Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70

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The foregoing reminiscence, however, has drawn me aside from the main
object of my sketch, in which I purposed to give a slight idea of those
public or partially public banquets, the custom of which so thoroughly
prevails among the English people, that nothing is ever decided upon, in
matters of peace or war, until they have chewed upon it in the shape of
roast-beef, and talked it fully over in their cups. Nor are these
festivities merely occasional, but of stated recurrence in all
considerable municipalities and associated bodies. The most ancient
times appear to have been as familiar with them as the Englishmen of
to-day. In many of the old English towns, you find some stately Gothic
hall or chamber in which the Mayor and other authorities of the place
have long held their sessions; and always, in convenient contiguity,
there is a dusky kitchen, with an immense fireplace, where an ox might
lie roasting at his ease, though the less gigantic scale of modern
cookery may now have permitted the cobwebs to gather in its chimney. St.
Mary's Hall, in Coventry, is so good a specimen of an ancient
banqueting-room that perhaps I may profitably devote a page or two to
the description of it.

In a narrow street, opposite to St. Michael's Church, one of the three
famous spires of Coventry, you behold a mediaeval edifice, in the
basement of which is such a venerable and now deserted kitchen as I have
above alluded to, and, on the same level, a cellar, with low stone
pillars and intersecting arches, like the crypt of a cathedral. Passing
up a well-worn staircase, the oaken balustrade of which is as black as
ebony, you enter the fine old hall, some sixty feet in length, and broad
and lofty in proportion. It is lighted by six windows of modern stained
glass, on one side, and by the immense and magnificent arch of another
window at the farther end of the room, its rich and ancient panes
constituting a genuine historical piece, in which are represented some
of the kingly personages of old times, with their heraldic blazonries.
Notwithstanding the colored light thus thrown into the hall, and though
it was noonday when I last saw it, the panelling of black oak, and some
faded tapestry that hung round the walls, together with the cloudy vault
of the roof above, made a gloom which the richness only illuminated into
more appreciable effect. The tapestry is wrought with figures in the
dress of Henry VI.'s time, (which is the date of the hall,) and is
regarded by antiquaries as authentic evidence both for the costume of
that epoch, and, I believe, for the actual portraiture of men known in
history. They are as colorless as ghosts, however, and vanish drearily
into the old stitch-work of their substance, when you try to make them
out. Coats-of-arms were formerly emblazoned all round the hall, but have
been almost rubbed out by people hanging their overcoats against them,
or by women with dish-clouts and scrubbing-brushes, obliterating
hereditary glories in their blind hostility to dust and spiders' webs.
Full-length portraits of several English kings, Charles II. being the
earliest, hang on the walls; and on the dais, or elevated part of the
floor, stands an antique chair of state, which more than one royal
character is traditionally said to have occupied while feasting here
with their loyal subjects of Coventry. It is roomy enough for a person
of kingly bulk, or even two such, but angular and uncomfortable,
reminding me of the oaken settles which used to be seen in old-fashioned
New-England kitchens.

Overhead, supported by a self-sustaining power, without the aid of a
single pillar, is the original ceiling of oak, precisely similar in
shape to the roof of a barn, with all the beams and rafters plainly to
be seen. At the remote height of sixty feet, you hardly discern that
they are carved with figures of angels, and doubtless many other
devices, of which the admirable Gothic art is wasted in the duskiness
that has so long been brooding there. Over the entrance of the hall,
opposite the great arched window, the party-colored radiance of which
glimmers faintly through the interval, is a gallery for minstrels; and a
row of ancient suits of armor is suspended from its balustrade. It
impresses me, too, (for, having gone so far, I would fain leave nothing
untouched upon,) that I remember, somewhere about these venerable
precincts, a picture of the Countess Godiva on horseback, in which the
artist has been so niggardly of that illustrious lady's hair, that, if
she had no ampler garniture, there was certainly much need for the good
people of Coventry to shut their eyes. After all my pains, I fear that I
have made but a poor hand at the description, as regards a transference
of the scene from my own mind to the reader's. It gave me a most vivid
idea of antiquity that had been very little tampered with; insomuch
that, if a group of steel-clad knights had come clanking through the
door-way, and a bearded and beruffed old figure had handed in a stately
dame, rustling in gorgeous robes of a long-forgotten fashion, unveiling
a face of beauty somewhat tarnished in the mouldy tomb, yet stepping
majestically to the trill of harp and viol from the minstrels' gallery,
while the rusty armor responded with a hollow ringing sound
beneath,--why, I should have felt that these shadows, once so familiar
with the spot, had a better right in St. Mary's Hall than I, a stranger
from a far country which has no Past. But the moral of the foregoing
pages is to show how tenaciously this love of pompous dinners, this
reverence for dinner as a sacred institution, has caught hold of the
English character; since, from, the earliest recognizable period, we
find them building their civic banqueting-halls as magnificently as
their palaces or cathedrals.

I know not whether the hall just described is still used for festive
purposes, but others of similar antiquity and splendor are so. For
example, there is Barber-Surgeons' Hall, in London, a very fine old
room, adorned with admirably carved wood-work on the ceiling and walls.
It is also enriched with Holbein's master-piece, representing a grave
assemblage of barbers and surgeons, all portraits, (with such extensive
beards that methinks one-half of the company might have been profitably
occupied in trimming the other,) kneeling before King Henry VIII. Sir
Robert Peel is said to have offered a thousand pounds for the liberty of
cutting out one of the heads from this picture, he conditioning to have
a perfect fac-simile painted in. The room has many other pictures of
distinguished members of the company in long-past times, and of some of
the monarchs and statesmen of England, all darkened with age, but
darkened into such ripe magnificence as only age could bestow. It is not
my design to inflict any more specimens of ancient hall-painting on the
reader; but it may be worth while to touch upon other modes of
stateliness that still survive in these time-honored civic feasts, where
there appears to be a singular assumption of dignity and solemn pomp by
respectable citizens, who would never dream of claiming any privilege of
rank outside of their own sphere. Thus, I saw two caps of state for the
warden and junior warden of the company, caps of silver (real coronets
or crowns, indeed, for these city-grandees) wrought in open-work and
lined with crimson velvet. In a strong-closet, opening from the hall,
there was a great deal of rich plate to furnish forth the banquet-table,
comprising hundreds of forks and spoons, a vast silver punch-bowl, the
gift of some jolly king or other, and, besides a multitude of less
noticeable vessels, two Loving-Cups, very elaborately wrought in silver
gilt, one presented by Henry VIII., the other by Charles II. These cups,
including the covers and pedestals, are very large and weighty, although
the bowl-part would hardly contain more than half a pint of wine, which,
when the custom was first established, each guest was probably expected
to drink off at a draught. In passing them from hand to hand adown a
long table of compotators, there is a peculiar ceremony which I may
hereafter have occasion to describe. Meanwhile, if I might assume such a
liberty, I should be glad to invite the reader to the official
dinner-table of his Worship, the Mayor, at a large English seaport where
I spent several years.

The Mayor's dinner-parties occur as often as once a fortnight, and,
inviting his guests by fifty or sixty at a time, his Worship probably
assembles at his board most of the eminent citizens and distinguished
personages of the town and neighborhood more than once during his year's
incumbency, and very much, no doubt, to the promotion of good feeling
among individuals of opposite parties and diverse pursuits in life. A
miscellaneous party of Englishmen can always find more comfortable
ground to meet upon than as many Americans, their differences of opinion
being incomparably less radical than ours, and it being the sincerest
wish of all their hearts, whether they call themselves Liberals or what
not, that nothing in this world shall ever be greatly altered from what
it has been and is. Thus there is seldom such a virulence of political
hostility that it may not be dissolved in a glass or two of wine,
without making the good liquor any more dry or bitter than accords with
English taste.

The first dinner of this kind at which I had the honor to be present
took place during assize time, and included among the guests the judges
and the prominent members of the bar. Reaching the Town-Hall at seven
o'clock, I communicated my name to one of several splendidly dressed
footmen, and he repeated it to another on the first staircase, by whom
it was passed to a third, and thence to a fourth at the door of the
reception-room, losing all resemblance to the original sound in the
course of these transmissions; so that I had the advantage of making my
entrance in the character of a stranger, not only to the whole company,
but to myself as well. His Worship, however, kindly recognized me, and
put me on speaking-terms with two or three gentlemen, whom I found very
affable, and all the more hospitably attentive on the score of my
nationality. It is very singular how kind an Englishman will almost
invariably be to an individual American, without ever bating a jot of
his prejudice against the American character in the lump. My new
acquaintances took evident pains to put me at my ease; and, in requital
of their good-nature, I soon began to look round at the general company
in a critical spirit, making my crude observations apart, and drawing
silent inferences, of the correctness of which I should not have been
half so well satisfied a year afterwards as at that moment.

There were two judges present, a good many lawyers, and a few officers
of the army in uniform. The other guests seemed to be principally of the
mercantile class, and among them was a ship-owner from Nova Scotia, with
whom I coalesced a little, inasmuch as we were born with the same sky
over our heads, and an unbroken continuity of soil between his abode and
mine. There was one old gentleman, whose character I never made out,
with powdered hair, clad in black breeches and silk stockings, and
wearing a rapier at his side; otherwise, with the exception of the
military uniforms, there was little or no pretence of official costume.
It being the first considerable assemblage of Englishmen that I had
seen, my honest impression about them was, that they were a heavy and
homely set of people, with a remarkable roughness of aspect and
behavior, not repulsive, but beneath which it required more familiarity
with the national character than I then possessed always to detect the
good-breeding of a gentleman. Being generally middle-aged, or still
farther advanced, they were by no means graceful in figure; for the
comeliness of the youthful Englishman rapidly diminishes with years, his
body appearing to grow longer, his legs to abbreviate themselves, and
his stomach to assume the dignified prominence which justly belongs to
that metropolis of his system. His face (what with the acridity of the
atmosphere, ale at lunch, wine at dinner, and a well-digested abundance
of succulent food) gets red and mottled, and develops at least one
additional chin, with a promise of more; so that, finally, a stranger
recognizes his animal part at the most superficial glance, but must take
time and a little pains to discover the intellectual. Comparing him with
an American, I really thought that our national paleness and lean habit
of flesh gave us greatly the advantage in an aesthetic point of view. It
seemed to me, moreover, that the English tailor had not done so much as
he might and ought for these heavy figures, but had gone on wilfully
exaggerating their uncouthness by the roominess of their garments: he
had evidently no idea of accuracy of fit, and smartness was entirely out
of his line. But, to be quite open with the reader, I afterwards learned
to think that this aforesaid tailor has a deeper art than his brethren
among ourselves, knowing how to dress his customers with such individual
propriety that they look as if they were born in their clothes, the fit
being to the character rather than the form. If you make an Englishman
smart, (unless he be a very exceptional one, of whom I have seen a few,)
you make him a monster: his best aspect is that of ponderous
respectability.

To make an end of these first impressions, I fancied that not merely the
Suffolk bar, but the bar of any inland county in New England, might show
a set of thin-visaged, green-spectacled men, looking wretchedly worn,
sallow with the intemperate use of strong coffee, deeply wrinkled across
the forehead, and grimly furrowed about the month, with whom these
heavy-cheeked English lawyers, slow-paced and fat-witted as they must
needs be, would stand very little chance in a professional contest. How
that matter might turn out I am unqualified to decide. But I state these
results of my earliest glimpses of Englishmen, not for what they are
worth, but because I ultimately gave them up as worth little or nothing.
In course of time, I came to the conclusion that Englishmen of all ages
are a rather good-looking people, dress in admirable taste from their
own point of view, and, under a surface never silken to the touch, have
a refinement of manners too thorough and genuine to be thought of as a
separate endowment,--that is to say, if the individual himself be a man
of station, and has had gentlemen for his father and grandfather. The
sturdy Anglo-Saxon nature does not refine itself short of the third
generation. The tradesmen, too, and all other classes, have their own
proprieties. The only value of my criticisms, therefore, lay in their
exemplifying the proneness of a traveller to measure one people by the
distinctive characteristics of another,--as English writers invariably
measure us, and take upon themselves to be disgusted accordingly,
instead of trying to find out some principle of beauty with which we may
be in conformity.

In due time we were summoned to the table, and went thither in no solemn
procession, but with a good deal of jostling, thrusting behind, and
scrambling for places when we reached our destination. The legal
gentlemen, I suspect, were responsible for this indecorous zeal, which I
never afterwards remarked in a similar party. The dining-hall was of
noble size, and, like the other rooms of the suite, was gorgeously
painted and gilded and brilliantly illuminated. There was a splendid
table-service, and a noble array of footmen, some of them in plain
clothes, and others wearing the town-livery, richly decorated with
gold-lace, and themselves excellent specimens of the blooming
young-manhood of Britain. When we were fairly seated, it was certainly
an agreeable spectacle to look up and down the long vista of earnest
faces, and behold them so resolute, so conscious that there was an
important business in hand, and so determined to be equal to the
occasion. Indeed, Englishman or not, I hardly know what can be prettier
than a snow-white table-cloth, a huge heap of flowers as a central
decoration, bright silver, rich china, crystal glasses, decanters of
Sherry at due intervals, a French roll and an artistically folded napkin
at each plate, all that airy portion of a banquet, in short, that comes
before the first mouthful, the whole illuminated by a blaze of
artificial light, without which a dinner of made-dishes looks spectral,
and the simplest viands are the best. Printed bills-of-fare were
distributed, representing an abundant feast, no part of which appeared
on the table until called for in separate plates. I have entirely
forgotten what it was, but deem it no great matter, inasmuch as there is
a pervading commonplace and identicalness in the composition of
extensive dinners, on account of the impossibility of supplying a
hundred guests with anything particularly delicate or rare. It was
suggested to me that certain juicy old gentlemen had a private
understanding what to call for, and that it would be good policy in a
stranger to follow in their footsteps through the feast. I did not care
to do so, however, because, like Sancho Panza's dip out of Camacho's
caldron, any sort of pot-luck at such a table would be sure to suit my
purpose; so I chose a dish or two on my own judgment, and, getting
through my labors betimes, had great pleasure in seeing the Englishmen
toil onward to the end.

They drank rather copiously, too, though wisely; for I observed that
they seldom took Hock, and let the Champagne bubble slowly away out of
the goblet, solacing themselves with Sherry, but tasting it warily
before bestowing their final confidence. Their taste in wines, however,
did not seem so exquisite, and certainly was not so various, as that to
which many Americans pretend. This foppery of an intimate acquaintance
with rare vintage: does not suit a sensible Englishman, as he is very
much in earnest about his wines, and adopts one or two as his life-long
friends, seldom exchanging them for any Delilahs of a moment, and
reaping the reward of his constancy in an unimpaired stomach, and only
so much gout as he deems wholesome and desirable. Knowing well the
measure of his powers, he is not apt to fill his glass too often.
Society, indeed, would hardly tolerate habitual imprudences of that
kind, though, in my opinion, the Englishmen now upon the stage could
carry off their three bottles, at need, with as steady a gait as any of
their forefathers. It is not so very long since the three-bottle heroes
sank finally under the table. It may be (at least, I should be glad if
it were true) that there was an occult sympathy between our
temperance-reform, now somewhat in abeyance, and the almost simultaneous
disappearance of hard-drinking among the respectable classes in England.
I remember a middle-aged gentleman telling me (in illustration of the
very slight importance attached to breaches of temperance within the
memory of men not yet old) that he had seen a certain magistrate, Sir
John Linkwater, or Drinkwater,--but I think the jolly old knight could
hardly have staggered under so perverse a misnomer as this last,--while
sitting on the magisterial bench, pull out a crown-piece and hand it to
the clerk. "Mr. Clerk," said Sir John, as if it were the most
indifferent fact in the world, "I was drunk last night. There are my
five shillings."

During the dinner, I had a good deal of pleasant conversation with the
gentlemen on either side of me. One of them, a lawyer, expatiated with
great unction on the social standing of the judges. Representing the
dignity and authority of the Crown, they take precedence, during
assize-time, of the highest military men in the kingdom, of the
Lord-Lieutenant of the county, of the Archbishops, of the royal Dukes,
and even of the Prince of Wales. For the nonce, they are the greatest
men in England. With a glow of professional complacency that amounted to
enthusiasm, my friend assured me, that, in case of a royal dinner, a
judge, if actually holding an assize, would be expected to offer his arm
and take the Queen herself to the table. Happening to be in company with
some of these elevated personages, on subsequent occasions, it appeared
to me that the judges are fully conscious of their paramount claims to
respect, and take rather more pains to impress them on their ceremonial
inferiors than men of high hereditary rank are apt to do. Bishops, if it
be not irreverent to say so, are sometimes marked by a similar
characteristic. Dignified position is so sweet to an Englishman, that he
needs to be born in it, and to feel it thoroughly incorporated with his
nature from its original germ, in order to keep him from flaunting it
obtrusively in the faces of innocent by-standers.

My companion on the other side was a thick-set, middle-aged man, uncouth
in manners, and ugly where none were handsome, with a dark, roughly hewn
visage, that looked grim in repose, and seemed to hold within itself the
machinery of a very terrific frown. He ate with resolute appetite, and
let slip few opportunities of imbibing whatever liquids happened to be
passing by. I was meditating in what way this grisly-featured
table-fellow might most safely be accosted, when he turned to me with a
surly sort of kindness, and invited me to take a glass of wine. We then
began a conversation that abounded, on his part, with sturdy sense, and,
somehow or other, brought me closer to him than I had yet stood to an
Englishman. I should hardly have taken him to be an educated man,
certainly not a scholar of accurate training; and yet he seemed to have
all the resources of education and trained intellectual power at
command. My fresh Americanism, and watchful observation of English
characteristics, appeared either to interest or amuse him, or perhaps
both. Under the mollifying influences of abundance of meat and drink, he
grew very gracious, (not that I ought to use such a phrase to describe
his evidently genuine good-will,) and by-and-by expressed a wish for
further acquaintance, asking me to call at his rooms in London and
inquire for Sergeant Wilkins,--throwing out the name forcibly, as if he
had no occasion to be ashamed of it. I remembered Dean Swift's retort to
Sergeant Bettesworth on a similar announcement,--"Of what regiment,
pray, Sir?"--and fancied that the same question might not have been
quite amiss, if applied to the rugged individual at my side. But I heard
of him subsequently as one of the prominent men at the English bar, a
rough customer, and a terribly strong champion in criminal cases; and it
caused me more regret than might have been expected, on so slight an
acquaintanceship, when, not long afterwards, I saw his death announced
in the newspapers. Not rich in attractive qualities, he possessed, I
think, the most attractive one of all,--thorough manhood.

After the cloth was removed, a goodly group of decanters were set before
the Mayor, who sent them forth on their outward voyage, full freighted
with Port, Sherry, Madeira, and Claret, of which excellent liquors,
methought, the latter found least acceptance among the guests. When
every man had filled his glass, his Worship stood up and proposed a
toast. It was, of course, "Our gracious Sovereign," or words to that
effect; and immediately a band of musicians, whose preliminary tootings
and thrummings I had already heard behind me, struck up "God save the
Queen," and the whole company rose with one impulse to assist in singing
that famous national anthem. It was the first time in my life that I had
ever seen a body of men, or even a single man, under the active
influence of the sentiment of Loyalty; for, though we call ourselves
loyal to our country and institutions, and prove it by our readiness to
shed blood and sacrifice life in their behalf, still the principle is as
cold and hard, in an American bosom, as the steel spring that puts in
motion a powerful machinery. In the Englishman's system, a force similar
to that of our steel spring is generated by the warm throbbings of human
hearts. He clothes our bare abstraction in flesh and blood,--at present,
in the flesh and blood of a woman,--and manages to combine love, awe,
and intellectual reverence, all in one emotion, and to embody his
mother, his wife, his children, the whole idea of kindred, in a single
person, and make her the representative of his country and its laws. We
Americans smile superior, as I did at the Mayor's table; and yet, I
fancy, we lose some very agreeable titillations of the heart in
consequence of our proud perogative of caring no more about our
President than for a man of straw, or a stuffed scarecrow straddling in
a cornfield.

But, to say the truth, the spectacle struck me rather ludicrously, to
see this party of stout middle-aged and elderly gentlemen, in the
fulness of meat and drink, their ample and ruddy faces glistening with
wine, perspiration, and enthusiasm, rumbling out those strange old
stanzas from the very bottom of their hearts and stomachs, which two
organs, in the English interior arrangement, lie closer together than in
ours. The song seemed to me the rudest old ditty in the world; but I
could not wonder at its universal acceptance and indestructible
popularity, considering how inimitably it expresses the national faith
and feeling as regards the inevitable righteousness of England, the
Almighty's consequent respect and partiality for that redoubtable little
island, and His presumed readiness to strengthen its defence against the
contumacious wickedness and knavery of all other principalities or
republics. Tennyson himself, though evidently English to the very last
prejudice, could not write half so good a song for the purpose. Finding
that the entire dinner-table struck in, with voices of every pitch
between rolling thunder and the squeak of a cartwheel, and that the
strain was not of such delicacy as to be much hurt by the harshest of
them, I determined to lend my own assistance in swelling the triumphant
roar. It seemed but a proper courtesy to the first Lady in the land,
whose guest, in the largest sense, I might consider myself. Accordingly,
my first tuneful efforts (and probably my last, for I purpose not to
sing any more, unless it be "Hail Columbia" on the restoration of the
Union) were poured freely forth in honor of Queen Victoria. The
Sergeant smiled like the carved head of a Swiss nutcracker, and the
other gentlemen in my neighborhood, by nods and gestures, evinced grave
approbation of so suitable a tribute to English superiority; and we
finished our stave and sat down in an extremely happy frame of mind.

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