Part 21

Of the table traits of this century, the best examples are to be found in Pepys and Evelyn. In the Diary of the former, may be seen what a jolly tavern life could be led by a grave official, and no scandal given. Evelyn takes us into better company. We find him at the Spanish Ambassador’s, when his Excellency, by way of dessert, endeavoured to convert him to the Roman Catholic Church. We go with him to the feast where the Envoy from the Emperor of Morocco figured as so civilized a gentleman, while the representative of the Czar of Muscovy comported himself like a rude clown; and we dine with him at Lady Sunderland’s, where the noble hostess had engaged, for the amusement of the guests, a man who swallowed stones, and who not only performed the feat in presence of the company, but convinced them there was no cheat, by making the stones rattle in his stomach. But, _nous avons changé tout cela_, and not only changed in taste, but improved in manners.

Pepys gives a curious account of a Lord Mayor’s dinner in 1663. It was served in the Guildhall, at one o’clock in the day. A bill of fare was placed with every salt-cellar, and at the end of each table was a list of “the persons proper” there to be seated. Here is a mixture of abundance and barbarism. “Many were the tables, but none in the hall, but the Mayor’s and the Lords’ of the Privy Council, _that had napkins or knives_, which was very strange. I sat at the merchant-strangers’ table, where ten good dishes to a mess, with plenty of wine of all sorts; but it was very unpleasing that we had no napkins, nor change of trenchers, and drank out of earthen pitchers and wooden dishes. The dinner, it seems, is made by the Mayor and two Sheriffs for the time being, and the whole is reckoned to come to £700 or £800 at most.” Pepys took his spoon and fork with him, as was the custom of those days with guests invited to great entertainments. “Forks” came in with Tom Coryat, in the reign of James I.; but they were not “familiar” till after the Restoration. The “laying of napkins,” as it was called, was a profession of itself. Pepys mentions, the _day before_ one of his dinner-parties, that he went home, and “there found one laying of my napkins against to-morrow, in figures of all sorts, which is mighty pretty, and, it seems, is his trade, and he gets much money by it.” The age of Pepys, we may further notice, was the great “supping age.” Pepys himself supped heartily on venison pasty; but his occasional “next morning” remark was like that of Scrub: “My head aches consumedly!” The dashing Duchess of Cleveland supped off such substantials as roast chine of beef; much more solid fare than that of the Squires in a succeeding reign, who were content, with Sir Roger de Coverley, to wind up the day with “good Cheshire cheese, best mustard, a golden pippin, and a pipe of John Sly’s best.”

A few years earlier, Laud had leisure to write anxiously to Strafford on the subject of Ulster eels. “Your Ulster eels are the fattest and fairest that ever I saw, and it’s a thousand pities there should be any error in their salting, or any thing else about them; for how the carriage should hurt them I do not see, considering that other salted eels are brought as far, and retain their goodness; but the dried fish was exceeding good.” There was a good deal of error in the preserving of other things besides eels, if Laud had only known as much.

It may be mentioned as something of a “Table Trait,” illustrating the popular appetite in the reign of Charles II., that he sent sea stores to the people encamped in Moorfields; but they were so well provisioned by the liberality of the nation, that they turned up their noses at the King’s biscuits, and sent them back, “not having been used to the same.” There was some ungrateful impertinence in this; but there was less meanness in it than was shown by the great ladies of Queen Anne’s reign, who were curious in old china, and who indulged their passion by “swopping” their old clothes for fragile cups and saucers, instead of giving the former to the poor.

Dryden speaks, in the Preface to his “Love Triumphant,” of a remarkable trait of the time of William III. “It is the usual practice,” he says, “of our decayed gentry, to look about them for some illustrious family, and then endeavour to fix their young darling, where he may be both well educated and supported.”

Shaftesbury reveals to us an illustration of George the First’s reign. “In latter days,” he says, “it has become the fashion to eat with less ceremony and method. Every one chooses to carve for himself. The learned manner of dissection is out of request; and a certain method of cookery has been introduced, by which the anatomical science of the table is entirely set aside. _Ragoûts_ and _fricassées_ are the reigning dishes, in which every thing is so dismembered, and thrown out of all order and form, that no part of the mess can properly be divided or distinguished from another.” But we have come to a period that demands a chapter to itself; and even with that implied space, we can hardly do justice to the Table Traits of the Last Century.

TABLE TRAITS OF THE LAST CENTURY.

When Mr. Chute intimated to Horace Walpole that his “temperance diet and milk” had rendered him stupid, Walpole protested pleasantly against such an idea. “I have such lamentable proofs,” he says, “every day, of the stupifying qualities of beef, ale, and wine, that I have contracted a most religious veneration for your spiritual nouriture. Only imagine that I here, (Houghton,) every day, see men who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant rock at Pratolino! I shudder when I see them brandish their knives, in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour one another. I should not stare at all more than I do, if yonder Alderman, at the end of the table, was to stick his fork into his jolly neighbour’s cheek, and cut a brave slice of brown and fat. Why, I’ll swear I see no difference between a country gentleman and a sirloin: whenever the first laughs, or the latter is cut, there run out just the same streams of gravy! Indeed, the sirloin does not ask quite so many questions. I have an aunt here, a family piece of goods, an old remnant of inquisitive hospitality and economy, who, to all intents and purposes, is as beefy as her neighbours.”

Certainly, I think it may be considered that, in diet and in principles, we have improved upon the fashion of one hundred and ten years ago;--and, perhaps, the improvement in principles is a consequence of that in diet. There was a profound meaning in the point of faith of some old religionists, that the stomach was the seat of the soul. However this may be, the “beefy” men of Walpole’s time had, occasionally, strange ideas touching honour. Old Nourse, for instance, challenged Lord Windsor, who refused to fight him, either with sword or pistols, on the plea that Nourse was too aged a man. Thereupon Nourse, in a fit of vexation and indigestion, went home from the coffee-house and cut his throat! “It was strange, yet very English,” says Walpole. Old Nourse must have had Japanese blood in him. At Jeddo, when a nobleman feels himself slighted, he walks home, takes the sharpest knife he can find, and rips himself open, from the _umbilicus_ to the _trachea_!

Quite as certainly, strong diet and weak principles prevailed among our great-grandsires and their dames. Lady Townshend fell in love with the rebel Lord Kilmarnock, from merely seeing him at his trial. She forthwith cast off her old lover, Sir Harry Nisbett, and became “as yellow as a jonquil” for the new object of her versatile affection. She even took a French master, in order that she might forget the language of “the bloody English!” She was not so afflicted, but that she could bear the company of gay George Selwyn to dine with her; and he, believing that her passion was feigned, joked with her, on what was always a favourite topic with himself,--the approaching execution. Lady Townshend forthwith rushed from the table in rage and tears, and Mr. Selwyn finished the bottle with “Mrs. Dorcas, her woman,” who begged of him to help her to a sight of the execution! Mrs. Dorcas had a friend who had promised to protect her, and, added she, “I can lie in the Tower the night before!” This is a pretty dining-room interior of the last century. As for George Selwyn, that most celebrated of the diners-out of a hundred years ago, he said the pleasantest thing possible at dessert, after the execution of Lord Lovat. Some ladies asked him how he could be such a barbarian as to see the head cut off. “Nay,” said he, “if that was such a crime, I am sure I have made amends; for I went to see it sewed on again!” “George,” says Walpole, “never thinks but _à la tête tranchée_; he came to town t’other day to have a tooth drawn, and told the man that he would drop his handkerchief for the signal.”

Selwyn kept his powers bright by keeping good company; while Gray the poet was but indifferent society, from living reclusely, added to a natural turn for melancholy, and “a little too much dignity.” Young, a greater poet than Gray, was as brilliant in conversation as Selwyn himself, as long as, like Selwyn, he polished his wit by contact with the world. When he dined with Garrick, Quin, and George Anne Bellamy, he was the sprightliest of the four; but when he took to realizing the solitude he had epically praised, Young, too, became a proser. Quin loved good living as much as he did sparkling conversation; and Garrick, the other guest noticed above, has perfectly delineated Quin the epicure in the following epigram, as he subsequently did Quin, the man and brother of men, in his epitaph in Bath Abbey:--

“A plague on Egypt’s art! I say; Embalm the dead, on senseless clay Rich wines and spices waste! Like sturgeon, or like brawn, shall I, Bound in a precious pickle, lie, Which I shall never taste?

“Let me embalm this flesh of mine With turtle fat and Bordeaux wine, And spoil th’ Egyptian trade. Than Humphrey’s Duke more happy I; Embalm’d alive, old Quin shall die, A mummy, ready-made.”

A good many female mummies were prepared during the last century after a similar receipt. Witness Walpole’s neighbour at Strawberry Hill, “an attorney’s wife, and much given to the bottle. By the time she has finished that and daylight, she grows afraid of thieves, and makes her servants fire minute-guns out of the garret windows. The divine Asheton,” he proceeds, “will give you an account of the astonishment we were in last night at hearing guns. I began to think that the Duke (of Cumberland) had brought some of his defeats from Flanders.”

Young denounces, in his “Satires,” both tea and wine, as abused by the fair sex of the last century. In Memmia he paints Lady Betty Germain, in the lines I have quoted under the head of “Tea;” and then, hurling his shafts of satire at that which another poet has described as “cups which cheer, but not inebriate,” he adds,--

“Tea! how I tremble at thy fatal stream! As Lethe, dreadful to the love of fame. What devastations on thy banks are seen! What shades of mighty names which once have been! A hecatomb of characters supplies Thy painted altar’s daily sacrifice. Hervey, Pearce, Blount, aspersed by thee, decay, As grains of finest sugars melt away, And recommend thee more to mortal taste: Scandal’s the sweetener of a female feast.”

And then, adverting to the ladies who, like Walpole’s “attorney’s wife,” were much given to the bottle, the poet exclaims,--

“But this inhuman triumph shall decline, And thy revolting Naiads call for wine; Spirits no longer shall serve under thee, But reign in thy own cup, exploded Tea! Citronia’s nose declares thy ruin nigh; And who dares give Citronia’s nose the lie? The ladies long at men of drink exclaim’d, And what impair’d both health and virtue blamed. At length, to rescue man, the generous lass Stole from her consort the pernicious glass. As glorious as the British Queen renown’d, Who suck’d the poison from her husband’s wound.”

Manners and morals generally go hand in hand; but those of the ladies satirized by Young were not so bad as those of the French Princesses of a few years before, when they and Duchesses were so addicted to drinking, that no one thought it a vice, since royalty and aristocracy practised it. The Dauphine of Burgundy is indeed praised by her biographers as not drinking to any great excess during the three last years of her life. But this was exceptional. The Duchess of Bourbon and her daughters drank like dragoons; but the latter were unruly in their cups, whereas the old lady carried her liquor discreetly. Henrietta, Madame de Montespan, and the Princess di Monaco, were all addicted, more or less, to tippling. The Duchess de Bourbon and Her Grace of Chartres added smoking to their other boon qualities; and the Dauphin once surprised them with pipes which had been _cullotés_ for them by common soldiers of the Swiss Guard! In France, devotion even was made a means towards drunkenness. Bungener tells us, in his “_Trois Sermons sous Louis XV._,” that Monsieur Basquiat de la House owned a small estate in Gascony, which produced a wine which no one would buy. Being at Rome, as Secretary of an Embassy, he procured a body from the catacombs, which he christened by the name of a saint venerated in his part of the country. The people received it with great pomp. A _fête_ was appointed by the Pope, a fair by the Government, and the wine was sold by hogsheads! It was a wine as thin as the beverage which Mr. Chute lived on when he had the gout, at which time, says Walpole, “he keeps himself very low, and lives upon very thin ink.”

There was a good deal of latitude of observation and conversation at the dinner-tables of the last century; and the letter-writer I have just cited affords us ample evidence of the fact. John Stanhope, of the Admiralty, he informs us, “was sitting by an old Mr. Curzon, a nasty wretch, and very covetous; his nose wanted blowing, and continued to want it; at last Mr. Stanhope, with the greatest good breeding, said, ‘Indeed, Sir, if you don’t wipe your nose, you will lose that drop.’”

A hundred years ago, Walpole remarked that Methodism, drinking, and gambling were all on the increase. Of the first he sneeringly says, “It increases as fast as any religious nonsense did.” Of the second he remarks, “Drinking is at the highest wine-mark;” and he speaks of the third as being so violent, that “at the last Newmarket meeting, in the rapidity of both gaming and drinking, a bank bill was thrown down, and, nobody immediately claiming it, they agreed to give it to a man who was standing by!”

There was a love of good eating, as well as of deep drinking, even among the upper classes of the last century. What a picture of a Duchess is that of her Grace of Queensberry, posting down to Parson’s Green, to tell Lady Sophia Thomas “something of importance;” namely, “Take a couple of beefsteaks, clap them together as if they were for a dumpling, and eat them with pepper and salt: it is the best thing you ever tasted! I could not help coming to tell you this;”--and then she drove back to town. And what a picture of a Magistrate is that of Fielding, seated at supper with a blind man, a Drury-Lane Chloris, and three Irishmen, all eating cold mutton and ham from one dish, on a very dirty cloth, and “his worship” refusing to rise to attend to the administration of Justices’ justice! It is but fair, however, to Fielding to add, that he might have had better fare had he been more oppressive touching fees. And, besides, great dignitaries set him but an indifferent example. Gray, speaking of the Duke of Newcastle’s installation at Oxford, remarks, that “every one was very gay and very busy in the morning, and very owlish and very tipsy at night. I make no exceptions, from the Chancellor to Blewcoat.” Lord Pembroke, truly, was temperate enough to live upon vegetables; but the diet did not improve either his temper or his morals. Ladies--and they were not over delicate a century ago--as much dreaded sitting near him at dinner, as their daughters and grand-daughters dreaded to be near the late Duke of Cumberland, who was pretty sure to say something in the course of dinner expressly to embarrass them. The vegetarian Lord Pomfret was so blasphemous at tennis, that the Primate of Ireland, Dr. George Stone, was compelled to leave off playing with him. For Primates handled the rackets then, as Pope and Cardinals do now the cue. Pio Nono and the expertest of the Sacred College play _la poule_ at billiards, after dinner, with the view of keeping down the good Pontiff’s obesity. This is almost as curious a trait as that of Taafe, the Irishman, who, conceiving himself to have been insulted at a dinner, and not being then able, as a Roman Catholic, to wear a sword, changed his religion, and ran his adversary through the body. The confusion of ideas which prompted a man to follow a particular faith, in order that he might commit murder, was something like that which influenced the poor woman who, suddenly becoming pious, after hearing a sermon from Rowland Hill, went to a book-stall, and stole a Bible.

I have noticed the love of good eating, and the coarseness connected with it. There was also a coarse economy attendant on it. The Duchess of Devonshire would call out to the Duke, when both were presiding at supper after one of their assemblies, “Good God, Duke! don’t cut the ham; nobody will eat any;” and then she would relate the circumstances of her private _ménage_ to her neighbour: “When there’s only my Lord and I, besides a pudding, we have always a dish of roast,”--no very dainty fare for a ducal pair. Indeed, there was much want of daintiness, and of dignity, too, in many of those with whom both might have been looked for as a possession. Lord Coventry chased his Lady round the dinner-table, and scrubbed the paint off her cheeks with a napkin. The Duke and Duchess of Hamilton were more contemptible in their pomposity than their Graces of Devonshire were in their plainness. At their own house they walked in to dinner before their company, sat together at the upper end of their own table, ate together off one plate, and drank to nobody beneath the rank of Earl. It was, indeed, a wonder that they could get any one of any rank to dine with them at all. But, in point of dinners, people are not “nice” even now. Dukes very recently dined with a railway potentate, in hopes of profiting by the condescension; and Duchesses heard, without a smile, that potentate’s lady superbly dismiss them with an “_au reservoir_!”--an expression, by the way, which is refined, when compared with that taught by our nobility, a hundred years ago, to the rich Bohemian Countess Chamfelt; namely, “D--n you!” and, “Kiss me!” but it was apologetically said of her, that she never used the former but upon the miscarriage of the latter. This was at a time when vast assemblies were followed by vast suppers, vast suppers by vast drinking, and when nymphs and swains reached home at dawn with wigs, like Ranger’s in the comedy, vastly battered, and not very fit to be seen.

Pope, in the last century, moralized, with effect, on the deaths of the dissolute Buckingham and the avaricious Cutler; and the avarice of Sir John was perhaps more detestable than any extravagance that is satirized by Pope, or witticized by Walpole. But Sir John Cutler was ingenious in his thrift. This rich miser ordinarily travelled on horseback and alone, in order to avoid expense. On reaching his inn at night, he feigned indisposition, as an excuse for not taking supper. He would simply order the hostler to bring a little straw to his room, to put in his boots. He then had his bed warmed, and got into it, but only to get out of it again as soon as the servant had left the room. Then, with the straw in his boots and the candle at his bed-side, he kindled a little fire, at which he toasted a herring which he drew from his pocket. This, with a bit of bread which he carried with him, and a little water from the jug, enabled the lord of countless thousands to sup at a very moderate cost.

Well, this sordidness was less culpable perhaps than slightly overstepping income by giving assemblies and suppers. At the latter there was, at least, wit, and as much of it as was ever to be found at Madame du Deffand’s, where, by the way, the people did _not_ sup. “Last night, at my Lady Hervey’s,” says Walpole, “Mrs. Dives was expressing great panic about the French,” who were said to be preparing to invade England. “My Lady Rochford, looking down on her fan, said, with great softness, ‘I don’t know; I don’t think the French are a sort of people that women need be afraid of.’” This was more commendable wit than that of Madame du Deffand herself, who, as I have previously remarked, made a whole assembly laugh, at Madame de Marchais’, when her old lover was known to be dying, by saying as she entered, “He is gone; and wasn’t it lucky? He died at six, or I could not possibly have shown myself here to-night.”

Our vain lady-wits, however, too often lacked refinement. “If I drink any more,” said Lady Coventry at Lord Hertford’s table, “if I drink any more, I shall be ‘muckibus.’” “Lord!” said Lady Mary Coke, “what is that?” “O,” was the reply, “it is Irish for _sentimental_!” In those days there were no wedding breakfasts: the nuptial banquet was a dinner, and bride and bridegroom saw it out. Walpole congratulates himself that, at the marriage of his niece Maria, “there was neither form nor indecency, both which generally meet on such occasions. They were married,” he adds, “at my brother’s in Pall Mall, just before dinner, by Mr. Keppel; the company, my brother, his son, Mrs. Keppel and Charlotte, Lady Elizabeth Keppel, Lady Betty Waldegrave, and I. We dined there; the Earl and new Countess got into their post-chaise at eight o’clock, and went to Navestock alone, where they stay till Saturday night.” Walpole gives instances enough--and more than enough--where matters did not go off so becomingly. Lords and Ladies were terribly coarse in sentiment and expression; and the women were often worse than the men. “Miss Pett,” says the writer whom I have so often quoted, “has dismissed Lord Buckingham: _tant mieux pour lui_! She damns her eyes that she will marry some Captain: _tant mieux pour elle_.” This is a sample of Table Traits in 1760; and it was long before manners and morals improved. The example was not of the best sort even in high places. The mistress of Alfieri dined at Court, as widow of the Pretender; and Madame du Barry was publicly feasted by our potential Lord Mayor.