Faith, methinks his humour is good, and his purse will buy
good company.--The Parson’s Wedding.
When Clarence returned home, after the conversation recorded in our last
chapter, he found a note from Talbot, inviting him to meet some friends
of the latter at supper that evening. It was the first time Clarence had
been asked, and he looked forward with some curiosity and impatience to
the hour appointed in the note.
It is impossible to convey any idea of the jealous rancour felt by Mr.
and Mrs. Copperas on hearing of this distinction,--a distinction which
“the perfect courtier” had never once bestowed upon themselves.
Mrs. Copperas tossed her head, too indignant for words; and the
stock-jobber, in the bitterness of his soul, affirmed, with a meaning
air, “that he dared say, after all, that the old gentleman was not so
rich as he gave out.”
On entering Talbot’s drawing-room, Clarence found about seven or eight
people assembled; their names, in proclaiming the nature of the party,
indicated that the aim of the host was to combine aristocracy and
talent. The literary acquirements and worldly tact of Talbot, joined
to the adventitious circumstances of birth and fortune, enabled him to
effect this object, so desirable in polished society, far better than
we generally find it effected now. The conversation of these guests was
light and various. The last bon mot of Chesterfield, the last sarcasm
of Horace Walpole, Goldsmith’s “Traveller,” Shenstone’s “Pastorals,” and
the attempt of Mrs. Montagu to bring Shakspeare into fashion,--in all
these subjects the graceful wit and exquisite taste of Talbot shone
pre-eminent; and he had almost succeeded in convincing a profound critic
that Gray was a poet more likely to live than Mason, when the servant
announced supper.
That was the age of suppers! Happy age! Meal of ease and mirth; when
Wine and Night lit the lamp of Wit! Oh, what precious things were said
and looked at those banquets of the soul! There epicurism was in the
lip as well as the palate, and one had humour for a hors d’oeuvre and
repartee for an entremet. At dinner there is something too pompous, too
formal, for the true ease of Table Talk. One’s intellectual appetite,
like the physical, is coarse but dull. At dinner one is fit only for
eating; after dinner only for politics. But supper was a glorious relic
of the ancients. The bustle of the day had thoroughly wound up the
spirit, and every stroke upon the dial-plate of wit was true to the
genius of the hour. The wallet of diurnal anecdote was full, and craved
unloading. The great meal--that vulgar first love of the appetite--was
over, and one now only flattered it into coquetting with another.
The mind, disengaged and free, was no longer absorbed in a cutlet or
burdened with a joint. The gourmand carried the nicety of his physical
perception to his moral, and applauded a bon mot instead of a bonne
bouche.
Then, too, one had no necessity to keep a reserve of thought for the
after evening; supper was the final consummation, the glorious funeral
pyre of day. One could be merry till bedtime without an interregnum.
Nay, if in the ardour of convivialism one did,--I merely hint at the
possibility of such an event,--if one did exceed the narrow limits of
strict ebriety, and open the heart with a ruby key, one had nothing to
dread from the cold, or, what is worse, the warm looks of ladies in the
drawing-room; no fear that an imprudent word, in the amatory fondness
of the fermented blood, might expose one to matrimony and settlements.
There was no tame, trite medium of propriety and suppressed confidence,
no bridge from board to bed, over which a false step (and your wine-cup
is a marvellous corrupter of ambulatory rectitude) might precipitate
into an irrecoverable abyss of perilous communication or unwholesome
truth. One’s pillow became at once the legitimate and natural bourne
to “the overheated brain;” and the generous rashness of the coenatorial
reveller was not damped by untimeous caution or ignoble calculation.
But “we have changed all that now.” Sobriety has become the successor
of suppers; the great ocean of moral encroachment has not left us one
little island of refuge. Miserable supper-lovers that we are, like the
native Indians of America, a scattered and daily disappearing race, we
wander among strange customs, and behold the innovating and invading
Dinner spread gradually over the very space of time in which the majesty
of Supper once reigned undisputed and supreme!
O, ye heavens, be kind,
And feel, thou earth, for this afflicted race.--WORDSWORTH.
As he was sitting down to the table, Clarence’s notice was arrested by
a somewhat suspicious and unpleasing occurrence. The supper room was
on the ground floor, and, owing to the heat of the weather, one of the
windows, facing the small garden, was left open. Through this window
Clarence distinctly saw the face of a man look into the room for
one instant, with a prying and curious gaze, and then as instantly
disappear. As no one else seemed to remark this incident, and the
general attention was somewhat noisily engrossed by the subject
of conversation, Clarence thought it not worth while to mention a
circumstance for which the impertinence of any neighbouring servant or
drunken passer-by might easily account. An apprehension, however, of a
more unpleasant nature shot across him, as his eye fell upon the costly
plate which Talbot rather ostentatiously displayed, and then glanced to
the single and aged servant, who was, besides his master, the only male
inmate of the house. Nor could he help saying to Talbot, in the course
of the evening, that he wondered he was not afraid of hoarding so many
articles of value in a house at once so lonely and ill guarded.
“Ill guarded!” said Talbot, rather affronted, “why, I and my servant
always sleep here!”
To this Clarence thought it neither prudent nor well-bred to offer
further remark.