第38章

Again, my friend Lady MacScrew, who has three grenadier flunkeys in lace round the table, and serves up a scrag-of-mutton on silver, and dribbles you out bad sherry and port by thimblefuls, is a Dinner-giving Snob of the other sort; and I confess, for my part, I would rather dine with old Livermore or old Soy than with her Ladyship.

Stinginess is snobbish.Ostentation is snobbish.Too great profusion is snobbish.Tuft-hunting is snobbish.

But I own there are people more snobbish than all those whose defects are above mentioned: viz., those individuals who can, and don't give dinners at all.The man without hospitality shall never sit SUB IISDEMTRABIBUS with ME.Let the sordid wretch go mumble his bone alone!

What, again, is true hospitality? Alas, my dear friends and brother Snobs! how little do we meet of it after all!

Are the motives PURE which induce your friends to ask you to dinner? This has often come across me.Does your entertainer want something from you? For instance, I am not of a suspicious turn; but it IS a fact that when Hookey is bringing out a new work, he asks the critics all round to dinner; that when Walker has got his picture ready for the Exhibition, he somehow grows exceedingly hospitable, and has his friends of the press to a quiet cutlet and a glass of Sillery.Old Hunks, the miser, who died lately (leaving his money to his housekeeper) lived many years on the fat of the land, by simply taking down, at all his friends', the names and Christian names OF ALLTHE CHILDREN.But though you may have your own opinion about the hospitality of your acquaintances; and though men who ask you from sordid motives are most decidedly Dinner-giving Snobs, it is best not to inquire into their motives too keenly.Be not too curious about the mouth of a gift-horse.After all, a man does not intend to insult you by asking you to dinner.

Though, for that matter, I know some characters about town who actually consider themselves injured and insulted if the dinner or the company is not to their liking.There is Guttleton, who dines at home off a shilling's-worth of beef from the cookshop, but if he is asked to dine at a house where there are not pease at the end of May, or cucumbers in March along with the turbot, thinks himself insulted by being invited.'Good Ged!'

says he, 'what the deuce do the Forkers mean by asking MEto a family dinner? I can get mutton at home;' or 'What infernal impertinence it is of the Spooners to get ENTREES from the pastrycook's, and fancy that I am to be deceived with their stories about their French cook!'

Then, again, there is Jack Puddington--I saw that honest fellow t'other day quite in a rage, because, as chance would have it, Sir John Carver asked him to meet the very same party he had met at Colonel Cramley's the day before, and he had not got up a new set of stories to entertain them.Poor Dinner-giving Snobs! you don't know what small thanks you get for all your pains and money!

How we Dining-out Snobs sneer at your cookery, and pooh-pooh your old hock, and are incredulous about your four-and-six-penny champagne, and know that the side-dishes of to-day are RECHAUFFES from the dinner of yesterday, and mark how certain dishes are whisked off the table untasted, so that they may figure at the banquet tomorrow.Whenever, for my part, I see the head man particularly anxious to ESCAMOTER a fricandeau or a blanc-mange, I always call out, and insist upon massacring it with a spoon.All this sort of conduct makes one popular with the Dinner-giving Snob.One friend of mine, I know, has made a prodigious sensation in good society, by announcing apropos of certain dishes when offered to him, that he never eats aspic except at Lord Tittup's, and that Lady Jimmy's CHEF is the only man in London who knows how to dress--FILET EN SERPENTEAU--or SUPREME DE VOLAILLE AUX TRUFFES.