DINNERS

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

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

"The undevout Gastronomer is mad"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Innocent

As is the sucking lamb."

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

'So young, and so untender!'"