138 A Dissertation upon Dinners. [FEB. 



the imaginative Rundall, the vulgar Glass, the indigestible shino pre- 

 eminent. Of these, Kitchiner is manifestly the best the Lucifer of the 

 culinary galaxy. His receipts alone (those gifted products of a refined 

 aesophagus) give one an appetite to read them so that cutting up the 

 pages of his duodecimo is like cutting up ragouts with the Barmecide, or 

 shoulders of mutton with Lord Peter: you acquire instantaneous vora- 

 city. 



There arc shades of difference in dinners, as in devotion ; and although 

 we cannot find it in our hearts to speak ill of any masticating sect (we 

 are no bigots, but look charitably on every kind of eating,), yet neverthe- 

 less we have our preferences. There is, for instance, the civic the diplo- 

 matic the legal the literary the biblical and, lastly, the pastoral din- 

 ner, or that given to his tenantry by some sycophantic landowner, just two 

 weeks before his election. This last, notwithstanding our vaunted tolera- 

 tion, we pronounce detestable we would add, diabolical, were we riot 

 afraid of being called plagiarists from the newspapers. What can be more 

 afflicting than to see a parcel of vulgar, villainous mouths, stretched in sar- 

 donic cachinnation from ear to ear, while their owners, stuck sixty in a 

 barn, with an overseer in corderoy shorts, at the head, keep fighting like 

 game-cocks for the first slice of a superannuated mutton, cold as charity, 

 or an underdone wedge, from some unhappy prize ox, who died about ten 

 days before of the dropsy Yet this is a country gentleman's ovation, given, as 

 we have seen ii ourselves, to some sixty small farmers, who, after scram- 

 bling through its starveling compounds, are required to toast their landlord 

 in swipes. Far different is the civic dinner (not the last), that beau-ideal 

 of gastric civilization. We pity the senseless soul who can uninspired sur- 

 vey such a symposium : he must be more or less than man. With what an 

 air the aldermen bestir themselves for the skirmish ! with what dexterity 

 they arrange their weapons ! how they lick their lips, and twinkle their 

 peepers, in all the manifest expressiveness of genius ! Would you not 

 swear that they had been bound apprentices to their appetite from child- 

 hood, were clerks in the house of Bacchus & Co., articled by indentures 

 never to be cancelled but with life? The fact is, that the appetite is the 

 chief, indeed the only requisite for an alderman. He is (or should be) 

 chosen like Mahometan mistresses, by the pound, and venerated solely in 

 proportion to his circumference. Thus an alderman weighing twenty 

 stone should be more honoured than one weighing only nineteen ; but he 

 who lifted up the scale with a ton attached to it should be deified. For 

 ourselves, we look upon a Guildhall dinner to be an epoch to date from ; 

 we think of it as a subject too awful for superficial meditation ; and 

 that such is the popular opinion is manifest, from the fact that your true 

 citizens, however sportive at other times, are invariably in earnest at din- 

 ner. No man ever yet seated himself at the Mansion- House who was not 

 seriously bent on plying his grinders to the utmost : if he did, he was a 

 tuneless string, at discord with the harmony of the place, which has, from 

 time immemorial, prescribed one uniform, unchanging music. Indeed, 

 now we come to reflect on the subject, we are convinced that the only 

 genuine "national melodies" are those resulting from an alderman's 

 mouth, when properly tuned at Guildhall. We ourselves are no discredit- 

 able musicians in this respect ; but we bow reverently to his scientific 

 superiority. t Independently of such vocal attractions, a civic dinner or, 

 indeed, any dinner at all is remarkable for tho waveless calm that it 

 spreads over the most stormy mind. Let a man sit down to table in a 



