and Perkins, emptied the contents on the upturned features of his prostrate foe. Such was the awful crash which had astounded the party above stairs, ending an event in bloodshed which had began in brotherly love.

For a short time I had been absent from the proceedings in the drawing-room, and on my return beheld Pounce again in the attitude of a speech! He had felt his genius called upon to repair, as far as possible, the havoc which had lately been made on the fabric of peace, and if his attempts were laudable, they were also most unquestionably dauntless. "Ladies and gentlemen," said he, "we have had a storm; and although any port in a storm is desirable, yet (seizing a decanter) into this most excellent port, let us now make way. (Applause and laughter.) I rise for the honour of proposing a toast. Two highly-gifted individuals have this day been joined in holy matrimony-have effected an insurance of their happiness at the Union; and may they ever find in their good policy the richest return! (Approbation after the usual manner.) Mr. Westbourne, I understand, is a military man-a son of Mars! and as like his father, as any son in her Majesty's dominions. But all praise must halt behind the merit of that lady who has become his wife. To beauty, virtue, and accomplishments, I beg to dedicate this glass! It is said that Socrates talked so eloquently of matrimony, that the wedded men ran off to their wives, and the bachelors ran off to be married. Should I have produced the same effect to-day, the result will be to me the best reward. Hip! hip! my boys! the Westbournes for

ever!"

Pounce having resumed his seat amidst the most deafening cheers, the young men now awaited a speech from Charles in reply. To the mortification, however, of the party, and the ludicrous dismay of Pounce himself, the object of their inquiry was nowhere to be found. The disappointment was cruel, but Charles had, at least, escaped this latter piece of calamity -he was gone! Constantia having administered some comfort to her mother, who soon forgot her grievances at the sight of a smart travelling-chariot and imperials, which was to contain the happy pair, the departure was with little difficulty at length effected, and when I again congratulated Charles, his look appeared to imply "this day will be also memorable to my friend!"

My compliments to the family had been made, and my delay in Warrenstreet was, by no means, of much longer duration. The equipage of Mrs. Dangerfield was just behind me-the ebriety of the footman might have occasioned her some inconvenience, had not the reverend gentleman so admirably supplied his place. Thus attended, she entered her carriage, and, with a laudable consideration, the parson followed.

In the lowest deep there is a lower deep. The discovery, though of diabolical origin, is not unproductive of consolation to mortals in their misery. We eat our overdone haunch with a lightened sense of the grievous burning, if news be brought that a friend's house is on fire. The holder of fifty shares in a Short-road-to-ruin Company, deems himself a lucky man-his neighbour holds five hundred. He that is going to be hanged has his comfort-he might have been sent to the penal settlements. Deep is the wail and sharp the suffering of the widower; but he might have been worse off, for there was a prospect of the patient's recovery.

The man who has no dinner is truly in a grievous plight; but his distress might have been aggravated. He has a pang less to endure than the man who, having no dinner to eat, has previously paid a guinea for his admission to a sumptuous feast. The fate of Tantalus involves more hardships than falls to the lot of ordinary poverty. It is Poverty in an ordinary always, and nothing to eat.

Let the poor take comfort, for theirs is a case of simple hunger; while the hunger of the rich is often attended with a sense of injury keener than the edge of appetite. The wight who wandereth from noon to dewy eve, with empty pockets and a stomach to correspond, merely endures the natural consequence of pennilessness, and has only the common and proper unpleasantness of famine to undergo. How grateful should he be, that he is not racked by the sensations to which that pitiable unfortunate is exposed, who, seated amidst plenty, has no dinner, and whose bodily craving is accompanied by a mental torture, arising from the consciousness of having paid one pound one for the privilege of being publicly starved.

Again we say, there is in the lowest deep, a deep yet lower. Dreadful no doubt are the sufferings of the dinnerless. Come in what shape it may, or under what circumstances, hunger is a detestable companion. Granted. But there is an injury, an evil, a pang beyond that. The dinnerless themselves are less to be commiserated than some who dine. There is one thing worse, incalculably worse than no dinner-only one-and that is, a bad dinner. We confidently put it to the late Mr. Pope to say whether we are not right.

We have frankly admitted the mortification of paying a guinea for a seat at a well-stored table-three courses and a dessert at least-and returning home, after some hours of hopeless endeavour, with an appetite whose edge would cut, at the first application, half through a round of boiled granite. But harder than granite itself is the lot of him, who, in addition to the loss of his guinea, has left his glorious appetite behind him; lost it, invaluable as it was, not in the natural and exquisite operation of dining, but in the anxious and protracted process of tasting multifarious dishes, in the vain hope of finding some dish upon the table, some one out of the several dozens, that a

gentleman might be presumed to relish without forfeiting his cha

racter.

We doubt whether there is a deep beyond this lowest of all; Milton's hero himself could never have found it out. To pay as aforesaid -to sit in eager but mute expectancy-to be excited and inflamed by wild, longing, doting, imaginative guesses as to what those covers may be concealing from view-to lose no opportunity of discovering some slight matter not unfitted to be relished by an epicurean taste, beginning with the soup and ending only with the finis, whatever it may be -to be disappointed dish after dish, duped and confounded remove after remove, until all is over-and then to fall back, after a voyage of discovery that has occupied an hour and a half, convinced of the total failure of the experiment-too certain that there is nothing worthy of being devoured, for every dish has been practically tasted-conscious, painfully conscious, than in the desperate and protracted search after a dinner the ardent stomach has over-exerted itself, and the fondlycherished appetite has fallen an innocent victim. This, we must and will insist, is something considerably more grievous than the mere undined condition which we sympathized with before.

The non-eater who has merely succeeded in nibbling up two round rasped rolls, one before covers were removed, and one during what is called" the dinner," goes home, be it recollected, with an enviable capacity for dining at any hour of the night, the sooner the better; but how should he who has experimentalized on each dish, consumed his relish for any thing, wasted his precious appetite in a fruitless search for something worthy of it-how should he retain the desired power, the enviable capacity to sup when he retires from the table! No, he is a man irretrievably ruined-until next day. He has been doubly taken in, and has a right to say, "Attack my pocket if you will, but spare my inner man; cheat me of my guinea, but don't pick my stomach of an appetite; send me hungry away, but don't poison me."

"You envy me!" cries poor Claude in the play; "wise judges are we of each other." Who has not been envied while hastening about six o'clock into the tavern towards which a numerous dinner-party has been making its way for the last quarter of an hour, and round whose door are gathered a dozen or two of sharp-set lookers-on, with noses keenly alive to every odour that indicates the proceedings within. Wise judges are we of each other, truly! The staring, longing exclusives at the door, imagine that we are a charming party of friendsthat a glorious dinner awaits us-that we are going to pass a delightfully jovial evening-that we shall have a rare time of it! Wise judges! If, instead of sniffing, they were to see and share in the festivity! If, instead of spectators, they were actors in the entertainment! But they were never behind the scenes. They know not how vast the difference between the "imagination of the feast," and the feast itself! It's exactly the difference between perfect happiness and“ such a headach!"

The mistake they commit is natural enough; but how odd it is that the very people who compose the public dinner-party fall into it too. They have been there before on a score of occasions they have been guinea-givers and dinner-hunters-and yet they go again; not that merely-but they go with anticipations, contradictory of all their ex

perience, of finding a pleasant meeting, witnessing an exciting scene, and enjoying a jolly entertainment. They hear that their friend Thompson, whose jokes are so devilish good, is to be there; and so he is, only he sits with his back to them at the table on the other side of the room; or it is announced that Viscount Thunderbolt is to take the -or the musical chair, and they never heard a first-rate orator yet;strength is prodigious, and they confess that they do like to hear Hobbs and Pyne, and Miss Hawes, and the Boys, and the rest of them ;—or it is in the sacred cause of charity, and it tugs irresistibly at their hearts; or it is given in honour of somebody that they cannot for their lives refuse to eat a dinner in admiration of. And so they go once more-do ye not, all ye Public Dinnerists? whether ye be Londontaverners, or Freemasoners, or Crown-and-Anchorites, or by whatsoever sign ye may be known!

When all are assembled in the grand room, covers being laid for three hundred, the sight is undoubtedly "imposing," and it might be not unamusing to view from the gallery the gradual arrival of the fat bald gentlemen who generally form two-thirds of the company. It is best to select a single dinner-seeker-mark him upon his entrance, see him make his way round the tables in quest of the particular plate that contains his card and is to supply his bliss-note the grumbling looks with which he surveys it, disgusted with its locality, and the scrutinizing glances at other names nearer the cross-table, taking up a card and turning it over here and there, with a strong inclination to substitute his own for it. Then he goes and shakes hands with some half-dozen seemingly-hungry gentlemen, who, having taken their seats, have already begun to break off small bits of their respective rolls, to look at their watches, and hint that nothing is so becoming in a chairman as punctuality. You will next see that he presently returns to his seat and does the same; and, as the example spreads, a considerable number of rolls vanish before dinner. Meanwhile, other people are late besides the chairman; and as they enter they survey the filled seats with little pleasure on their visages, and edge their way from the bottom of the room to the top, round the cross-table, and down again, looking out for the possibility of a seat being reserved for them, or eagerly hunting for a cardless plate upon which they may seize, or a polite steward whom they may mercilessly arrest on his passage to the And now committee-room to receive the distinguished chairman. ("See the conquering hero comes,") the distinguished chairman, ushered in by a score of white-wanded and blue-ribboned stewards, enters the room amidst as much loud and long-continued applause as three hundred gentlemen, who are quite ravenous and decided against delay, can conveniently bestow; grace is inaudibly said in the sixtieth part of a minute, and then the public dinner begins to begin. It is exactly at this point of the entertainment that we should respectfully recommend the ladies in the gallery to consider the sports terminated, and retire accordingly.

What a clatter! How instantaneous, and how universal! What a startling and violent concussion of plates, forks, and spoons! What congeniality of sentiment-what fixedness of purpose! Leonidas and his three hundred were never more resolved and united than the distinguished chairman and his desperate company. There are six-times

forty feeding like one. The removal of the covers lifted the veil from the ruling passion-there it is, you see it in full play, or rather hard at work. Change but a word, and how applicable is the couplet,

"The fool consistent and the false sincere,

Priests, princes, statesmen, no dissemblers here!"

Of each it might be said, as Kemble said of Kean, " He is terribly in earnest." And yet if we pause in our survey of the general effect, where all seems to be vivid and successful action-waiters almost winged, plates skimming along the air, and elbows rivalling Paganini's, though the noise is not music exactly-if we pause to notice individual examples, we immediately observe what labour-in-vain work it for the most part is. It is much-ado-about-nothing after all. Each man may have secured possession of some soup, but not the soup he ordered, for that has gone to a gentleman who petitioned for what he has. Those who have obtained turbot, look at it, lacking sauce, for seven minutes; and when they have at last procured some absent and essential accompaniment, all perseverance is futile, all intercession idle, in relation to cayenne, without which they have obtained nothing.

The story of one course is the story of another. Every man's hand is lifted to his own mouth as often as may be, but every man's hand is against his neighbour's doing so. On first entering, there was a mixed company, but still they might all be gentlemen, being much better dressed than the dinner; now, however, a change comes over their spirit. There is a tacit but unanimous recognition of the maxim that every man should take care of himself. The principle observable at each table, at all parts of each table, and with scarcely one visible exception, though in reality there are many, is,

"That they should take who have the power,
And they should dine who can."

It seems to be a rule that the gentleman who first seizes upon the salt should keep it. It is upon the same principle that the party who sits opposite the turbot, helps himself liberally to the fins, and having pitched a rude supply into one or two plates thrust over his shoulder by beseeching waiters, drops the fish-slice, and can neither see nor hear appeals until he has finished his fins. Whosoever fixes his fork in a fowl, becomes the proprietor of it, so far as wings, or breast, or all that he himself has a taste for, is concerned. A slice of tongue is quite unattainable with your chicken-chicken and tongue too must always be considered unreasonable and romantic at a public dinner; but perhaps the desired slice is securable by itself. We make a trial; we send a plate-having little chance of seeing another-with an earnest, a pathetic appeal. That plate we never see again. With exemplary patience we await its return-time passes on, and the dishes disappear; we have become accustomed to our hunger, and having some of the nicely-rasped roll left, we forget our application in applying ourselves to that. But at length the solid dishes have all melted away into a horrible mockery of custards and jellies! Even a wrong cut of the spoiled mutton is now irrecoverable. Grumio's "beef without the mustard" we might have had-but may not now. The tough turkey has become an impossibility. The dinner, shockingly arranged, infa