Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

66

and with servants on all sides pressing him to eat and drink, as is their custom at Rome"; and the duchess was roused to protest against the tactics of those who were for limiting a guest of hers, so intent was she on being hospitable with a vengeance.

Nonagenarian Miss Mure of Caldwell, in her Remarks on the Changes of Manners in My Own Times, 1700-1790, explains, if not justifies, as follows the then still prevailing practice of pressing to eat: "Nobody helped themselves at table, nor was it the fashion to eat up what was put on their plate. So that the mistress of the family might give you a full meal or not as she pleased, from whence came in the fashion of pressing the guests to eat, so far as to be disagreeable." Scott illustrates the custom again and again in his

face; so that it is well for him if he escapes from the ordeal without a temporary promotion into the ranks of acknowledged and privileged sickness.

Sir H. Holland devotes a chapter of his Medical Notes and Reflections to the discussion of "points where a patient may judge for himself”; and his view with regard to limitation of food is, that the tempestiva abstinentia is often with the patient himself an urgent suggestion of nature, especially in cases where fever is present. He holds it to be part of the provision for cure, an insufficient observance of which greatly impairs the value of all other remedies. 'Here, then" he tells his brethren of the faculty, "we are called upon to maintain the cause of the patient, for such it truly is, against the mistaken importunities which surround him, and which it sometimes requires much firmness to put aside." He affirms it to be rarely that any mischief can follow this instinctive guidance, if care be taken to ascertain its reality.

Cruel kindness the patient often deems this anxious pressure of affectionate nurses and sympathisers, when it comes to the last. Mr. Windham's Diary has one or two entries which concern Dr. Johnson in this respect, when the hale statesman visited the dying moralist he loved so well. "I hinted only what they [the medical attendants] had been before urging, viz., that he would be prevailed upon to take some sustenance, and desisted only upon his exclaiming, 'It is all very childish; let us hear no more of it! The second time I came in, in consequence of a consultation with Mr. Cruikshanks and the apothecary, and addressed him formally. After premising that I considered what I was going to say as a matter of duty, I said that I hoped he would not suspect me of the weakness of importuning him to take nourishment for the purpose of prolonging life for a few hours or days." That he might preserve his faculties entire to the last moment, was the motive urged on the dying man. And the narrative presently goes on: "I flattered myself that I had succeeded in my endeavours, when he recurred to his general refusal, and begged that there might be an end of it."-Diary of the Right Hon. W. Windham, Dec. 12, 1784.

novels of Scottish life. He makes Dame Glendinning forget her vexations in the hospitable duty of pressing her assembled visitors to eat and drink, watching every trencher as it tended to become empty, and loading it with fresh supplies ere the guest could utter a negative; after the manner in more recent times duly deprecated by Dean Ramsay, "the irksome hospitality of being pressed to eat, urged to take a fresh supply of victuals when you had already eaten more than nature required, in deference to the misplaced kindness of the host or hostess, nay perhaps of having an additional wing of a chicken smuggled on your plate when you were for a moment looking another way." Again, Sir Walter congregates in the great stone hall at Tillietudlem a party of such hungry guests that his Lady Margaret Bellenden beholds with delight the wholesale consumption of her cates, and has little occasion to exercise the "compulsory urgency of pressing to eat, to which, as to the peine forte et dure, the ladies of that period were in the habit of subjecting their guests." His Bailie Nicol Jarvie entertains at a homely dinner two southern guests, presiding "with great glee and hospitality," but compelling Owen and Frank Osbaldistone to do rather more justice to his Scottish dainties, sheep's head included, than is quite agreeable to their English palates. The heroine of Mrs. Brunton's Discipline records with becoming emphasis the details of her first breakfast in the Highlands, when the old laird heaps before her all the variety of food within his reach. In vain she remonstrates. The ceremonial of hospitality requires that she be urged even to loathing. "When I turned to supplicate my host for quarter, and hoped that he was inclined to relent, an old lady, who sat by me on the other side, assailed me in the unguarded moment with a new charge of ham and marmalade."

Remembrancers of Scottish life and manners as they con

1 "It was ridiculous enough to see Owen, whose ideas of politeness were more rigorous and formal, eating, with rueful complaisance, mouthful after mouthful of singed wool, and pronouncing it excellent in a tone in which disgust almost overpowered civility."

tinued up to the commencement of the present century record that in many houses the going away of the ladies after dinner was the signal for the setting in of "compulsory conviviality.” No shirking was allowed; "no daylight," "no heeltaps," was what Dean Ramsay calls the wretched jargon in which were expressed the propriety and the duty of seeing that the glass when filled must be emptied and drained. The venerable dean cannot help looking back with amazement at the infatuation which could for a moment tolerate such a sore evil. To a man of sober inclinations it must, as he says, have been an intolerable nuisance to join a dinner party at many houses, where he knew he should have to witness the most disgusting excesses in others, and to fight hard to preserve himself from compliance. There is a letter of apology from Burns to a laird's wife, in which however he declines to apologise to the laird. "Your husband, who insisted on my drinking more than I chose, has no right to blame me." In another letter, to another correspondent, the Ayrshire bard complains: “The savage hospitality of this country spent me the most part of the night over the nauseous potions of the bowl. This day sick headache, low spirits," etc. Mackenzie's Sir William Sindall "excelled in one part of hospitality, which was the faculty of making everybody drunk that had not uncommon fortitude to resist his attacks." The golden rules of hospitality, as observed by the Cockloft family, consisted in cramming a guest with beef and pudding, and, if possible, laying him under the table with port and claret. Another of the

1 Ingoldsby Legend lore relates in a Lay of St. Dunstan how King Edwy, "inconceivably bored by his Witenagemote," left them all joking, and drinking and smoking, and at last getting so tipsy that they send a prelate to bring back the king, will he nill he :

"With a hint that perchance on his crown he might feel taps

Unless he came back straight and took off his heeltaps."

The youthful hero of Great Expectations, and their victim too, as yet an unlicked cub, and unused to "society," is thus addressed and admonished after dinner by his mercurial Mentor: "Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose.'

Knickerbocker worthies piques himself on plying his guests with bumpers until not one of them is capable of seeing.1 Mr. Charles Reade makes his banker's wife pet her husband's guests like princes at the Christmas festivals, always expecting them to be "solemnly not improperly intoxicated by the end of the supper; nowise fuddled, but muddled. For the graceful superstition of the day suspected severe sobriety at solemnities as churlish and ungracious." A Vacation Tourist in the land of Schamyl, in his account of the famous Kakhetian wine, which it is there the custom to drink in tumblers, speaks of the ladies of the company "assisting" in passing and pressing the bottle, which they sparingly share, thinking lightly however of the guest who prefers their example to their precept.

Well may Cassio (as the event proves), with his very poor and unhappy brains for drinking, protest to his jovial tempter: "I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of

1 Dire experience of such hospitality with a vengeance might go far to reconcile one to the per contra caution of Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit, who, when he filled his visitors' wine glasses, called on them not to spare the wine, as they might be certain there was plenty more where that came from; but adding with some haste after this sally, that it was only his joke, and they wouldn't suppose him to be in earnest, he was sure.

Eat not thou the bread of him that hath an evil eye,—is it not written among the Proverbs of Solomon? Neither desire thou his dainty meats ; for as he thinketh in his heart, so is he. Eat and drink, saith he to thee, but his heart is not with thee. The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words.

Harpagon is stringent in his instructions to his servants against the coming feast. "Je vous établis," he says to two of them picked out for the purpose, "dans la charge de rincer les verres et de donner à boire, mais seulement lorsque l'on aura soif, et non selon la coutume de certains impertinents de laquais, qui viennent provoquer les gens, et les faire aviser de boire lorsqu'on n'y songe pas. Attendez qu'on vous demande plus d'une fois, et vous ressouvenez de porter toujours beaucoup d'eau."-Molière, L'Avare, acte iii., sc. I.

There is a sadder, not a sorrier, aspect of the hospitality that is malgré lui-même, in such famine-stricken pictures as this, by Father John, of the Siege of Ancona, in Landor's play:

"Unwillingly

I enter houses where the family

Sits round the table at the spare repast.

Sometimes they push toward me the untasted

And uninviting food, look wistfully,

Press me; yet dread acceptance."

entertainment." Professor Pryme's Autobiographical Recollections go back to a period when drinking to excess was common in the universities, as indeed over all England, and when it was considered a point of hospitality to send away your friends staggering. Mr. Pryme in his second year at Cambridge became one of a number of young men who made a stand against this, and agreed "to press no one to drink at their own wine parties, and to resist pressure elsewhere"; among the members of which temperance league were Monk and Pepys, afterwards Bishops of Gloucester and Worcester, whose example spread, and better habits rapidly came into repute, and held their own. Happy change from the despotism of a set to, or as Thomson words it, a setting in, for “serious drinking"; when

"Nor evasion sly,

Nor sober shift, was to the puking wretch
Indulged apart; but earnest, brimming bowls
Laved every soul, the table floating round,
And pavement, faithless to the fuddled foot."

George Herbert, a century before, had vexed the question with more of piquancy and point; it is the quaint casuistry of

common sense:

"Shall I, to please another's winesprung mind,

Lose all mine own? God hath given me a measure

Short of his can and body; must I find

A pain in that wherein he finds a pleasure?

Stay at the third glass; if thou lose thy hold,

Then thou art modest, and the wine grows bold.

If reason move not gallants, quit the room;
(All in a shipwreck shift their several way ;)

Let not a common ruin thee entomb;

Be not a beast in courtesy, but stay,

Stay at the third cup, or forego the place,

Wine above all things doth God's stamp deface."

Worthy in Plutarch of being bracketed with the Ahasuerus of Scripture is Cleomenes, king of Sparta, whose state suppers were graced by a fair supply of his best wine, with silver cups of serviceable size; and such of the guests, says Plutarch, "as

« НазадПродовжити »