Chapter VII (8)

Had the famous “petit père André” kept down his impulses as successfully as Madame de Sevigné did at the supper, where, after all, she did _not_ exclaim, “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 at _piquet_, 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 saved _me_, 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 them and 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 during _that_ week 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, and being 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 their hunger, 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 a _good_ dinner, _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 make _tendrons d’agneau_ of 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 lamb without 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 with Reynolds’s sister, by way of approval. What a sample of the manners of the day, and how characteristic the remark of Johnson, who _was_ present, 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. Chatterton _did_ despair, 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 of _them_. 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 perished of 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, happy and 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,--and _there_ is 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 the _medico_ to 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 spirit an 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 very rare,--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 construe _frugis_ to 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 settled _their_ theories.” 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; but _he_ kept 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 sound one” 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 would _not_ keep 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

THE LIQUOR-LOVING LAUREATES.

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 his _erudite voluptes_ at 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 of _that_ night certainly _must_ have 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 more fiery 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 27_l._ 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 Mount _was_ once in his life “full of the god;” 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,--

“O plump head waiter at ‘The Cock,’
To which I most resort,
How goes the time? ’Tis five o’clock.
Go fetch a pint of port.

“But let it not be such as that
You set before chance-comers,
But such whose father-grape grew fat
On Lusitanian summers.”

And now all things must have an end; and the end of pleasure is like the end of life,--weariness, satiety, and regret; and the end of a well-spent day is _not_ of that complexion, for its name should be “supper,” without which, however, a man had better go to bed, than with it and arise in debt. But, as the moral does not apply to us, you and I, Reader, if you will venture further with so indifferent a companion, will go hand in hand, before we finally separate.

SUPPER.

The supper was the only recognised repast in Rome; if, indeed, we may call that supper which sometimes took place at three in the afternoon. It was then rather a dinner, after which properly educated persons would not, and those who had supped over freely could not, eat again on the same day. The early supper hour was favoured by those who intended to remain long at table. “Imperat extructos frangere nona toros,” says Martial. The more frugal, but they must also have been the more hungry, supped, like the Queen of Carthage, at sunset; “labente die convivia quærit.” All other repasts than this had no allotted hour; each person followed inclination or necessity, and there was no difference in the _jentaculum_, the _prandium_, or the _merenda_,--the breakfast, dinner, or collation,--save difference of time. Bread, dried fruits, and perhaps honey, were alone eaten at these simple meals; whereat too, some, like Marius, drank before supper-time, “the genial hour for drinking.” The hosts were, in earlier ages, cooks as well as entertainers. Patroclus was famous for his Olla Podrida, and a Roman general received the Samnite ambassadors in a room where he was boiling turnips for his supper!

Sunset, however, was the _ordinary_ supper-time amongst the Romans. “De vespere suo vivere,” in Plautus, alludes to this. In the time of Horace, ten o’clock was not an unusual hour, and men of business supped even later. At the period of the decadence of the empire, it was the fashion to go to the baths at eight, and sup at nine. The repasts which commenced earlier than this were called _tempestiva_, as lasting a longer time. Those which began by daylight--_de die_--had a dissolute reputation; “ad amicam de die potare,” is a phrase employed in the _Asinaria_ to illustrate the great depravity of him to whom it is applied.

There is no doubt, I think, in spite of what critics say, that, however it may have been with the Romans, the Greeks certainly had four repasts every day. There was the breakfast (άκφκάτισμα), the dinner (ἄριστον), the collation (ἑσπέρισμα), and the chief of all, despite the term for dinner, the supper (δεῖπνον).

Among the Romans the _Cœna adventitia_ was the name given to suppers whereat the return of travellers to their homes was celebrated; the _Cœna popularis_ was simply a public repast, given to the people by the government; the _terrestris cœna_ was, as Hegio describes it in the _Captivei_, a supper of herbs, _multis oleribus_. The Greeks called such “a bloodless supper.” The parasite, in Athenæus, says that when he is going to a house to supper, he does not trouble himself to gaze at the architectural beauties of the mansion, nor the magnificence of the furniture, but at the smoke of the chimney. If it ascends in a thick column, he knows there is certainty of good cheer; but if it is a poor thread of smoke, says he, why then I know that there is no blood in the supper that is preparing: τὸ δεῖπνον ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ αἷμα ἔχει.

These repasts were gay enough when there was good Chian wine, unmixed with sea-water, to set the wit going. The banquets of Laïs were probably the most brilliant ever seen in Greece, for there was abundance of sprightly intellect at them. It might be said of them, as Sidney Smith says of what used to be in Paris under the ancient régime, when “a few women of brilliant talents violated all the common duties of life, and gave very pleasant little suppers.”

It is a well-ascertained fact that when the Greeks gave great entertainments, and got tipsy thereat, it was for pious reasons. They drank deeply in honour of some god. They not only drank deeply, but progressively so; their last cup at parting was the largest, and it went by the terrible name of the Cup of Necessity. There was a headache of twenty-anguish power at the bottom of it. Their pic-nic and conversation suppers were not bad things. Every guest brought his own rations in a basket; but as the rich and the selfish used to shame and tantalise the poorer guests by their savoury displays, Socrates, that dreadfully didactic personage, imperious as Beau Nash in matters of social discipline, insisted, that what each guest brought should be common to all. The result was less show and more comfort. But I would not have liked to have supped where Socrates was in the chair, for, in spite of his talents, he was a horrid bore, watching what and how each guest ate, and speaking to or at him whenever his acute eye discovered a rent in the coat of his good manners. If he sometimes said good things, he as frequently said sharp ones; and where he was president, the guests were simply at school.

It is indeed seldom that the sages are desirable associates. “Come and sup with me next Thursday,” said a French Amphitryon to a friend. “You shall meet philosophers or literary men; take your choice.” “My choice is soon made,” was the reply; “I will sup twice with you.” It was so arranged, and the supper with the _literati_ was incomparably the better banquet of the two.

The supper was the great meal of the Greeks; but neither at this, nor at any other repast, does Homer ever make mention of boiled meat. The Greeks, then, were not like our poor Greenwich pensioners, who, up to the present time, have never been provided with meat cooked in any other way. The result is that the men themselves look as if they were half-boiled. But a new order of things, including ovens and baked joints, has been introduced into the kitchen and refectory of the hospital, and the ancient mariners will soon show the effects of variety in diet and cooking, by a healthier and a happier hue on their solemn and storm-beaten cheeks.

And this matter of boiled meat reminds me of the old Duke of Grafton, who never ate any thing else at dinner or supper, (for it was in the days of double meals,) but boiled mutton. Yet every day the cook was solemnly summoned to his grace’s side, to listen to orders which he knew by heart, and instructions which wearied while they vexed his spirits. The duke must have been of the saddened constitution which would have entitled him to sup with that nervous Duke of Marlborough, who always joined with his invitation a request that his guest would say or do nothing to make him laugh, as his grace could not bear excitement.

At the supper-table the Romans did not decline the flesh of the ass, nor that of the dog; and they were as fond of finely fatted snails as the southern Germans are, who have inherited their taste. Macrobius, describing the supper given by the epicurean pontiff Lentulus, in honour of his reception, says that the first course was composed of sea hedgehogs, oysters, and asparagus. After these provocatives came a second course, consisting of more oysters, and various other shell-fish, fat pullets, beccaficoes, venison, wild boar, and sea nettles,--to digest the marine hedgehogs, I suppose. The third course assumed a more civilized aspect, and the guests were only tempted by fish, fowl, game, and cakes from the Ancona marshes. There is a supper of Lentulus, as described by Becker. The supper was given to Gallus, and the account of it is so little exaggerated as to afford a tolerably correct idea of what those banquets were. Nine guests, two of them “gentlemen from Perusia,” occupied the _triclinium_. The pictures around represented satyrs celebrating the joyous vintage; the death of the boar; fruit and provision pieces over the door, and similar designs, calculated to awaken a relish for the banquet, were suspended between the elegant branches occupied by living thrushes. The lowest place in the middle sofa was the seat for the most honoured guest. As soon as all were in a reclining posture, the attendant slaves took off their sandals, and water in silver basins was carried round by good-looking youths, and therewith the visitors performed their brief ablutions. At a nod from the host, two servants deposited the tray bearing the dishes of the first course in the centre of the table. The chief ornament of this tray, which was adorned with tortoise-shell, was a bronze ass, whose panniers were filled with olives, and on whose back rode a Silenus, whose pores exuded a sauce which fell upon the roast breast of a sow that had never fulfilled a mother’s duty, below. Sausages on silver gridirons, with Syrian plums and pomegranate seeds beneath them to simulate fire; and dishes, also of silver, containing various vegetables, shell-fish, snails, and a reptile or two, formed the other delicacies of this course. While the guests addressed themselves thereto, they were supplied with a beverage composed of wines and honey scientifically commingled. The glory of the first course was, however, the carved figure of the brooding hen, which was brought in on a separate small tray. The eggs taken from beneath her were offered to the guests, who found the apparent eggs made of dough, on breaking which with the spoon, a fat figpecker was seen lying in the pepper-seasoned yolk, and strongly tempting the beholder to eat. This delicacy, was, of course, readily eaten, and _mulsum_, the mixture of Hymettian honey and Falernian wines, was copiously drunk to aid digestion. A good deal of wine was imbibed, and numerous witch stories told (a favourite supper pastime), between and during the courses, at which the dishes were more and more elaborate and fantastic. A vast swine succeeded to a wild boar at the supper of Lentulus, who affecting to be enraged at his cook for forgetting to disembowel the animal before preparing it for the table, that official feigns to tremble with the energy of his repentance, and forthwith proceeds to perform the office of gutting the animal in presence of the guests. He plunges his knife into its flanks, when there immediately issues from the gaping wound string after string of little sausages. The conclusion of the supper is thus told:--“The eyes of the guest were suddenly attracted to the ceiling by a noise overhead; the ceiling opened, and a large silver hoop, on which were ointment bottles of silver and alabaster, silver garlands with beautifully chiselled leaves, and circlets and other trifles, descended upon the table; and after the dessert, prepared by the new baker, whom Lentulus purchased for a hundred thousand sesterces, had been served up, the party rose, to meet again in the brilliant saloon, the intervening moments being spent, by some in sauntering along the colonnades, and by others in taking a bath.”

In the description of the supper given by Siba to celebrate the return of Nero to Rome, we find that the slaves, when they took off the sandals of the guests, supplied them with others of a lighter description, which were fastened by crossed ribands. Those who did not come in “dress,” were furnished with variegated woollen vestments to cover their togas. Siba’s banquet began to the sound of a hydraulic organ, which, however, was only in place of our dinner-bell. When the lime-wood tables were duly covered and flowered, the guests took their places to the sound of flutes and harps, and said a sort of _grace_, by invoking Jupiter; while a modest libation of wine was cast on the floor in honour of the household gods. The first course consisted of some remarkably strange dishes, but the guests reserved their appetite, or provoked it with pickled radishes, fried grasshoppers, and similar cattle. A master of drinking was then chosen, whose duty it was to regulate how often the guests should drink; and the latter invariably selected the most confirmed toper. _We_ leave this office to the master of the house, and in well-regulated families that high official leaves his guests to do according to their good pleasure. The garlands having been duly encircled round the brows of Siba’s friends, the trumpets announced the entrance of the second course. The second course was duly discussed, its extraordinary dishes thoroughly consumed, and the four cups were drained to Nero; being the number of letters in his name; and a good deal of jollity began to abound, which was checked a little by the arrival of a present from the emperor, sent to Siba, and which consisted of a silver skeleton. As the guests feared to interpret the meaning of the gift they fell to deeper drinking, and then to singing, and philosophising; and then resumed their eating; and when the force of nature could no further go, they called in the jugglers, and tumblers, and buffoons, and puppets, and having drawn as much amusement from these as they possibly could, they whipped up their flagging sensations by looking at the feats of Spanish dancing girls, and these were succeeded by ten couple of gladiators, who slew one another in the apartment for the pastime of the supremely indifferent personages who lay half asleep and half drunk, and lazily applauded the murderous play. The company were in the very midst of this innocent amusement when the fire was lit up in Rome by Nero, and which did not spare the mansion of Siba. The struggle to escape was not more furious and selfish than that which took place at Prince Schwartzenberg’s ball in Paris, at which the devouring flames had as little respect for some of the guests as they had at the terrible supper of Caius Siba.

It may be said that civilization never afforded such examples of deformed appetites as some of those which we find in the records of the olden time. But this is not the case. They are fewer; but they _do_ exist. We read in the modern history of Germany, that a man with an uncontrollable appetite for bacon once presented himself at the tent where Charles Gustavus was supping, before Prague, which he was besieging. The man was a boor, and had sought access to the king, to ask permission to perform before him a feat which he boasted of being able to accomplish,--namely, devour a whole hog. General Koenigsmark, who was present, and was very superstitious, warned the king not to listen to a being who, if not the devil, was probably leagued with him. “I’ll tell you what it is, and please your Majesty,” said the boor, “if you will but make that old gentleman take off his sword and spurs, I’ll eat him before I begin with the hog!” The general was no coward; but he took to his heels, as though the man were serious, and left the king to enjoy what pleasure he might from seeing a peasant eat a whole pig.

In Africa, the rustics eat something smaller than pigs for supper. When Cailli was in that quarter of the world, a Bambere woman gave him some yams, and what he thought was gambo sauce, to make them palatable. On dipping his yams therein, however, he saw some little paws, and at once knew that it was the famous mouse-sauce; but he was hungry, and continued his repast. He often subsequently saw the women chopping up mice for their suppers. When the animals were caught, they were singed over a fire, put by for a week, and then cooked. A hungry man _might_ eat thereof without loathing. We have all partaken of far less clean animals.

It is commonly said that the time of the evening meal is the very hour for wit. I do not know how this may be, but Souwarow’s wit appears to have been uncommonly alert at supper-time. When he returned from his Italian campaign to St. Petersburg, in 1799, the Emperor Paul sent Count Kontaissow to compliment him on his arrival. The count had been originally a Circassian slave, and _valet_ to Paul, who had successively raised him to the ranks of equerry, baron, and count. The Circassian _parvenu_ found the old warrior at supper. “Excuse me,” said Souwarow, pausing in his meal, “I cannot recall the origin of your illustrious family. Doubtless your valour in battle procured for you your dignity as count.” “Well, no,” said the ex-valet, “I have never been in battle.” “Ah! perhaps you have been attached to an embassy?” “No.” “To a ministerial office then?” “That neither.” “What important post, _then_, have you occupied?”--“I have been valet-de-chambre to the emperor,” “Oh, indeed,” said the veteran leader, laying down his spoon, and calling aloud for his own valet, Troschka. “Here, you villain,” said he, as the latter appeared, “I tell you daily to leave off drinking and thieving, and you never listen to me. Now, look at this gentleman here. He was a valet like you; but being neither sot nor thief, he is now grand equerry to his majesty, knight of all the Russian orders, and count of the empire. Go, sirrah, follow his example, and you will have more titles than your master; who requires nothing just now, but to be left alone to finish his supper!”

It was at Paris, however, that the evening hour was generally accounted as the peculiar season of wit; but wit, often too daring at such an hour, sometimes got chastised for its over-boldness.