Mr. and Mrs. Chadband—"Dainty new bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin slices of ham, tongue, and German sausage, delicate little rows of anchovies nestling in parsley, new-laid eggs brought up warm in a napkin, and hot buttered toast." German sausage washed down with tea! What, oh what, would the Coroner say? And what must be the emotions of the waiters at the House of Commons, with their traditions of Bellamy'sveal pies and Mr. Disraeli's port, when they see the Labour Members sit down to a refection of Tea and Brawn? But, it may be urged, Medical Science is always shifting its ground, and what is the elixir of life to-day may be labelled Poison to-morrow. Thus Thackeray, using his keenest art to stigmatize the unwholesome greediness of a City Dinner, describes the surfeited guests adjourning after dinner to the Tea Room, and there "drinking slops and eating buttered muffins until the grease trickled down their faces." This was written in 1847; but in 1823 the great Dr. Kitchener, both physician and gastronomer, pronounces thus—"Tea after Dinner assists Digestion, quenches Thirst, and thereby exhilarates the Spirits," and he suggests as an acceptable alternative "a little warmed Milk, with a teaspoonful of Rum, a bit of Sugar, and a little Nutmeg." Truly our forefathers must have had remarkable digestions."These be black Vespers' pageants." I have spoken so far of Tea in the evening. When did people begin to drink Tea in the morning? I seem to remember that, in our earlier romancists and dramatists, Coffee is the beverage for breakfast. Certainly it is so—and inimitably described as well—in Lord Beaconsfield's account of a Yorkshire breakfast in "Sybil." At Holland House, which was the very ark and sanctuary of luxury, Macaulay in 1831 breakfasted on "verygood coffee and very good tea, and very good eggs, butter kept in the midst of ice, and hot rolls." Here the two liquids are proffered, but meat is rigidly excluded, and Dr. Wynn Westcott's law of life observed. But nine years later the character of breakfast had altered, and altered in an unwholesome direction. The increasing practice of going to Scotland for the shooting season had familiarized Englishmen with the more substantial fare of the Scotch breakfast, and since that time the unhallowed combination of meat and tea has been the law of our English breakfast-table. Sir Thomas in the "Ingoldsby Legends," on the morning of his mysterious disappearance, had eaten for breakfast some bacon, an egg, a little broiled haddock, and a slice of cold beef."And then—let me see!—he had two, perhaps three,Cups (with sugar and cream) of strong gunpowder tea,With a spoonful in each of some choiceeau de vie,Which with nine out of ten would perhaps disagree."The same trait may be remembered in the case of Mrs. Finching, who, though she had cold fowl and broiled ham for breakfast, "measured out a spoonful or two of some brown liquid that smelt like brandy and put it into her tea, saying that she was obliged to be careful to follow the directions of her medical man, though the flavour was anything but agreeable."Time passes, and the subject expands. Wehave spoken of Tea in the morning and Tea in the evening. To these must be added, if the topic were to be treated with scientific completeness, that early cup which opens our eyes, as each new day dawns, on this world of opportunity and wonder, and that last dread draught with which the iron nerves of Mr. Gladstone were composed to sleep after a late night in the House of Commons. But I have no space for these divagations, and must crown this imperfect study of Tea with the true, though surprising, statement that I myself—moi qui vous parle—have known the inventor of Five o'Clock Tea. This was Anna Maria Stanhope, daughter of the third Earl of Harrington and wife of the seventh Duke of Bedford. She died at an advanced age—rouged and curled and trim to the last—in 1857; but not before her life's work was accomplished and Five o'Clock Tea established among the permanent institutions of our free and happy country. Surely she is worthier of a place in the Positivist Kalendar of those who have benefited Humanity than Hippocrates, Harvey, or Arkwright; and yet Sir Algernon West writes thus in his book of "Recollections": "Late in the 'forties and in the 'fifties, Five o'Clock Teas were just coming into vogue, the old Duchess of Bedford's being, as I considered, very dreary festivities." Such is gratitude, and such is fame.

TEA

Few, I fear, are the readers of Mrs. Sherwood. Yet in "The Fairchild Family" she gave us some pictures of English country life at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century which neither Jane Austen nor Mrs. Gaskell ever beat, and at least one scene of horror which is still unsurpassed. I cannot say as much for "Henry Milner, or the Story of a Little Boy who was not brought up according to the Fashions of this World." No, indeed—very far from it. And Henry now recurs to my mind only because, in narrating his history, Mrs. Sherwood archly introduces a sentence which may serve as a motto for this meditation. Like Bismarck (though unlike him in other respects), she was fond of parading scraps of a rather bald Latinity; and, in this particular instance, she combines simple scholarship with staid humour, making her hero exclaim to a tea-making lady, "Non possum vivere sine Te." The play onTeandTeawill be remarked as very ingenious. Barring the Latinity and the jest, I am at one with Mrs. Sherwood in the sentiment, "My heart leaps up when I behold"a teapot, like Wordsworth's when he beheld a rainbow; and the mere mention of tea in literature stirs in me thoughts which lie too deep for words. Thus I look forward with the keenest interest to

By Okakura-Kakuzo

which the publishers promise at an early date. Solemn indeed, as befits the subject, is the preliminary announcement:—

"This book in praise of tea, written by a Japanese, will surely find sympathetic readers in England, where the custom of tea-drinking has become so important a part of the national daily life. Mr. Kakuzo shows that the English are still behind the Japanese in their devotion to tea. In England afternoon tea is variously regarded as a fashionable and luxurious aid to conversation, a convenient way of passing the time, or a restful and refreshing pause in the day's occupation, but in Japan tea-drinking is ennobled into Teaism, and the English cup of tea seems trivial by comparison."

This is the right view of Tea. The wrong view was lately forced into sad prominence in the Coroner's Court:—

Dangers of Tea-Drinking

"In summing up at a Hackney inquest on Saturday, Dr. Wynn Westcott, the coroner, commentedon the fact that deceased, a woman of twenty-nine, had died suddenly after a meal of steak, tomatoes, and tea. One of the most injudicious habits, he said, was to drink tea with a meat meal. Tea checked the flow of the gastric juice which was necessary to digestion. He was sorry if that went against teetotal doctrines, but if people must be teetotallers they had best drink water and not tea with their meals."

My present purpose is to enquire whether the right or the wrong view has more largely predominated in English history and literature. If, after the manner of a German commentator, I were to indulge in "prolegomena" about the history, statistics, and chemical analysis of Tea, I should soon overflow my limits; and I regard a painfully well-known couplet in which "tea" rhymes with "obey" as belonging to that class of quotations which no self-respecting writer can again resuscitate. Perhaps a shade, though only a shade, less hackneyed is Cowper's tribute to the divine herb:—

"Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urnThrows up a steamy column, and the cups,That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,So let us welcome peaceful evening in."

But this really leaves the problem unsolved. Cowper drank tea, and drank it in the evening;but whether he "had anything with it," as the phrase is, remains uncertain. Bread and butter, I think, he must have had, or toast, or what Thackeray scoffs at as the "blameless muffin"; but I doubt about eggs, and feel quite sure that he did not mingle meat and tea. So much for 1795, and I fancy that the practice of 1816 (when "Emma" was published) was not very different. When Mrs. Bates went to spend the evening with Mr. Woodhouse there was "vast deal of chat, and backgammon, and tea was made downstairs"; but, though the passage is a little obscure, I am convinced that the "biscuits and baked apples" were not served with the tea, but came in later with the ill-fated "fricassee of sweetbread and asparagus." Lord Beaconsfield, who was born in 1804, thus describes the evening meal at "Hurstley"—a place drawn in detail from his early home in Buckinghamshire: "Then they were summoned to tea.... The curtains were drawn and the room lighted; an urn hissed; there were piles of bread and butter, and a pyramid of buttered toast." And, when the family from the Hall went to tea at the Rectory, they found "the tea-equipage a picture of abundance and refinement. Such pretty china, and such various and delicious cakes! White bread, and brown bread, and plum cakes, and seed cakes, and no end of cracknels, and toasts, dry or buttered." Still here is no mention of animalfoods, and even Dr. Wynn Westcott would have found nothing to condemn. The same refined tradition meets us in "Cranford," which, as we all know from its reference to "Pickwick," describes the social customs of 1836-7. Mrs. Jameson was the Queen of Society in Cranford, and, when she gave a tea-party, the herb was reinforced only by "very thin bread and butter," and Miss Barker was thought rather vulgar—"a tremendous word in Cranford"—because she gave seed cake as well. Even in "Pickwick" itself, though that immortal book does not pretend to depict the manners of polite society, the tea served in the sanctum of the "Marquis of Granby" at Dorking was flanked by nothing more substantial than a plate of hot buttered toast.

Impressive, therefore, almost startling, is the abrupt transition from these ill-supported teas (which, according to Dr. Wynn Westcott, were hygienically sound) to the feast, defiant of all gastronomic law, which Mrs. Snagsby spread for Mr. and Mrs. Chadband—"Dainty new bread, crusty twists, cool fresh butter, thin slices of ham, tongue, and German sausage, delicate little rows of anchovies nestling in parsley, new-laid eggs brought up warm in a napkin, and hot buttered toast." German sausage washed down with tea! What, oh what, would the Coroner say? And what must be the emotions of the waiters at the House of Commons, with their traditions of Bellamy'sveal pies and Mr. Disraeli's port, when they see the Labour Members sit down to a refection of Tea and Brawn? But, it may be urged, Medical Science is always shifting its ground, and what is the elixir of life to-day may be labelled Poison to-morrow. Thus Thackeray, using his keenest art to stigmatize the unwholesome greediness of a City Dinner, describes the surfeited guests adjourning after dinner to the Tea Room, and there "drinking slops and eating buttered muffins until the grease trickled down their faces." This was written in 1847; but in 1823 the great Dr. Kitchener, both physician and gastronomer, pronounces thus—"Tea after Dinner assists Digestion, quenches Thirst, and thereby exhilarates the Spirits," and he suggests as an acceptable alternative "a little warmed Milk, with a teaspoonful of Rum, a bit of Sugar, and a little Nutmeg." Truly our forefathers must have had remarkable digestions.

"These be black Vespers' pageants." I have spoken so far of Tea in the evening. When did people begin to drink Tea in the morning? I seem to remember that, in our earlier romancists and dramatists, Coffee is the beverage for breakfast. Certainly it is so—and inimitably described as well—in Lord Beaconsfield's account of a Yorkshire breakfast in "Sybil." At Holland House, which was the very ark and sanctuary of luxury, Macaulay in 1831 breakfasted on "verygood coffee and very good tea, and very good eggs, butter kept in the midst of ice, and hot rolls." Here the two liquids are proffered, but meat is rigidly excluded, and Dr. Wynn Westcott's law of life observed. But nine years later the character of breakfast had altered, and altered in an unwholesome direction. The increasing practice of going to Scotland for the shooting season had familiarized Englishmen with the more substantial fare of the Scotch breakfast, and since that time the unhallowed combination of meat and tea has been the law of our English breakfast-table. Sir Thomas in the "Ingoldsby Legends," on the morning of his mysterious disappearance, had eaten for breakfast some bacon, an egg, a little broiled haddock, and a slice of cold beef.

"And then—let me see!—he had two, perhaps three,Cups (with sugar and cream) of strong gunpowder tea,With a spoonful in each of some choiceeau de vie,Which with nine out of ten would perhaps disagree."

The same trait may be remembered in the case of Mrs. Finching, who, though she had cold fowl and broiled ham for breakfast, "measured out a spoonful or two of some brown liquid that smelt like brandy and put it into her tea, saying that she was obliged to be careful to follow the directions of her medical man, though the flavour was anything but agreeable."

Time passes, and the subject expands. Wehave spoken of Tea in the morning and Tea in the evening. To these must be added, if the topic were to be treated with scientific completeness, that early cup which opens our eyes, as each new day dawns, on this world of opportunity and wonder, and that last dread draught with which the iron nerves of Mr. Gladstone were composed to sleep after a late night in the House of Commons. But I have no space for these divagations, and must crown this imperfect study of Tea with the true, though surprising, statement that I myself—moi qui vous parle—have known the inventor of Five o'Clock Tea. This was Anna Maria Stanhope, daughter of the third Earl of Harrington and wife of the seventh Duke of Bedford. She died at an advanced age—rouged and curled and trim to the last—in 1857; but not before her life's work was accomplished and Five o'Clock Tea established among the permanent institutions of our free and happy country. Surely she is worthier of a place in the Positivist Kalendar of those who have benefited Humanity than Hippocrates, Harvey, or Arkwright; and yet Sir Algernon West writes thus in his book of "Recollections": "Late in the 'forties and in the 'fifties, Five o'Clock Teas were just coming into vogue, the old Duchess of Bedford's being, as I considered, very dreary festivities." Such is gratitude, and such is fame.

Back to IndexNext