AUTHORS AND THEIR DIETETICS.
It is all very well for Mr. Leigh Hunt to write a poem on the “Feast of the Poets,” and to show us how Apollo stood “pitching his darts,” by way of invitation to the ethereal banquet. This is all very well in graceful poetry, but the account is no more to be received, than the new gospel according todittois likely to be by the Lord Primate and orthodox Christians. It is far more difficult to tell the matter in plain prose; for, where there are few dinners, many authors cannot well dine. It is easier to tell how they fasted than how they fed; how they died, choked at last by the newly-baked roll that came too late to be swallowed, than how they lived daily,—for the daily life of some would be as impossible of discovery, as the door of the “Cathedral of Immensities,” wherein Mr. Carlyle transacts worship. The soul of the poet, says an Eastern proverb, passes into the grasshopper, which sings till it dies of starvation. An apt illustration, but our English grasshoppers must not be used for the illustrative purpose, seeing that they are far too wise to do anything of the sort. A British grasshopper no more sings till he dies, than a British swan dies singing: these foolish habits are left to foreigners and poetry. Let us turn to the more reliable register of our ever-juvenile friend, Mr. Sylvanus Urban.
More than a century ago, Mr. Urban, who is the only original “oldest inhabitant,” gave a “Literary Bill ofMortality for 1752,” showing the casualties among books as well as among authors. Touching the respective fates of the former, we find the productions of the year set down as, “Abortive, 7000; still-born, 3000; old age, 0.” Sudden deaths fell upon 320. Three or four thousand perished by trunk-makers, sky-rockets, pastrycooks, or worms; while more than half that number were privily disposed of. If such were the fortunes of the works, how desperate must have been the diet of the authors! So also was their destiny. As a class, they are fixed, in round numbers, at 3000; and a third of these are registered as dying of lunacy. Some 1200 are entered as “starved.” Seventeen were disposed of by “the hangman,” and fifteen by hardly more respectable persons, namelythemselves! Mad dogs, vipers, and mortification, swept off a goodly number. Five pastoral poets, who could not live by the oaten pipe, appropriately died of “fistula.” And, as a contrast to the multitude “starved,” we find azeroindicating the ascertained quantity of authors who had perished by the aldermanic malady of “surfeit.”
There is, perhaps, more approximation to truth than appears at first sight in thisjeu d’esprit. It was only in Pagan days that authors could boast of obesity. They dined with thetyranni, as Persian poets get their mouths stuffed with sugar-candy by the Shah Inshah. And yet Pliny speaks of poets feeding sparingly,ut solent poetœ. Perhaps this was only an exception, like that of Moore, who smilingly sat down to a broil at home when not dining with “right honourables;” or contentedly thanked Heaven for “salt fish and biscuits” with his mother and sister in Abbey Street, the day after he had supped with the ducal viceroy of Ireland, and half the peerage of the three kingdoms.
Still, in the old times, authors took more liberty withtheir hosts. In Rome they kept more to the proprieties; for a nod of the head of the imperial entertainer was sufficient to make their own fly from their shoulders. In presence of the Roman emperor of old, an author could only have declared that the famous invasion of Britain, which was productive of ship-loads of spoil, in the shape of sea-shells, was a god-like feat. So, at the table of the czar, all the lyres of Muscovy sing the ode of eternal sameness, to the effect that the dastardly butchery at Sinope was an act that made the angels of God jubilant! The Russian lyres dare not sing to any other tune. It was not so of yore. Witness what is told us of Philoxenus, the ode writer, whose odes, however, are less known than his acts. He was the author of the wish that he had a crane’s neck, in order to have prolonged enjoyment in swallowing. This is a poor wish compared with that of Quin, elsewhere recorded, that he might have a swallow as long as from here to Botany Bay in palate all the way! He was a greedy fellow, this same Philoxenus. He accustomed himself to hold his hands in the hottest water, and to gargle his throat with it scalding; and, by this noble training, he achieved the noble end of being able to swallow the hottest things at table, before the other guests could venture on them. He would have conquered the most accomplished of our country bumpkins in consuming hasty-pudding at a fair. His mouth was as though it was paved, and his fellow-guests used to say of him, that he was an oven and not a man. He once travelled many miles to buy fish at Ephesus; but, when he reached the market-place, he found it all bespoke for a wedding banquet. He was by no means embarrassed; he went uninvited to the feast, kissed the bride, sang an epithalamium that made the guests roar with ecstasy, and afforded such delight by his humour, that the bridegroom invited him to breakfast with him on the morrow. His withad made amends for his devouring all the best dishes. It is a long way from Philoxenus to Dr. Chalmers forgetting his repast in the outpouring of his wisdom, and entering in his journal the expression of his fear that he had been intolerant in argument. What a contrast, too, between Philoxenus and Byron, who, when dining with a half-score of wits at Rogers’s, only opened his mouth to ask for biscuits and soda-water, and not finding any such articles in the bill of fare, silently dining on vegetables and vinegar! The noble poet’s fare in Athens was often of the same modest character; but we know what excesses he could commit when his wayward appetite that way prompted, or when he wished to lash his Pegasus into fury, as, after reading the famous attack on his poetry in the Edinburgh Review, when he swallowed three bottles of claret, and then addressed himself to the tomahawking of his reviewers and rivals.
Philoxenus, however, had his counterpart in those abbés and poets who used, in the hearing of Louis XV., to praise Madame de Pompadour. He was writing a poem called “Galatea,” in honour of the mistress of Dionysius of Sicily, when he was once dining with that tyrant. There were a couple of barbels on the royal board, a small one near the poet, and a larger near the prince. As the latter saw Philoxenus put his diminutive barbel to his ear, he asked him wherefore, and the poet replied that he was asking news of Nereus, but that he thought the fish he held had been caught too young to give him any. “I think,” said Philoxenus, “that the old fish near your sacredness would better suit my purpose.” This joke has descended to Joe Miller, in whose collection it is to be found in a modified form. But the story is altogether less neat than the one told of Dominic, the famous Italian harlequin and farce writer. He was standing in presence of Louis XIV. at dinner, when the GrandMonarque observed that his eyes were fixed on a dish of partridges. “Take that dish to Dominic,” said the king. “What!” exclaimed thefarceur, “partridges and all!” “Well,” said the monarch, smiling with gravity, “yes, partridges and all!” This reminds me of another anecdote, the hero of which is the Abbé Morallet, whom Miss Edgeworth in her “Ormond” praises so highly, and praises so justly. But Morallet, if he loved good deeds, loved not less good dinners, and he shone in both. His talents as a writer, and his virtues as a man, to say nothing of his appetite, made him especially welcome at the hospitable table of Monsieur Ansu. The abbé had learned to carve expressly that he might appropriate to himself his favourite portions,—a singular instance of selfishness in a man who was selfish in nothing else. It was on one of these occasions that a magnificent pheasant excited the admiration of the guests, and of the abbé in particular, who nevertheless sighed to think that it had not been placed close to him. Some dexterity was required so to carve, it, that each of the guests might partake of the oriental bird; and the mistress of the house, remembering the abbé’s skill as a carver, directed an attendant to pass the pheasant to M. l’Abbé de Morallet. “What!” exclaimed the latter, “the whole of it? how very kind!” “The whole of it?” repeated the lady; “I have no objection, if these ladies and gentlemen are willing to surrender their rights to you.” The entire company gave consent, by reiterating the words, “the whole of it!” and the man, who might have gained the Montholon prize for virtue, really achieved a prize of gluttony which hardly confers honour on a hungry clown at a fair.
La Fontaine at table was seen in a better light than the Abbé Morallet. A fermier-general once invited him to a dinner of ceremony, in the persuasion that an author who excited such general admiration would create endlessdelight for the select company, to entertain whom he had been invited. La Fontaine knew it well, during the whole repast ate in silence, and immediately rose, to the consternation of the convives, to take his departure. He was going, he said, to the Academy. The master of the house represented to him that it was by far too early, and that he would find none of the members assembled. “I know that,” said the fabulist, with his quiet smile and courteous bow; “I know that, but I will go a long way round.” If this seemed a trifle uncourteous—and it was so more in seeming than reality—it was not so much so as in the case of Byron, who used to invite a company to dinner, and then leave them to themselves to enjoy their repast. Noble hosts of the past century used to do something like this when they gave masquerades. Fashion compelled them to adopt a species of amusement which they detested; but they vindicated personal liberty nevertheless, for when their rooms were at their fullest, the noble host, quietly leaving his guest to the care of his wife, would slip away to some neighbouring coffee-house, and over a cool pint of claret enjoy the calm which was not to be had at home. The late Duke of Norfolk used habitually to dine at one of the houses in Covent Garden, out of pure liking to it. He was accustomed to order dinner for five, and to duly eat what he had deliberately ordered; but, as he one day detected a waiter watching him in his gastronomic process, he angrily ordered his bill, and never entered the house again.
It was a common practice with Haydn, like his Grace of Norfolk, to order a dinner for five or six, and then eat the whole himself. He once ordered such a dinner to be ready by a stated hour, at which time he alone appeared, and ordered the repast to be served. “But where is the company?” respectfully inquired the head waiter. “Oh!” exclaimed Haydn, “Iam de gompany!” But if he ateall, he also paid for all. Moore and Bowles, in their visits together to Bath, used sometimes to dine at the White Hart, where, as Moore records, he paid his share of the dinner and pint of Madeira, and then Bowles magnificently “stood” a bottle of claret, at dessert. And a pleasant dinner the two opposite, yet able, poets, made of it;—far more pleasant than Coleridge’s dinner with a party at Reynolds’s, when he bowled down the glasses like nine-pins, because they were too small to drink from copiously!
The name of Coleridge reminds me of Dufresny, an author of the time of Louis XIV., who was full of sentiment and majestic sounds, but who was content to live at the cost of other people, and who never achieved anything like an independence for himself. After the death of his royal patron, he was one day dining with the Regent Duke of Orleans, who expressed a wish to provide for him. Caprice inspired the author to say, “Your royal highness had better leave me poor, as I am, as a monument of the condition of France before the regency.” He was not displeased at having his petition refused. A guest at his side did indeed remark, by way of encouragement, that “poverty was no vice.” “No,” answered Dufresny, sharply, “but it is something very much worse.” In act and spirit he was not unlike a prince of wits and punsters among ourselves, who used to set up bottles of champagne on his little lawn and bowl them down for nine-pins; and who, of course, left his wife and children pensioners on the charity of the state and the people.
I have spoken of La Fontaine; he was as absent at table as poor Lord Dudley and Ward, whose first aberrations so alarmed Queen Adelaide. La Fontaine was also like Dean Ogle, who, at a friend’s table, always thought himself at his own, and if the dinner were indifferent, he would make an apology to the guests, and promise them better treatment next time. So La Fontaine was one day at the table ofDespreaux; the conversation turned upon St. Augustin, and after much serious discourse upon that Christian teacher, La Fontaine, who had till then been perfectly silent, turned to his neighbour, the Abbé Boileau, one of the most pious men of his day, and asked him “if he thought that St. Augustin had as much wit as Rabelais?” The priest blushed scarlet, and then contented himself with remarking, “M. de la Fontaine, you have got on one of your stockings the wrong side out;”—which was the fact.
The poet’s query to the priest was no doubt as startling as that put by the son of a renowned reverend joker to the then Lord Primate. The anxious parent had informed his somewhat “fast” offspring, that as the archbishop was to dine with him that day, it would be desirable that the young gentleman should eschew sporting subjects, and if he spoke at all, speak only on serious subjects. Accordingly, at dessert, during a moment of silence, the obedient child, looking gravely at his grace, asked him “if he could tell him what sort of condition Nebuchadnezzar was in, when he was taken up from grass?” The Lord Primate readily replied that he should be able to answer the question by the time he who had made it had found out the name of the man whom Samson ordered to tie the torches to the foxes’ tails, before they were sent in to destroy the corn of the Philistines!
Moore loved to dine with the great; but there have been many authors who could not appreciate the supposed advantages of such distinction. Lainez was one of these, and there were but few of his countrymen who resembled him. One day the Duke of Orleans met him in the park at Fontainebleau, and did him the honour of inviting him to dinner. “It is really quite impossible,” said Lainez; “I am engaged to dine at a tavern with half-a-dozen jolly companions; and what opinion would your royal highness have of me if I were to break my word?” Lainez was notlike Madame de Sevigné, who, after having been asked to dance by Louis XIV., declared in her delight that he was the greatest monarch in the world. Bussi, who laughed at her absurd enthusiasm, affirms that the fair authoress of the famous “Letters” was so excited at the supper after the dance, that it was with difficulty she could refrain from shrieking out “Vive le Roi!”
Had the famous “petit père André” kept down his impulses as successfully as Madame de Sevigné did at the supper, where, after all, she didnotexclaim, “Vive le Roi,” it would have been more to his credit, and less to our amusement. The good father, like a better man, H. Vincent de Paul, was excessively fond of cards, but he did not cheat, like the saint, for the sake of winning for the poor. He had been playing atpiquet, and in one game had won a considerable sum by the lucky intervention of a fourth king. He was in such ecstasy at his luck, that he declared at supper he would introduce his lucky fourth king into his next day’s sermon. Bets were laid in consequence of this declaration, and the whole company were present when the discourse was preached. The promise made at the supper was kept in the sermon, though something profanely: “My brethren,” said the abbé, “there arrived one king, two kings, three kings; but what were they?—and where should I have been without the fourth king, who savedme, and has benefited you? That fourth king was He who lay in the manger, and whom the three royal magi came but to worship!” At the dinner which followed the author of the sermon was more eulogised than if he had been as grand as Bourdaloue, as touching as Massillon, or as winning as Fénelon.
There was more wit in a curé of Basse Bretagne, who was the author of his diocesan’s pastorals, and who happened to hold invitations to dinners for the consecutive days of the week. He could not take advantage of themand perform his duty too, but he hit on a method of accomplishing his desire. He gave out at church, an intimation to this effect:—“In order to avoid confusion, my brethren, I have to announce that to-morrow, Monday, I will receive at confession, the liars only; on Tuesday, the misers; on Wednesday, the slanderers; on Thursday, the thieves; Friday, the libertines; and Saturday, the women of evil life.” It need not be said that the priest was left duringthatweek to enjoy himself without let or hindrance. And it was at such joyous dinners as he was in the habit of attending that most of the sermons, with startling passages in them, like those of Father André, were devised. Thus, the Cordelier Maillard, the author of various pious works, at a dinner of counsellors, announced his intention of preaching against the counsellors’ ladies,—that is, against their wives, or such of them that wore embroidery. And well he kept his word, as the following choice flowers from the bouquet of his pulpit oratory will show. “You say,” he exclaimed to the ladies in question, “that you are clad according to your conditions; all the devils in hell fly away with your conditions, and you too, my ladies! You will say to me, perhaps, Our husbands do not give us this gorgeous apparel, we earn it by the labours of our bodies. Thirty thousand devils fly away with the labours of your bodies, and you too, my ladies!” And, after diatribes like these against the ladies in question, the Cordelier would dine with their lords, and dine sumptuously too. The dinners of the counsellors of those days were not like the Spanish dinner to which an author was invited, and which consisted of capon and wine, two excellent ingredients, but unfortunately, as at the banquet celebrated by Swift, where there was nothing warm but the ice, and nothing sweet but the vinegar, so here the capon was cold and the wine was hot. Whereupon, the literary guest dips the leg of the capon into the flask of wine, andbeing asked by his host wherefore he did so, replied, “I am warming the capon in the wine, and cooling the wine with the capon.”
The host was not such a judge of wine, apparently, as the archbishops of Salzbourg, who used not indeed to write books, nor indeed read them, but who used to entertain those who did, and then preach against literary vanity from those double-balcony pulpits which some of my readers may recollect in the cathedral of the town where Paracelsus was wont to discourse like Solan, and to drink like Silenus; and before whose tomb I have seen votaries, imploring his aid against maladies, or thanking him for having averted them! It is said of one of these prince primates that when, on the occasion of his death, the municipal officers went to place the seals on his property, they found the library sealed up exactly as it had been done many years before at the time of the decease of his predecessor. Such, however, was not the case with the wine-cellars. What the archiepiscopal wine is at Salzbourg, I do not know, but if it be half as good as that drank by the monks of Mölk, on the Danube, why the archbishops may stand excused. Besides, they only drank it during their leisure hours,—of which, as Hayne remarks, archbishops have generally four-and-twenty daily.
But to return nearer home, and to our own authors:—Dr. Arne may be reckoned among these, and it is of him, I think, that a pleasant story is told, showing how he wittily procured a dinner in an emergency, which certainly did not promise to achieve such a consummation. The doctor was with a party of composers and musicians in a provincial town, where a musical festival was being celebrated, and at which they were prominent performers. They proceeded to an inn to dine; they were accommodated with a room, but were told that every eatable thing in the house was already engaged. All despaired in theirhunger, save the “Mus. Doc.” who, cutting off two or three ends of catgut, went out upon the stairs, and observing a waiter carrying a joint to a company in an adjacent room, contrived to drop the bits of catgut on the meat, while he addressed two or three questions to the waiter. He then returned to his companions, to whom he intimated that dinner would soon be ready. They smiled grimly at what they thought was a sorry joke, and soon after, some confusion being heard in the room to which the joint which he had ornamented had been conveyed, he reiterated the assurance that dinner was coming, and thereupon he left the room. On the stairs he encountered the waiter bearing away the joint, with a look of disgust in his face. “Whither so fast, friend, with that haunch of mutton?” was his query. “I am taking it back to the kitchen, Sir; the gentlemen cannot touch it. Only look, Sir,” said William, with his nose in the direction of the bits of catgut; “its enough to turn one’s stomach!” “William,” said Arne gravely, “fiddlers have very strong stomachs; bring the mutton to our room.” The thing was done, the haunch was eaten, the hungry guests were delighted, but William had ever afterwards a contempt for musical people; he classed them with those barbarians whom he had heard the company speak of where he waited, who not only ate grubs, but declared that they liked them.
Martial was often as hardly put to it to secure a dinner as any of the authors I have hitherto named. He was fond of agooddinner,ut solent poetæ; and he knew nothing better than a hare, followed by a dish of thrushes. The thrush appears to have been a favourite bird in the estimation of the poets. The latter, may have loved to hear them sing, but they loved them better in a pie. Homer wrote a poem on the thrush; and Horace has said, in a line, as much in its favour as the Chian could have said in his long and lost poem,—“nil melius turdo.”Martial was, at all events, a better fed and better weighted man than the poet Philetas of Cos, who was so thin that he walked abroad with leaden balls to his feet, in order that he might not be carried away by the wind. The poet Archestratus, when he was captured by the enemy, was put in a pair of scales, and was found of the weight of an obolus. Perhaps this was the value of his poetry! It was the value of nearly all that was written by a gastronomic authoress in France; I allude to Madame de Genlis, who boasts in her Memoirs, that having been courteously received by a certain German, she returned the courtesy by teaching him how to cook seven different dishes after the French fashion.
The authors of France have exhibited much caprice in their gastronomic practice; often professing in one direction, and acting in its opposite. Thus Lamartine was a vegetarian until he entered his teens. He remains so in opinion, but he does violence to his taste, and eats good dinners for the sake of conforming to the rules of society! This course in an author, who is for the moment rigidly Republican when all the world around him is Monarchical, is singular enough. Lamartine’s vegetarian taste was fostered by his mother, who took him when a child to the shambles, and disgusted him with the sight of butchers in activity on slaughtering days. He for a long time led about a pet lamb by a ribbon, and went into strong fits at a hint from his mother’s cook, that it was time to turn the said pet into useful purposes, and maketendrons d’agneauof him. Lamartine would no more have thought of eating his lamb, than Emily Norton would have dreamed of breakfasting on collops cut from her dear white doe of Rylston. The poet still maintains, that it is cruel and sinful to kill one animal in order that another may dine; but, with a sigh for the victim, he can eat heartily of what is killed, and even put his fork into the breast of lambwithout compunction,—but all for conformity! He knows that if he were to confine himself to turnips, he should enjoy better health and have a longer tenure of life; but then he thinks of the usages of society, sacrifices himself to custom, and gets an indigestion upon truffled turkey.
Moore, in his early days in London, used to dine somewhere in Marylebone with French refugee priests, for something less than a shilling. Dr. Johnson dined still cheaper, at the “Pine Apple,” in New-street, Covent Garden—namely, for eightpence. They who drank wine paid fourpence more for the luxury, but the lexicographer seldom took wine at his own expense; and sixpenny-worth of meat, one of bread, and a penny for the waiter, sufficed to purchase viands and comfort for the author of the “Vanity of Human Wishes.” Boyce the versifier was of quite another kidney; when he lay in bed, not only starving, but stark naked, a compassionate friend gave him half-a-guinea, which he spent in truffles and mushrooms, eating the same in bed under the blankets. There was something atrociously sublime about Boyce. Famine had pretty well done for him, when some one sent him a slice of roast beef, but Boyce refused to eat it, because there was no catchup to render it palatable.
It must have been a sight of gastronomic pleasure to have seen Wilkes and Johnson together over a fillet of veal, with abundance of butter, gravy, stuffing, and a squeeze of lemon. The philosopher and the patriot were then on a level with other hungry and appreciating men. Shallow with his short-legged hen, and Sir Roger de Coverley over hasty-pudding, are myths; not so Pope with stewed regicide lampreys, Charles Lamb before roast pig, or Lord Eldon next to liver and bacon, or Theodore Hook bending to vulgar pea-soup. These were rich realities, and the principal performers in them had not the slightest idea of affecting refinement upon such subjects. Goldsmith,when he could get it, had a weakness for haunch of venison; and Dr. Young was so struck with a broiled bladebone on which Pope regaled him, that he concluded it was a foreign dish, and anxiously inquired how it was prepared. Ben Jonson takes his place among the lovers of mutton, while Herrick wandering dinnerless about Westminster, Nahum Tate enduring sanctuary and starvation in the Mint, Savage wantonly incurring hunger, and Otway strangled by it, introduce us to authors with whom “dining with Duke Humphrey,” was so frequent a process, that each shadowy meal was but as a station towards death.
When Goldsmith “tramped” it in Italy, his flute ceased to be his bread-winner as it had been in France; the fellow-countrymen of Palestrina were deaf to “Barbara Allen,” pierced from memory through the vents of an Irish reed. Goldsmith, therefore, dropped his flute, and took up philosophy; not as a dignity; he played it as he had done his flute, for bread and a pillow. He knocked at the gate of a college instead of at the door of a cottage, made his bow, gave out a thesis, supported it in a Latin which must have set on edge the teeth of his hearers, and, having carried his exhibition to a successful end, was awarded the trifling and customary honorarium, with which he purchased bread and strength for the morrow. No saint in the howling wilderness lived a harder life than Goldsmith during his struggling years in London; the table traits, even of his days of triumph, were sometimes coloured unpleasingly. I am not sure if Goldsmith was present at the supper at Sir Joshua’s, when Miss Reynolds, after the repast, was called upon as usual to give a toast, and not readily remembering one, was asked to give the ugliest man of her acquaintance, and thereon she gave “Dr. Goldsmith;” the name was no sooner uttered than Mrs. Cholmondeley rushed across the room, and shook hands withReynolds’s sister, by way of approval. What a sample of the manners of the day, and how characteristic the remark of Johnson, whowaspresent, and whose wit, at his friend’s expense, was rewarded by a roar, that “thus the ancients, on the commencement of their friendships, used to sacrifice a beast between them!” Cuzzoni, when found famishing, spent the guinea given her in charity, in a bottle of tokay and a penny roll. So Goldsmith, according to Mrs. Thrale, was “drinking himself drunk with Madeira,” with the guinea sent to rescue him from hunger by Johnson. But let us be just to poor Oliver. If he squandered the eleemosynary guinea of a friend, he refused roast beef and daily pay, offered him by Parson Scott, Lord Sandwich’s chaplain, if he would write against his conscience, and in support of government; and he could be generous in his turn to friends who needed the exercise of generosity. When Goldsmith went into the suburban gardens of London to enjoy his “shoemakers’ holiday,” he generally had Peter Barlow with him. Now Peter’s utmost limit of profligacy was the sum of fifteen-pence for his dinner; his share would sometimes amount to five shillings, but Goldsmith always magnificently paid the difference. Perhaps there are few of the sons of song who dined so beggarly, and achieved such richness of fame, as Butler, Otway, Goldsmith, Chatterton, and, in a less degree of reputation, but not of suffering, poor Gerald Griffin, who wrestled with starvation till he began to despair. Chattertondiddespair, as he sat without food, hope, and humility; and we know what came of it. Butler, the sturdy son of a Worcestershire farmer, after he had astonished his contemporaries by his “Hudibras,” lived known but to a few, and upon the charity or at the tables ofthem. But he did not, like the heartless though sorely-tried Savage, slander the good-natured friends at whose tables he drew the support of his life. As for Otway, whether he perishedof suffocation by the roll which he devoured too greedily after long fasting, or whether he died of the cold draught of water, drank when he was overheated, it is certain that he died in extreme penury at the “Bull” on Tower Hill,—the coarse frequenters of the low public-house were in noisy revelry round their tables, while the body of the dead poet lay, awaiting the grave, in the room adjacent.
The table life of Peter Pindar was a far more joyous one than that of much greater poets. At Truro he was noted for his frugal fare, and he never departed from the observance of frugality of living throughout his career. He would sometimes, we are told, when visiting country patients, and when he happened to be detained, go into the kitchen and cook his own beefsteak, in order to show a country cook how a steak was done in London,—the only place, he said, where it was properly cooked. He laughed at the faculty as he did at the king, and set the whole profession mad by sanctioning the plentiful use of water, declaring that physic was an uncertain thing, and maintaining that in most cases all that was required on the doctor’s part was “to watch nature, and when she was going right, to give her a shove behind.” He was accustomed to analyse the drugs which he had prescribed for his patients, before he would allow the latter to swallow them, and he gave a decided county bias against pork by remarking of a certain apothecary that he was too fond of bleeding the patients who resorted to him, and too proud of his large breed of pigs. The inference was certainly not in favour of pork. Peter’s practical jokes in connexion with the table were no jokes to the chief object of them. Thus, when a pompous Cornish member of parliament issued invitations for as pompous a dinner to personages of corresponding pomposity, “Peter,” recollecting that the senator had an aunt who was a laundress, sent her an invitation in her nephew’s name, and the old lady, happyand proud, excited universal surprise, and very particular horror in the bosom of the parliament-man, by making her appearance in the august and hungry assembly, who welcomed her about as warmly as if she had been a “boule asphyxiatre” of the new French artillery practice.
It is going a long way back to ascend from “Pindar” to Tasso, but both poets loved roasted chestnuts,—andthereis the affinity. Peter never drank any thing but old rum; a wine glass, (never beyond a wine glass and a half,) served him for a day, after a dinner of the plainest kind. The doctor eschewed wine altogether, at least in his latter days, as generating acidity. Tasso, however, unlike our satirical friend, was a wine-bibber. During the imprisonment which had been the result of his own arrogance, he wrote to the physician of the Duke of Ferrara, complaining of intestinal pains, of sounds of bells in his ears, of painful mental images and varying apparitions of inanimate things appearing to him, and of his inability to study. The doctor advised him to apply a cautery to his leg, abstain from wine, and confine himself to a diet of broth and gruels. The poet defended the sacredness of his appetite, and declined to abstain from generous wine; but he urged themedicoto find a remedy for his ills, promising to recompense him for his trouble, by making him immortal in song. At a later period of his life, when he was the guest of his friend Manco, in his gloomy castle of Bisaccio, the illustrious pair were seated together, after dinner, over a dessert of Tasso’s favourite chestnuts and some generous wine; and there he affrighted his friend by maintaining that he was constantly attended by a guardian spirit, who was frequently conversing with him, and in proof of the same, he invited Manco to listen to their dialogue. The host replenished his glass and announced himself ready. Tasso fell into a loud rhapsody of mingled folly and beauty, occasionally pausing to give his spiritan opportunity of speaking; but the remarks of this agathodæmon were inaudible to all but the ears of the poet. The imaginary dialogue went on for an hour; and at the end of it, when Tasso asked Manco what he thought of it, Manco, who was the most matter-of-fact man that ever lived, replied that, for his part, he thought Tasso had drunk too much wine and eaten too many chestnuts. And truly I think so too.
The greatest of authors are given to the strangest of freaks. Thus one of the most popular of the teachers of the people presided at a gay tavern supper the night before the execution of the Mannings. The feast concluded, the party (supplied with brandy and biscuits) proceeded to the disgusting spectacle, where they occupied “reserved seats;” and when all was done, the didactic leader of the revellers and sight-seers, thought he compensated for his want of taste, by pronouncing as “execrable” the taste of those who, like George Selwyn, could find pleasure in an execution. But there are few men so inconsistent as didactic authors. Pope taught, in poetry, the excellence of moderation; but he writes to Congreve in 1715, that he sits up till two o’clock over burgundy and champagne; and he adds, “I am become so much of a rake that I shall be ashamed, in a short time, to be thought to do any sort of business.” But Pope’s table practice, like Swift’s, was not always of the same character. The dean, writing to Pope, in the same year that the latter tells Congreve (a dissolute man at table, by the way) of his sitting over burgundy and champagne till two in the morning, speaks of quite another character of life: “You are to understand that I live in the corner of a vast unfurnished house. My family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in my stable, a footman, and an old maid, who are all at board wages; and when I do not dine abroad, or make an entertainment,—which last is veryrare,—I eat a mutton pie, and drink half a pint of wine.” Pope’s habit of sleeping after dinner did not incline him to obesity; and it was a habit that the dean approved. Swift told Gay that his wine was bad, and that the clergy did not often call at his house; an admission in which Gay detected cause and effect. In the following year to that last named, Swift wrote a letter to Pope, in which I find a paragraph affording a table trait of some interest: “I remember,” he says, “when it grieved your soul to see me pay a penny more than my club, at an inn, when you had maintained me three months at bed and board; for which, if I had dealt with you in the Smithfield way, it would have cost me a hundred pounds, for I live worse here (Dublin) upon more. Did you ever consider that I am, for life, almost twice as rich as you, and pay no rent, and drink French wine twice as cheap as you do port, and have neither coach, chair, nor mother?” Pope illustrates Bolingbroke’s way of living as well as his own some years later. The reveller till two in the morning, of the year 1715, is sobered down to the most temperate of table men, in 1728. “My Lord Bolingbroke’s great temperance and economy are so signal, that the first is fit for my constitution, and the latter would enable you to lay up so much money as to buy a bishopric in England. As to the return of his health and vigour, were you here, you might inquire of his haymakers. But, as to his temperance, I can answer that, for one whole day, we have had nothing for dinner but mutton broth, beans and bacon, and a barn-door fowl;” after all, no bad fare either, for peer or poet! Swift too, at this period, boasts no longer of his “French wines.” His appetite is affected by the appalling fact, that the national debt amounts to the unheard-of sum of seven millions sterling! and thereupon he says: “I dine alone on half a dish of meat, mix water with my wine, walk ten miles a day, and read Baronius.”
Such was the table and daily life of an author who began to despair of his country! In 1732, however, the dean was again full of hope,—we see it in the condition of his wine matters: “My stint in company,” he writes to Gay, “is a pint at noon, and half as much at night; but I often dine at home, like a hermit, and then I drink little or none at all.” Was it that he despaired again, when alone; or that he only drank copiously at others’ cost? Of his own cellar arrangements, though, he thus speaks: “My one hundred pounds will buy me six hogsheads of wine, which will support me a year,provisæ frugis in annum copia. Horace desired no more; for I will construefrugisto be wine. How a man who drank little or none at home, and seldom saw company to help him to consume the remainder, could contrive to get through six hogsheads in a year, is a problem that will be solved when the philosophers of Laputa have settledtheirtheories.” Literature is a pleasant thing when its professors have not to write in order to live. Such was the case in the last century, with poor De Limiers, who was permitted to write in periodicals, on the stipulation that he “never told anybody.” It is said of him that he would have been an exceedingly clever person, if he had not always been hungry, but that famine spoiled his powers. This was the bookseller’s fault, not his. The same might nearly be said of poor Gerald Griffin; buthekept his ability warm even amid cold hunger, and had the courage to write his noble tragedy “Gisippus” on scraps of paper picked up by him in wretched coffee-shops, where he used to take a late breakfast, and cajole himself into the idea that it was dinner.
When Cervantes, with two friends, were travelling from Esquivias, famous for its illustrious wines, towards Toledo, he was overtaken by a “polite student,” who added himself and his mule to the company of “the crippled soundone” and his friends, and who gave honest Miguel much fair advice touching the malady which was then swiftly killing him. “This malady is the dropsy,” said the student with the neck bands that wouldnotkeep in their place,—“the dropsy, which all the water in the world would not cure, even if it were not salt; you must drink by rule, sir, and eat more, and this will cure you better than any medicine.” “Many have told me so,” was the reply of the immortal Miguel, “but I should find it as impossible to leave off drinking, as if I had been born for no other purpose. My life is well-nigh ended, and by the beatings of my pulse, I think next Sunday, at latest, will see the close of my career.” The great Spaniard was not very incorrect in his prognostic. I introduce this illustrative incident for a double reason; first, it is “germane to the matter” in hand, and secondly, it reminds me of a fact with the notice of which I will conclude this section of my imperfect narrative: I allude to
It is incontrovertible that, with the exception of two or three, all our laureates have loved a more pleasant distillation than that from bay-leaves. In the early days, the “versificatores regis,” were rewarded, as all the minstrels in Teutonic ballads are, with a little money and a full bowl. The nightingales in kings’ cages piped all the better for their cake being soaked in wine. From the time of the first patented laureate, Ben Jonson, the rule has borne much the same character, and permanent thirstiness seems generally to have been seated under the laurel. Thus, Ben himself was given to joviality, jolly company, deep drinking, and late hours. His affection for a particular sort of wine acquired for him the nick-name of the Canary-bird; and indeed succeeding laureates who, down to Pye, enjoyed the tierce of Canary, partly owe it to Ben.
Charles I. added the wine to an increase of pay asked for by the bard; and the spontaneous generosity of one king became a rule for those that followed. The next laureate, Davenant, a vintner’s son, was far more dissolute in his drinking, for which he did not compensate by being more excellent in his poetry. The third of the patented laureates, Dryden, if he loved convivial nights, loved to spend them as Jonson did, in “noble society.” Speaking of the Roman poets of the Augustan age, he says:—“They imitated the best way of living, which was, to pursue an innocent and inoffensive pleasure; that which one of the ancients called ‘eruditam voluptatem.’ We have, like them, our genial nights, where our discourse is neither too serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and for the most part instructive; the raillery neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious on the absent; and the cups only such as will raise the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow.” The genial nights, however, were not always so delightfully Elysian and æsthetic. When Rochester suspected Dryden of being the author of the “Essay on Satire,” which was really written by Lord Mulgrave, and which was offensive to Rochester, the latter took a very unpoetical revenge. As Dryden was returning from hiserudite voluptesat Wills’, and was passing through Rose-street, Covent Garden, to his house in Gerrard-street, he was waylaid and severely beaten, by ruffians who were believed to be in the pay of Rochester. The conversation ofthatnight certainlymusthave disturbed the business of the morrow!
And next we come to hasty Shadwell, who may be summarily dismissed with the remark that he was addicted to sensual indulgence, and to any company that promised good wine, and plenty of it. Poor Nahum Tate, too, is described as “a free and fuddling companion;” but the miserable man had gone through morefiery trials than genial nights. Of Rowe, the contrary may be said. He was the great diner-out of his day; always vivacious, dashing, gay, good-humoured, and habitually generous, whether drunk or sober. He was but a poor poet, but he was succeeded by one who wrote worse and drank more—Eusden, of whom Gray writes to Mason that he “was a person of great hopes in his youth, though at last he turned out a drunken parson.” Cibber loved the bottle quite as intensely as Eusden did, and he was a gambler to boot; but there were some good points about Colley, although Pope has so bemauled him. Posterity has used Cibber as his eccentric daughter did when he went to her fish-stall to remonstrate with her against bringing disgrace upon his family by her adoption of such a course: the affectionate Charlotte caught up a stinking sole, and smacked her sire’s face with it; but Colley wiped his cheek, went home, and got drunk to prove that he was a gentleman. With heavy Whitehead we first fall in with indisputable respectability. He sipped his port, a pensioner at Lord Jersey’s table, and wrote classical tragedies, for which I heartily forgive him, because they are deservedly forgotten. His successor, slovenly Warton, exulted over his college wine with the gobble of a turkey-cock; and then came Pye, with his pleasant conviviality and his warlike strains, which “roared like a sucking dove,” and put to sleep the militia, which it was hoped they would have aroused. Pye was of the time of “Pindar, Pye, and Parvus Pybus;” and it was during his tenure of office that the tierce of Canary was discontinued, and the 27l.substituted. With Southey, a dignity was given to the laureateship, which it had, perhaps, never before enjoyed; and the poetic mantle fell on worthy shoulders, when it covered those of the gentle Wordsworth. Not that Wordsworth never was drunk. The bard of Rydal Mountwasonce in his life “full of thegod;” but he was drunk with strong enthusiasm too, and the occasion excused, if it did not sanctify the deed. The story is well told by De Quincey, and it runs thus:—
“For the first time in his life, Wordsworth became inebriated at Cambridge. It is but fair to add, that the first time was also the last time. But perhaps the strangest part of the story is the occasion of this drunkenness, which was the celebration of the first visit to the very rooms at Christ College once occupied by Milton,—intoxication by way of homage to the most temperate of men, and this homage offered by one who has turned out himself to the full as temperate! Every man, in the mean time, who is not a churl, must grant a privilege and charter of large enthusiasm to such an occasion; and an older man than Wordsworth, at that era not fully nineteen, and a man even without a poet’s blood in his veins, might have leave to forget his sobriety in such circumstances. Beside which, after all, I have heard from Wordsworth’s own lips that he was not too far gone to attend chapel decorously during the very acme of his elevation!”
De Quincey has told how pleasant, and cheerful, and conversational was the tea-time at Wordsworth’s table; and there, no doubt, the poet was far more, so to speak, in his element than when in the neighbourhood of wine, whose aid was not needed by him to elevate his conversation. But Wordsworth, gentle as he was, had nothing in him of the squire of dames, whom he generally treated with as much indifference as the present laureate, Tennison, was once said to feel for those very poetical little mortals,—children. And here I end the record of a few table traits of the patented laureates, adding no more of the fourteenth and last, that is, the present vice-Apollo to the Queen, than that he has said of his own tastes and locality to enjoy them in, in Will Waterproof’s Lyrical Monologue, made at the Cock,—