458 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
To ‘‘ dine with Duke Humphrey ” (buried at St. Alban’s, 1446) 
was to wander dinnerless about his tomb; whereupon Quin is 
supposed (in an epigram by Garrick) to have soliloquized thus 
concerning the embalmed Duke below :— 
“A plague on Egypt’s arts, 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 can never taste ? 
Let me embalm this flesh of mine 
With turtle-fat and Bordeaux wine, 
And spoil the Egyptian trade ! 
Than Humphrey’s Duke more happy I: 
Embalmed alive old Quin shall die, 
A mummy ready made!” 
When Mr. Pickwick and Bob Sawyer reached Towcester, 
dripping wet from outside the coach, at the “ Saracen’s Head,” 
“A werry good little dinner,” said Sam Weller, in attendance 
upon them, “can be got ready in half-an-hour,—pair of fowls, 
Sir, and a weal cutlet, French beans, taturs, tart, and tidiness. 
You had better stop vere you are, Sir, if I might recommend ! 
Take adwice, Sir, as the doctor said.” Again, when Bob 
Sawyer and Benjamin Allen were having a nap, they were 
roused by the mere whispering of the talismanic word “ dinner ” 
in their ears; and to dinner they went, with “ good digestion 
waiting on appetite, and health on both, and a waiter on all 
three.” 
At the Supper given in her lodgings by Miss Snevellicci, of the 
Theatre Royal, Portsmouth (see Nicholas Nickleby, 1838), to 
her parents after a benefit performance, and to which Mr. 
Johnson (Nicholas), the leading actor, was specially invited, 
“the cloth was laid, under the joint superintendence of all the 
ladies, upon two tables put together, the one being high and 
narrow, and the other low, and broad. There were oysters 
at the top, sausages at the bottom, a pair of snuffers in the 
centre, and baked potatoes wherever it was most convenient 
to put them.” Samuel Pepys, when at the Hague (in 1660), 
“ gained admission late one evening to the ‘ Prince of Orange ; 
this done, we went to a place we had taken to sup in, where 4 
sallet, and two or three bones of mutton were provided for @ 
matter of ten of us, which was very strange.” 
