'"Then I wish," said a guest, "when you ask us to eat, You would furnish your board _à la_ Louis Dixhuit. The eye, can it feast when the stomach is starving? Pray less of your gilding and more of your carving."'
John Headley, describing dinner at one Lady Anne's, tells us that
'A silver service loads the board, Of eatables a slender hoard;'
and the sarcasm reminds one of the address with which Theodore Hook once bore himself under somewhat similar circumstances. Invited to dine with an old lady, he was horrified when the servant, lifting the cover, displayed a couple of chops. 'Mr. Hook,' said the hostess, 'you see your dinner.' 'Thank you, ma'am,' observed Hook; 'but where's yours?'
The niggardliness which displays itself in smaller subscriptions to public or private objects than the donor's means will justify has naturally met with keen reproach. Herrick has a quatrain directed against the failing; and everyone remembers the lines about the man who declared that at the sound of woe his hand was always open:
'Your hand is open, to be sure, But there is nothing in it.'
Perhaps the happiest satire on meanness of this sort is contained in the anonymous couplet 'On Close-fist's Subscription':
'The charity of Close-fist, give to fame: He has at last subscribed--how much?--his name.'
A leading Review lately contained a contribution entitled 'The Old School of Classics and the New.' It was, as regards its literary form, a 'Dialogue of the Dead'--a discussion supposed to take place between the famous scholars Bentley and Madvig, with a brief intervention on the part of Euripides and Shakespeare. It was written with much smartness, and one could wish that such lucubrations were more common nowadays than they are. Not that they are by any means rare. It was only the other day that Mr. Marion Crawford published a work which had the conventional shape of fiction, but which was really little more than a series of colloquies in which some famous men of the past took part, talking throughout with a characteristic flavour which did the author considerable credit. Dialogues of the dead, pure and simple, have also been written of recent years by Mr. H. D. Traill, some of the best of whose efforts were republished in a volume called 'The New Lucian.'