"Such strenuous lines, so cheering, soft, and sweet, That daily flow from your conjunctive wit, Proclaim the power of Beef, that noble meat. Your tuneful songs such deep impression make, And of such awful, beauteous strength partake, Each stanza seems an ox, each line a steak. As if the rump in slices, broil'd or stew'd In its own gravy, till divinely good, Turned all to powerful wit, as soon as chew'd.
To grind thy gravy out their jaws employ, O'er heaps of reeking steaks express their joy, And sing of Beef as Homer did of Troy."
We shall now more closely examine the origin and history of the Sublime Society of the Steaks, which has its pedigree, its ancestry, and its title-deeds. The gridiron of 1735 is the real gridiron on which its first steak was broiled. Henry Rich (Lun, the first Harlequin) was the founder, to whom Garrick thus alludes in a prologue to the Irish experiment of a speaking pantomime:
"When Lun appeared, with matchless art and whim, He gave the power of speech to every limb.
Though masked and mute conveyed his true intent, And told in frolic gestures what he meant; But now the motley coat and sword of wood, Require a tongue to make them understood."
There is a letter extant, written by Nixon, the treasurer, probably to some artist, granting permission by the Beef-steak Society "to copy the original gridiron, and I have wrote on the other side of this sheet a note to Mr. White, at the Bedford, to introduce you to our room for the purpose making your drawing. The first spare moment I can take from my business shall be employed in making a short statement of the rise and establishment of the Beef-steak Society."
Rich, in 1732, left the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre for Covent Garden, the success of the _Beggars' Opera_ having "made Gay rich and Rich gay." He was accustomed to arrange the comic business and construct the models of tricks for his pantomimes in his private room at Covent Garden. Here resorted men of rank and wit, for Rich's colloquial oddities were much relished. Thither came Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, the friend of Pope, and thus commemorated by Swift:
"Mordanto fills the trump of fame; The Christian world his death proclaim; And prints are crowded with his name. In journeys he outrides the post; Sits up till midnight with his host; Talks politics, and gives the toast, A skeleton in outward figure; His meagre corpse, though full of vigour, Would halt behind him, were it bigger, So wonderful his expedition; When you have not the least suspicion, He's with you, like an apparition: Shines in all climates like a star; In senates bold, and fierce in war; A land-commandant, and a tar."