512 ENGLAND AND HER CRITICS. 



the sentiment of Horace, notwithstanding the authority against us of 

 Count Achilles de Jouffroy, and certainly prefer no verses to bad 

 verses. We can hardly imagine, for example, any service more 

 severe than that of assisting at a dinner, where the couplets fell to 

 the purveyance of the noble and censorious lord. In short, we totally 

 dispense with such unseasonable and premeditated trumpery. Here, 

 however, we are v. illing to allow the Count Achilles the full in- 

 dulgence of his taste, expressing, at the same time, our implicit ap- 

 probation of the social mirth and reasonable gaiety which commonly 

 obtain at tables of the English gentry, who are not (good sense be 

 thanked!) so totally the slaves of levity that every moment of their 

 lives requires the inspiration of a Merry Andrew, or some other 

 frivolous jack-pudding. To us it seems sufficient that the course of 

 a repast is marked with cheerfulness and ease ; nor do we wish to see 

 the habits of unimpeachable propriety, which reign among us, 

 changed for that barbarian system of uproarious tumult, which re- 

 sembles more the fierce voracity of famished hounds than the decent 

 satisfaction of a human appetite. At the same time, nothing loth to 

 meet the charges of the Count Achilles on the point of quietude, we 

 take occasion to commend, and most distinctly to prefer, the con- 

 cession and forbearance which constitute the very soul of well-bred 

 conversation in an English company to that clamorous effort for pre- 

 cedence, which is carried on elsewhere, amidst a shower of missiles 

 uttered by the full-mouthed candidate for audience saving some few 

 steady devotees of Comus, who, intent on the perfections of the pass- 

 ing feast alone, absorbed in greedy speculation, are looking to the 

 door for the succeeding plat, and seem, with all their napkins tucked 

 in their cravats, to await the ceremony of a shave from some expected 

 barber. Again, upon the point of heavy joints, the Count must be 

 informed, that England is a country where the meats are so in- 

 comparably good, that they admit of being wholesomely and simply 

 set on table ; and that, though in nations where the fact is diametri- 

 cally opposite, their cooks must have recourse to twenty thousand 

 freaks of pompous nastiness and sounding nomenclatures, to conceal 

 the naked truth of half-starved, coarse, and insalubrious viands the 

 English kitchen is exempted from those impure contrivances. Be- 

 sides, we have an hundred lighter works, revised editions of Apician I 

 skill, improved and purified from foreign trickery some few genuine 

 dishes of our own, which put the efforts of all countries at defiance ; 

 and thus provided as to culinary means, with venison, fish, and 

 game, which never kitchen but our own produced in absolute per- 

 fection we make a pretty reputable stand against the nondescript 

 pretensions of the very French themselves, who tolerate the tenth 

 appearance of a worn-out fricandeau, consume a hundred casual 

 heterogeneous essences in one chaotic soup, and swallow fish with 

 rapture in the gastronomic capital of France, which the veriest starve- 

 ling in Great Britain would repudiate in the keenest agony of hunger. 

 Furthermore, we venture, without fear of confutation, to assert, that 

 for one superb dinner set on table daily in' the splendid city of Paris, 

 there are at least one hundred in the gothic town of London, where 

 infinitely better wines (and the best of French among the number) are 



