A DINNER SCENE IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE THE SECOND. (From the Chudleigh Papers.) [My great-grandfather, Sir Orlando Chudleigh, was a man of some note in his time. He sat in three parliaments for the county of Hereford, and distinguished himself on all occasions as a stanch supporter of the House of Brunswick. Educated at Oxford, he early imbibed that taste for books, which enabled him to pass the greater portion of his life in the country, without depending upon foxhunting, or drinking, for the means. He seems, like the great Lord Clarendon, to have made it a rule to cover a certain quantity of writing-paper with his thoughts every day; but as his matter was not quite so important as that of the noble historian, neither my grandfather nor my father considered it incumbent upon him to make posterity acquainted with any of the numerous MSS. he left behind. The taste of the present age, however, being decidedly favourable to ransacking the repositories of the last and preceding ones, I have determined to transcribe a specimen from those of Sir Orlando. The worthy knight, among other things, kept a regular DIARY for nearly twenty years; the first entry being dated March 6th, 1735, and the last, Nov. 11th, 1754. In this Diary, amid much that is now of no interest, there is a great deal which is excellent, especially his reflections upon the various authors that constituted his daily course of reading. In making my first selection, however, I have preferred the following account of a dinner, which is given with more than the minuteness of a Boswell, and I think with nearly equal discrimination of character.-C. C.] June 3d, (1745). I dined to-day with my friend, Marmaduke Langdale. It was the anniversary of his wedding-day; and in pursuance of a custom, which, like many old customs, had its origin in feelings that exist no longer, the practice is still adhered to of inviting certain friends to celebrate the return of the happy day. Not that my friend Marmaduke can be reckoned among those who have verified the sarcasm of the satirist, that marriage has but two happy days the first and the last. Yet, disguise it as we may, four-and-twenty years do strip off a great many of the flowers which composed our garland on the happy day. It never looks quite so fresh, nor is it ever quite so fragrant, afterwards. It is good, however, to keep up these periodical memorials of decaying happiness. What though they gradually make their reappearance with wrinkles, like an old friend whom we knew in our youth? Are we not wrinkled ourselves? Alas! The bridegroom sinks into the husband-the husband into the father -while the sober felicity and serious cares of both engross the whole man. And the bride, too-that vision of brightness-that bland dream of the young imagination-that incarnation of surpassing loveliness which in ecstasy we call angelic,-she turns out merely mortal, when we have called her wife, and lisping children hail her mother. Well, then, why complain? The banquet is ended: the revel is over: the music has ceased; and we have laid aside our masks with our holiday suits. Are we therefore to snarl and grumble? Let us rejoice, rather, that we have been happy without too curiously examining what made us so. Among the guests invited, were the Rev. Jonas Dankes, Godfrey Burlingham, a Major Bagot, Caleb Oldaker, and Jeremiah Chesterton. In their train came wives, daughters, sons, nieces and nephews. There were, besides, at least twenty other heads of families, some of whom, though bachelors, were not unprovided with that well-known description of kindred, the orphan sons and daughters of dear brothers and sisters who had died abroad. Marmaduke, indeed, had contrived to assemble more friends than I thought he possessed: but to give a dinner, and to want one, are two certain tests of friendship. The first collects, the second counts, our friends. The Rev. Jonas Dankes is one of those learned men, the race of which is becoming, I fear, extinct. Indiscriminate and indefatigable reading, aided by a powerful memory, has made his mind a sort of receiving-house for other men's ideas. I have heard him ridiculed as a seeker of useless knowledge (if that which is useless, by the by, can be called knowledge), and his acquisitions compared to a man who has a thousand acres of land in a wilderness, whereof only some half-dozen are profitably cultivated. Be that as it may, he will sometimes rush into the arena of an argument, so armed at all points, with his Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, and Latin, that he seems able to stand alone, and confute, single-handed, the picked scholars of his age. Jeremiah Chesterton is a mere droll; one who ekes out small means of living by the use he makes of small wit: he is a sort of dinner buffoon, who plays mountebank for the amusement of the company. He can sing a merry song; tell a facetious story before the ladies retire, and a broad one afterwards; is smart at repartee; successful, I think, in a pun, once out of seven times; laughs at his own humour, to set others the example; never takes offence at what is said to him, out of respect to his host; loves church, king, and Port wine; and hates a Jacobite. Jeremiah is certainly a valuable addition to every company where a joke takes precedence of an argument, and where the nothings of such kind of talk are accounted excellent. His society is so much in request, indeed, that I have heard his butcher's bill, one year with another, rarely exceeds fifteen shillings; for his two servants are on board wages. Caleb Oldaker, of Oldaker House, was originally an attorney at Ross, where he lived in habits of close intimacy with that excellent man, John Kyrle, whom Mr. Pope, I see, has mentioned in one of his late poems; and an attorney he would have remained to this day, had not those clients whose wills he was called in to make, evinced, uniformly, a singular aversion to leaving his name out of them. How this propensity arose, it might puzzle philosophy to explain; but I remember it was a common saying among the good people of Ross, when they heard of the death of one of his clients, that "Caleb would come in for something snug." And so he generally did; insomuch, that after a few years he was enabled to purchase the estate on which he now lives. Godfrey Burlingham and Major Bagot, when they chance to meet, may be compared to a variorum edition of an ancient author. The major, it should be observed, is a very Sancho Panza in the use of those compendious oracles of wisdom, proverbs; while Burlingham has made it the business of his life to trace their origin through every corruption of colloquial discourse, and every observance of ancient but forgotten manners and customs. Whenever, therefore, a venerable saw is uttered in his presence, asked or unasked, he gives its history, shows how it came to be first used, and by what accidents of time, or perversions of language it has degenerated into its present application. The only person who likes this humour on all occasions is the major; for though he receive ninety-nine explanations of the same proverb, the hundredth never lacks any of its novelty, owing to that happy quality of his memory, which gives him the advantage of always hearing a thing for the first time. I have dined, in the course of my life, with many learned, witty, and agreeable persons; but I hardly remember ever to have heard a good thing come out of their mouths till a reasonable quantity of the good things at table had gone into them. Let any one note the same individuals waiting for dinner, at dinner, and after dinner; they will see how intellect expands as appetite contracts. In the first state, they are absorbed in silent musings; they are faint; they wax sick with hope deferred, especially if the cook happen to be behind time; they are ready to exclaim with the prophet, "My bowels! my bowels! I ain pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me: I cannot hold my peace." In the second state they are like the bee, busy in extracting sweets from every flower, while they obey the exhortation, "Eat, friends! yea, drink abundantly, beloved!" But in the third state-after dinner-their tongues are nimble, their gesticulation is energetic, their eyes sparkle, their wit flashes, their voices are loud, their spirits mantle, and their hearts grow big within them. Thus it was to-day, at my friend Marmaduke Langdale's. The last course was no sooner removed, than the fermentation of wit and humour began; and the first display was elicited by the major, who observed, that "he was not like Buridan's ass (as General Sibthorpe "I dare say you don't know the origin of Buridan's ass," interrupted Burlingham. "I can't say I do," replied the major; "but I know what it means-that I have made a good dinner." "Buridan," continued Burlingham, was one of the schoolmen; and, in order to prove the existence of free will, he supposed a hungry ass-or an ass equally hungry and thirsty-" "As you were, major, when you sat down," interrupted Jeremiah Chesterton, only my friend Burlingham did not like to say so. "Buridan," pursued Burlingham, "supposed such an ass placed between a bushel of oats and a tub of water, each being equidistant from him, and then inquired what the ass would do?" "Nothing at all," said the Rev. Jonas Dankes, "for equal powers must produce equal results, and the ass would be starved to death; his hunger and thirst would be suspended between coordinate attractions." "When that was the answer," observed Burlingham, "Buridan derided it as a palpable absurdity: but when it was contended that the ass would both eat and drink, then he maintained it had free will-else it followed, that of two equal attractions one was greater than the other, which involved a contradiction of terms." “Buridan was a magnificent ass himself," exclaimed Jeremiah, "to suppose he proved any thing by such an argu ment." "I am not going to defend Buridan," replied Burlingham; "I merely wished to explain to Major Bagot the origin of the expression." "Thank you," said the major; "it is very curious, and I'll try and recollect it, please the pigs. "I dare say," interrupted Burlingham again," you don't know the origin of that phrase either; and little think, while using it, that you are employing a corrupt formula of popish adjuration." "God forbid!" exclaimed the major, "for I hate the pope and all his works." "Originally," continued Burlingham, "it was an it please the pix'-the pix being the name of the little box in which the host is carried, and meant simply, I will do such or such thing, God willing, or with God's permission." "It is a singular fact," observed the Rev. Jonas Dankes, "that it was a custom among the Jews to undertake nothing without the holy and devout parenthesis, if God will." Nor was it confined to the Jews. You will rarely meet with a book in Arabic which does not begin Bismillahi, in the name of God:' especially the Alcoran, or any book of divinity.” "With respect to the Alcoran," I said, "every surat or chapter of that scripture (as they account it) begins so." "The Persians use it too," replied the doctor; "as you may see in Nassyr Eddyn's Commentaries upon the Arabic Euclid, at the end of his preface to the tenth book. From the orientals this manner of speech spread to all nations. The Greeks had it; the Latins in their Deo Volente, and--but you may see a great deal upon this subject in Brissonius de Formulis, &c. first book, p. 68." "By the by, Burlingham," said Jeremiah, "I suspect you are wrong in your account." "Can you give a better?" "I think I can one derived from the well-known fact of St. Anthony preaching to the pigs, and the pigs following him." "And you believe in the ridiculous legend of St. Anthony!" exclaimed Burlingham. "Why not?" said the Rev. Jonas Dankes, gravely. "Why not?" repeated Burlingham; "because they must have been very different pigs from their posterity, if they followed any thing but their own wills." "You forget," continued the doctor, "that it is very possible St. Anthony was acquainted with the charm which Pierius mentions in his learned Treatise de Mure. "Take,' says he, the hair of a mouse, and give it in a fig to the swine, and they shall follow the donor which way or whither he listeth.' For a mouse was an elf with which conjurors of old were not unacquainted; and Pierius, in his admirable discourses upon Egyptian hieroglyphics, introduces an experiment to prove this very charm, which he himself saw practised in Ravenna." "What an invaluable recipe for a pigstealer!" exclaimed Jeremiah. |