of his diocesan’s pastorals, and who happened to hold invitations
to dinners for the consecutive days of the week. He could not take
advantage of them and perform his duty too, but he hit on a method of
accomplishing his desire. He gave out at church, an intimation to this
effect:--“In order to avoid confusion, my brethren, I have to announce
that to-morrow, Monday, I will receive at confession, the liars only;
on Tuesday, the misers; on Wednesday, the slanderers; on Thursday,
the thieves; Friday, the libertines; and Saturday, the women of evil
life.” It need not be said that the priest was left during _that_ week
to enjoy himself without let or hindrance. And it was at such joyous
dinners as he was in the habit of attending that most of the sermons,
with startling passages in them, like those of Father André, were
devised. Thus, the Cordelier Maillard, the author of various pious
works, at a dinner of counsellors, announced his intention of preaching
against the counsellors’ ladies,--that is, against their wives, or
such of them that wore embroidery. And well he kept his word, as the
following choice flowers from the bouquet of his pulpit oratory will
show. “You say,” he exclaimed to the ladies in question, “that you are
clad according to your conditions; all the devils in hell fly away with
your conditions, and you too, my ladies! You will say to me, perhaps,
Our husbands do not give us this gorgeous apparel, we earn it by the
labours of our bodies. Thirty thousand devils fly away with the labours
of your bodies, and you too, my ladies!” And, after diatribes like
these against the ladies in question, the Cordelier would dine with
their lords, and dine sumptuously too. The dinners of the counsellors
of those days were not like the Spanish dinner to which an author
was invited, and which consisted of capon and wine, two excellent
ingredients, but unfortunately, as at the banquet celebrated by Swift,
where there was nothing warm but the ice, and nothing sweet but the
vinegar, so here the capon was cold and the wine was hot. Whereupon,
the literary guest dips the leg of the capon into the flask of wine,
and being asked by his host wherefore he did so, replied, “I am
warming the capon in the wine, and cooling the wine with the capon.”
The host was not such a judge of wine, apparently, as the archbishops
of Salzbourg, who used not indeed to write books, nor indeed read
them, but who used to entertain those who did, and then preach against
literary vanity from those double-balcony pulpits which some of my
readers may recollect in the cathedral of the town where Paracelsus was
wont to discourse like Solan, and to drink like Silenus; and before
whose tomb I have seen votaries, imploring his aid against maladies,
or thanking him for having averted them! It is said of one of these
prince primates that when, on the occasion of his death, the municipal
officers went to place the seals on his property, they found the
library sealed up exactly as it had been done many years before at the
time of the decease of his predecessor. Such, however, was not the case
with the wine-cellars. What the archiepiscopal wine is at Salzbourg, I
do not know, but if it be half as good as that drank by the monks of
Mölk, on the Danube, why the archbishops may stand excused. Besides,
they only drank it during their leisure hours,--of which, as Hayne
remarks, archbishops have generally four-and-twenty daily.
But to return nearer home, and to our own authors:--Dr. Arne may be
reckoned among these, and it is of him, I think, that a pleasant story
is told, showing how he wittily procured a dinner in an emergency,
which certainly did not promise to achieve such a consummation. The
doctor was with a party of composers and musicians in a provincial
town, where a musical festival was being celebrated, and at which they
were prominent performers. They proceeded to an inn to dine; they were
accommodated with a room, but were told that every eatable thing in
the house was already engaged. All despaired in their hunger, save
the “Mus. Doc.” who, cutting off two or three ends of catgut, went
out upon the stairs, and observing a waiter carrying a joint to a
company in an adjacent room, contrived to drop the bits of catgut on
the meat, while he addressed two or three questions to the waiter. He
then returned to his companions, to whom he intimated that dinner would
soon be ready. They smiled grimly at what they thought was a sorry
joke, and soon after, some confusion being heard in the room to which
the joint which he had ornamented had been conveyed, he reiterated the
assurance that dinner was coming, and thereupon he left the room. On
the stairs he encountered the waiter bearing away the joint, with a
look of disgust in his face. “Whither so fast, friend, with that haunch
of mutton?” was his query. “I am taking it back to the kitchen, Sir;
the gentlemen cannot touch it. Only look, Sir,” said William, with his
nose in the direction of the bits of catgut; “its enough to turn one’s
stomach!” “William,” said Arne gravely, “fiddlers have very strong
stomachs; bring the mutton to our room.” The thing was done, the haunch
was eaten, the hungry guests were delighted, but William had ever
afterwards a contempt for musical people; he classed them with those
barbarians whom he had heard the company speak of where he waited, who
not only ate grubs, but declared that they liked them.
Martial was often as hardly put to it to secure a dinner as any of the
authors I have hitherto named. He was fond of a _good_ dinner, _ut
solent poetæ_; and he knew nothing better than a hare, followed by a
dish of thrushes. The thrush appears to have been a favourite bird in
the estimation of the poets. The latter, may have loved to hear them
sing, but they loved them better in a pie. Homer wrote a poem on the
thrush; and Horace has said, in a line, as much in its favour as the
Chian could have said in his long and lost poem,--“nil melius turdo.”
Martial was, at all events, a better fed and better weighted man than
the poet Philetas of Cos, who was so thin that he walked abroad with
leaden balls to his feet, in order that he might not be carried away
by the wind. The poet Archestratus, when he was captured by the enemy,
was put in a pair of scales, and was found of the weight of an obolus.
Perhaps this was the value of his poetry! It was the value of nearly
all that was written by a gastronomic authoress in France; I allude
to Madame de Genlis, who boasts in her Memoirs, that having been
courteously received by a certain German, she returned the courtesy
by teaching him how to cook seven different dishes after the French
fashion.
The authors of France have exhibited much caprice in their gastronomic
practice; often professing in one direction, and acting in its
opposite. Thus Lamartine was a vegetarian until he entered his teens.
He remains so in opinion, but he does violence to his taste, and eats
good dinners for the sake of conforming to the rules of society! This
course in an author, who is for the moment rigidly Republican when all
the world around him is Monarchical, is singular enough. Lamartine’s
vegetarian taste was fostered by his mother, who took him when a
child to the shambles, and disgusted him with the sight of butchers
in activity on slaughtering days. He for a long time led about a pet
lamb by a ribbon, and went into strong fits at a hint from his mother’s
cook, that it was time to turn the said pet into useful purposes,
and make _tendrons d’agneau_ of him. Lamartine would no more have
thought of eating his lamb, than Emily Norton would have dreamed of
breakfasting on collops cut from her dear white doe of Rylston. The
poet still maintains, that it is cruel and sinful to kill one animal in
order that another may dine; but, with a sigh for the victim, he can
eat heartily of what is killed, and even put his fork into the breast
of lamb without compunction,--but all for conformity! He knows that if
he were to confine himself to turnips, he should enjoy better health
and have a longer tenure of life; but then he thinks of the usages of
society, sacrifices himself to custom, and gets an indigestion upon
truffled turkey.
Moore, in his early days in London, used to dine somewhere in
Marylebone with French refugee priests, for something less than a
shilling. Dr. Johnson dined still cheaper, at the “Pine Apple,” in
New-street, Covent Garden--namely, for eightpence. They who drank wine
paid fourpence more for the luxury, but the lexicographer seldom took
wine at his own expense; and sixpenny-worth of meat, one of bread, and
a penny for the waiter, sufficed to purchase viands and comfort for
the author of the “Vanity of Human Wishes.” Boyce the versifier was of
quite another kidney; when he lay in bed, not only starving, but stark
naked, a compassionate friend gave him half-a-guinea, which he spent
in truffles and mushrooms, eating the same in bed under the blankets.
There was something atrociously sublime about Boyce. Famine had pretty
well done for him, when some one sent him a slice of roast beef, but
Boyce refused to eat it, because there was no catchup to render it
palatable.
It must have been a sight of gastronomic pleasure to have seen Wilkes
and Johnson together over a fillet of veal, with abundance of butter,
gravy, stuffing, and a squeeze of lemon. The philosopher and the
patriot were then on a level with other hungry and appreciating men.
Shallow with his short-legged hen, and Sir Roger de Coverley over
hasty-pudding, are myths; not so Pope with stewed regicide lampreys,
Charles Lamb before roast pig, or Lord Eldon next to liver and bacon,
or Theodore Hook bending to vulgar pea-soup. These were rich realities,
and the principal performers in them had not the slightest idea of
affecting refinement upon such subjects. Goldsmith, when he could get
it, had a weakness for haunch of venison; and Dr. Young was so struck
with a broiled bladebone on which Pope regaled him, that he concluded
it was a foreign dish, and anxiously inquired how it was prepared.
Ben Jonson takes his place among the lovers of mutton, while Herrick
wandering dinnerless about Westminster, Nahum Tate enduring sanctuary
and starvation in the Mint, Savage wantonly incurring hunger, and Otway
strangled by it, introduce us to authors with whom “dining with Duke
Humphrey,” was so frequent a process, that each shadowy meal was but as
a station towards death.
When Goldsmith “tramped” it in Italy, his flute ceased to be his
bread-winner as it had been in France; the fellow-countrymen of
Palestrina were deaf to “Barbara Allen,” pierced from memory through
the vents of an Irish reed. Goldsmith, therefore, dropped his flute,
and took up philosophy; not as a dignity; he played it as he had done
his flute, for bread and a pillow. He knocked at the gate of a college
instead of at the door of a cottage, made his bow, gave out a thesis,
supported it in a Latin which must have set on edge the teeth of his
hearers, and, having carried his exhibition to a successful end, was
awarded the trifling and customary honorarium, with which he purchased
bread and strength for the morrow. No saint in the howling wilderness
lived a harder life than Goldsmith during his struggling years in
London; the table traits, even of his days of triumph, were sometimes
coloured unpleasingly. I am not sure if Goldsmith was present at the
supper at Sir Joshua’s, when Miss Reynolds, after the repast, was
called upon as usual to give a toast, and not readily remembering one,
was asked to give the ugliest man of her acquaintance, and thereon
she gave “Dr. Goldsmith;” the name was no sooner uttered than Mrs.
Cholmondeley rushed across the room, and shook hands with Reynolds’s
sister, by way of approval. What a sample of the manners of the day,
and how characteristic the remark of Johnson, who _was_ present, and
whose wit, at his friend’s expense, was rewarded by a roar, that
“thus the ancients, on the commencement of their friendships, used to
sacrifice a beast between them!” Cuzzoni, when found famishing, spent
the guinea given her in charity, in a bottle of tokay and a penny
roll. So Goldsmith, according to Mrs. Thrale, was “drinking himself
drunk with Madeira,” with the guinea sent to rescue him from hunger
by Johnson. But let us be just to poor Oliver. If he squandered the
eleemosynary guinea of a friend, he refused roast beef and daily pay,
offered him by Parson Scott, Lord Sandwich’s chaplain, if he would
write against his conscience, and in support of government; and he
could be generous in his turn to friends who needed the exercise of
generosity. When Goldsmith went into the suburban gardens of London
to enjoy his “shoemakers’ holiday,” he generally had Peter Barlow
with him. Now Peter’s utmost limit of profligacy was the sum of
fifteen-pence for his dinner; his share would sometimes amount to five
shillings, but Goldsmith always magnificently paid the difference.
Perhaps there are few of the sons of song who dined so beggarly,
and achieved such richness of fame, as Butler, Otway, Goldsmith,
Chatterton, and, in a less degree of reputation, but not of suffering,
poor Gerald Griffin, who wrestled with starvation till he began to
despair. Chatterton _did_ despair, as he sat without food, hope, and
humility; and we know what came of it. Butler, the sturdy son of a
Worcestershire farmer, after he had astonished his contemporaries by
his “Hudibras,” lived known but to a few, and upon the charity or
at the tables of _them_. But he did not, like the heartless though
sorely-tried Savage, slander the good-natured friends at whose tables
he drew the support of his life. As for Otway, whether he perished
of suffocation by the roll which he devoured too greedily after long
fasting, or whether he died of the cold draught of water, drank when
he was overheated, it is certain that he died in extreme penury at the
“Bull” on Tower Hill,--the coarse frequenters of the low public-house
were in noisy revelry round their tables, while the body of the dead
poet lay, awaiting the grave, in the room adjacent.
The table life of Peter Pindar was a far more joyous one than that of
much greater poets. At Truro he was noted for his frugal fare, and he
never departed from the observance of frugality of living throughout
his career. He would sometimes, we are told, when visiting country
patients, and when he happened to be detained, go into the kitchen and
cook his own beefsteak, in order to show a country cook how a steak
was done in London,--the only place, he said, where it was properly
cooked. He laughed at the faculty as he did at the king, and set
the whole profession mad by sanctioning the plentiful use of water,
declaring that physic was an uncertain thing, and maintaining that in
most cases all that was required on the doctor’s part was “to watch
nature, and when she was going right, to give her a shove behind.”
He was accustomed to analyse the drugs which he had prescribed for
his patients, before he would allow the latter to swallow them, and
he gave a decided county bias against pork by remarking of a certain
apothecary that he was too fond of bleeding the patients who resorted
to him, and too proud of his large breed of pigs. The inference was
certainly not in favour of pork. Peter’s practical jokes in connexion
with the table were no jokes to the chief object of them. Thus, when
a pompous Cornish member of parliament issued invitations for as
pompous a dinner to personages of corresponding pomposity, “Peter,”
recollecting that the senator had an aunt who was a laundress, sent her
an invitation in her nephew’s name, and the old lady, happy and proud,
excited universal surprise, and very particular horror in the bosom of
the parliament-man, by making her appearance in the august and hungry
assembly, who welcomed her about as warmly as if she had been a “boule
asphyxiatre” of the new French artillery practice.
It is going a long way back to ascend from “Pindar” to Tasso, but both
poets loved roasted chestnuts,--and _there_ is the affinity. Peter
never drank any thing but old rum; a wine glass, (never beyond a wine
glass and a half,) served him for a day, after a dinner of the plainest
kind. The doctor eschewed wine altogether, at least in his latter days,
as generating acidity. Tasso, however, unlike our satirical friend, was
a wine-bibber. During the imprisonment which had been the result of
his own arrogance, he wrote to the physician of the Duke of Ferrara,
complaining of intestinal pains, of sounds of bells in his ears, of
painful mental images and varying apparitions of inanimate things
appearing to him, and of his inability to study. The doctor advised him
to apply a cautery to his leg, abstain from wine, and confine himself
to a diet of broth and gruels. The poet defended the sacredness of his
appetite, and declined to abstain from generous wine; but he urged the
_medico_ to find a remedy for his ills, promising to recompense him
for his trouble, by making him immortal in song. At a later period of
his life, when he was the guest of his friend Manco, in his gloomy
castle of Bisaccio, the illustrious pair were seated together, after
dinner, over a dessert of Tasso’s favourite chestnuts and some generous
wine; and there he affrighted his friend by maintaining that he was
constantly attended by a guardian spirit, who was frequently conversing
with him, and in proof of the same, he invited Manco to listen to
their dialogue. The host replenished his glass and announced himself
ready. Tasso fell into a loud rhapsody of mingled folly and beauty,
occasionally pausing to give his spirit an opportunity of speaking;
but the remarks of this agathodæmon were inaudible to all but the ears
of the poet. The imaginary dialogue went on for an hour; and at the end
of it, when Tasso asked Manco what he thought of it, Manco, who was the
most matter-of-fact man that ever lived, replied that, for his part, he
thought Tasso had drunk too much wine and eaten too many chestnuts. And
truly I think so too.
The greatest of authors are given to the strangest of freaks. Thus
one of the most popular of the teachers of the people presided at a
gay tavern supper the night before the execution of the Mannings.
The feast concluded, the party (supplied with brandy and biscuits)
proceeded to the disgusting spectacle, where they occupied “reserved
seats;” and when all was done, the didactic leader of the revellers
and sight-seers, thought he compensated for his want of taste, by
pronouncing as “execrable” the taste of those who, like George
Selwyn, could find pleasure in an execution. But there are few men
so inconsistent as didactic authors. Pope taught, in poetry, the
excellence of moderation; but he writes to Congreve in 1715, that he
sits up till two o’clock over burgundy and champagne; and he adds, “I
am become so much of a rake that I shall be ashamed, in a short time,
to be thought to do any sort of business.” But Pope’s table practice,
like Swift’s, was not always of the same character. The dean, writing
to Pope, in the same year that the latter tells Congreve (a dissolute
man at table, by the way) of his sitting over burgundy and champagne
till two in the morning, speaks of quite another character of life:
“You are to understand that I live in the corner of a vast unfurnished
house. My family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in my stable,
a footman, and an old maid, who are all at board wages; and when I
do not dine abroad, or make an entertainment,--which last is very
rare,--I eat a mutton pie, and drink half a pint of wine.” Pope’s habit
of sleeping after dinner did not incline him to obesity; and it was a
habit that the dean approved. Swift told Gay that his wine was bad,
and that the clergy did not often call at his house; an admission in
which Gay detected cause and effect. In the following year to that
last named, Swift wrote a letter to Pope, in which I find a paragraph
affording a table trait of some interest: “I remember,” he says, “when
it grieved your soul to see me pay a penny more than my club, at an
inn, when you had maintained me three months at bed and board; for
which, if I had dealt with you in the Smithfield way, it would have
cost me a hundred pounds, for I live worse here (Dublin) upon more.
Did you ever consider that I am, for life, almost twice as rich as
you, and pay no rent, and drink French wine twice as cheap as you do
port, and have neither coach, chair, nor mother?” Pope illustrates
Bolingbroke’s way of living as well as his own some years later. The
reveller till two in the morning, of the year 1715, is sobered down
to the most temperate of table men, in 1728. “My Lord Bolingbroke’s
great temperance and economy are so signal, that the first is fit for
my constitution, and the latter would enable you to lay up so much
money as to buy a bishopric in England. As to the return of his health
and vigour, were you here, you might inquire of his haymakers. But, as
to his temperance, I can answer that, for one whole day, we have had
nothing for dinner but mutton broth, beans and bacon, and a barn-door
fowl;” after all, no bad fare either, for peer or poet! Swift too, at
this period, boasts no longer of his “French wines.” His appetite is
affected by the appalling fact, that the national debt amounts to the
unheard-of sum of seven millions sterling! and thereupon he says: “I
dine alone on half a dish of meat, mix water with my wine, walk ten
miles a day, and read Baronius.”
Such was the table and daily life of an author who began to despair of
his country! In 1732, however, the dean was again full of hope,--we
see it in the condition of his wine matters: “My stint in company,” he
writes to Gay, “is a pint at noon, and half as much at night; but I
often dine at home, like a hermit, and then I drink little or none at
all.” Was it that he despaired again, when alone; or that he only drank
copiously at others’ cost? Of his own cellar arrangements, though, he
thus speaks: “My one hundred pounds will buy me six hogsheads of wine,
which will support me a year, _provisæ frugis in annum copia_. Horace
desired no more; for I will construe _frugis_ to be wine. How a man
who drank little or none at home, and seldom saw company to help him
to consume the remainder, could contrive to get through six hogsheads
in a year, is a problem that will be solved when the philosophers of
Laputa have settled _their_ theories.” Literature is a pleasant thing
when its professors have not to write in order to live. Such was the
case in the last century, with poor De Limiers, who was permitted to
write in periodicals, on the stipulation that he “never told anybody.”
It is said of him that he would have been an exceedingly clever person,
if he had not always been hungry, but that famine spoiled his powers.
This was the bookseller’s fault, not his. The same might nearly be said
of poor Gerald Griffin; but _he_ kept his ability warm even amid cold
hunger, and had the courage to write his noble tragedy “Gisippus” on
scraps of paper picked up by him in wretched coffee-shops, where he
used to take a late breakfast, and cajole himself into the idea that it
was dinner.
When Cervantes, with two friends, were travelling from Esquivias,
famous for its illustrious wines, towards Toledo, he was overtaken by
a “polite student,” who added himself and his mule to the company of
“the crippled sound one” and his friends, and who gave honest Miguel
much fair advice touching the malady which was then swiftly killing
him. “This malady is the dropsy,” said the student with the neck bands
that would _not_ keep in their place,--“the dropsy, which all the
water in the world would not cure, even if it were not salt; you must
drink by rule, sir, and eat more, and this will cure you better than
any medicine.” “Many have told me so,” was the reply of the immortal
Miguel, “but I should find it as impossible to leave off drinking, as
if I had been born for no other purpose. My life is well-nigh ended,
and by the beatings of my pulse, I think next Sunday, at latest, will
see the close of my career.” The great Spaniard was not very incorrect
in his prognostic. I introduce this illustrative incident for a double
reason; first, it is “germane to the matter” in hand, and secondly,
it reminds me of a fact with the notice of which I will conclude this
section of my imperfect narrative: I allude to
THE LIQUOR-LOVING LAUREATES.
It is incontrovertible that, with the exception of two or three,
all our laureates have loved a more pleasant distillation than that
from bay-leaves. In the early days, the “versificatores regis,”
were rewarded, as all the minstrels in Teutonic ballads are, with
a little money and a full bowl. The nightingales in kings’ cages
piped all the better for their cake being soaked in wine. From the
time of the first patented laureate, Ben Jonson, the rule has borne
much the same character, and permanent thirstiness seems generally
to have been seated under the laurel. Thus, Ben himself was given to
joviality, jolly company, deep drinking, and late hours. His affection
for a particular sort of wine acquired for him the nick-name of the
Canary-bird; and indeed succeeding laureates who, down to Pye, enjoyed
the tierce of Canary, partly owe it to Ben.