A Family Dinner! Pot-luck, as it is called, in Scotland--when the man's
wife is in the sulks, the wife's man proportionably savage, the children
blear-eyed from the recent blubber in the nursery--the governess afraid
to lift her eyes from her plate--the aunt sourer than the vinegar
cruet--and we--alas! the stranger, stepping in to take pot-luck--we,
poor old Christopher North, thanklessly volunteering to help the
cock-y-leekie, that otherwise would continue to smoke and steam
unstirred in its truly classical utensil! What looking of inutterable
things! As impossible to break the silence with your tongue, as to break
pond-ice ten inches thick with your knuckle. In comes the cock that made
the cock-y-leekie, boiled down in his tough antiquity to a tatter. He
disappears among the progeny, and you are now tied to the steak. You
find there employment sufficient to justify any silence; and hope during
mastication that you have not committed any crime since Christmas, of an
enormity too great to be expiated by condemnation to the sulks.
A Literary Dinner! apparently the remains of the Seven Young Men
sprinkled along both sides of the table--with here and there "a
three-times skimmed sky-blue" interposed; on each side of the Lord of
the Mansion, a philosopher--on each hand of the lady, a poet--somewhere
or other about the board, a Theatrical Star--a Strange Fiddler--an
Outlandish Traveller--and a Spanish Refugee. As Mr. Wordsworth rather
naughtily sayeth,
"All silent, and all damn'd!"
Still the roof does not fall, although the chandelier burns dim in
sympathy,
"And all the air a solemn stillness holds."
Will not a single soul in all this wide world, as he hopes to be saved,
utter so much as one solitary syllable? Oh! what would not the lady and
the gentleman of the house give even for a remark on the weather from
the mouth of poet, philosopher, sage, or hero! Hermetically sealed! Lo!
the author of the very five-guinea quarto, that lay open, in
complimentary exposure, at a plate, up stairs on the drawing-room
table--with his round unmeaning face "breathing tranquillity"--sound
asleep! With eyes fixed on the ceiling, sits at his side the profound
Parent of a Treatise on the Sinking Fund. The absent gentleman, who has
kept stroking his chin for the last half hour, as if considering how he
is off for soap,--would you believe it,--has just returned from abroad,
and has long been justly celebrated for his conversational talents in
all the coteries and courts of Europe. If that lank-and-leather-jawed
gentleman, with complexion bespeaking a temperament dry and adust, and
who has long been sedulously occupied in feeling the edge of his
fruit-knife with the ball of his thumb--do not commit suicide before
September,--Lavater must have been as great a goose as Gall. You might
not only hear a mouse stirring--a pin dropping--but either event would
rouse the whole company like a peal of thunder. You may have seen Madame
Toussaud's images,--Napoleon, Wellington, Scott, Canning, all sitting
together, in full fig, with faces and figures in opposite directions,
each looking as like himself as possible, so that you could almost
believe you heard them speak. You get rather angry--you wonder that they
don't speak. Even so with those living images. But the exhibition is
over--the ladies leave the room--and after another hour of silence, more
profound than that of the grave, all the images simultaneously rise up
and--no wonder people believe in ghosts--disappear.
A Return Dinner! Thirty people of all sorts and sizes, jammed--glued
together--shoulder to shoulder--knee to knee--all with their elbows in
each other's stomachs--most faces as red as fire, in spite of all those
floods of perspiration--two landed gentlemen from the Highlands--a
professor--four officers, naval and military, in his Majesty's and in
the Company's service--some advocates--two persons like
ministers--abundance of W.S.'s of course--an accoucheur--old ladies with
extraordinary things upon their heads, and grey hair dressed in a mode
fashionable before the flood--a few fat mothers of promising
families--some eldest daughters now nubile--a female of no particular
age, with a beard--two widows, the one buxom and blooming, with man-fond
eyes, the other pale and pensive, with long, dark eye-lashes, and lids
closed as if to hide a tear--there they all sit steaming through three
courses--well does the right hand of the one know what the left hand of
the other is doing--there is much suffering, mingled with much
enjoyment--for though hot, they are hungry--while all idea of speaking
having been, from the commencement of the feast, unanimously
abandoned--you might imagine yourself at an anniversary GAUDEAMUS of the
Deaf and Dumb.--_Blackwood's Mag._
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