youth and natural modesty prevents them from that easy, confidential conversational abandon which forms the delight of the intercourse with their dear mothers. It is to these, if he would prosper in his profession, that the Dining-out Snob should address himself. Suppose you sit next to one of these, how pleasant it is, in the intervals of the banquet, actually to abuse the victuals and the giver of the entertainment! It's twice as piquant to make fun of a man under his very nose.

What is a Dinner-giving Snob? some innocent youth, who is not répandu in the world, may ask-or some simple reader who has not the benefits of London experience.

My dear sir, I will show you-not all, for that is impossiblebut several kinds of Dinner-giving Snobs. For instance, suppose you, in the middle rank of life, accustomed to Mutton, roast on Tuesday, cold on Wednesday, hashed on Thursday, &c., with small means, and a small establishment, choose to waste the former and set the latter topsy-turvy by giving entertainments unnaturally costly-you come into the Dinner-giving Snob class at once. Suppose you get in cheap made dishes from the pastrycook's, and hire a couple of greengrocers, or carpet-beaters, to figure as footmen, dismissing honest Molly, who waits on common days, and bedizening your table (ordinarily ornamented with willow-pattern crockery) with twopenny-halfpenny Birmingham plate. Suppose you pretend to be richer and grander than you ought to be-you are a Dinner-giving Snob. And O, I tremble to think how many many a one will read this on Thursday!

and

A man who entertains in this way—and, alas, how few do not! -is like a fellow who would borrow his neighbour's coat to make a show in, or a lady who flaunts in the diamonds from next door --a humbug, in a word, and amongst the Snobs he must be set down.

A man who goes out of his natural sphere of society to ask Lords, Generals, Aldermen, and other persons of fashion, but is niggardly of his hospitality towards his own equals, is a Dinnergiving Snob. My dear friend, Jack Tufthunt, for example, knows one Lord whom he met at a watering-place; old Lord Mumble, who is as toothless as a three-months-old baby, and as mum as an undertaker, and as dull as-well, we will not particularise.

Tufthunt never has a dinner now, but you see this solemn old toothless patrician at the right-hand of Mrs. Tufthunt-Tufthunt is a Dinner-giving Snob.

Old Livermore, old Soy, old Chuttney, the East India Director, old Cutler, the Surgeon, &c.,-that society of old fogies, in fine, who give each other dinners round and round, and dine for the mere purpose of guttling-these, again, are Dinner-giving Snobs.

Again, my friend Lady MacScrew, who has three grenadier flunkies 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 iisdem trabibus 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 all the 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 cook's shop, but if he is asked to dine at a house where there are not peas 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 me to a family dinner? I can get mutton at home; or What infernal impertinence it is of the Spooners to get entrées 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 Dinnergiving 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-sixpenny Champagne; and know that the sidedishes of to-day are réchauffées from the dinner of yesterday, and mark how certain dishes are whisked off the table untasted, so that they may figure at the banquet to-morrow. 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 massacreing 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 àpropos of certain dishes when offered to him, that he never eats aspic except at Lord Tittup's, and that Lady Jiminy's Chef is the only man in London who knows how to dress--filet en serpenteau-or Suprême de Volaille aux truffes.

CHAPTER XX.

DINNER-GIVING SNOBS FURTHER CONSIDERED,

IF my friends would but follow the present prevailing fashion, I think they ought to give me a testimonial for the paper on Dinner-giving Snobs, which I am now writing. What do you say now to a handsome comfortable dinner-service of plate (not including plates, for I hold silver plates to be sheer wantonness, and would almost as soon think of silver tea-cups), a couple of neat tea-pots, a coffee-pot, trays, &c., with a little inscription to my wife, Mrs. Snob; and a half-score of silver tankards for the little Snoblings, to glitter on the homely table where they partake of their quotidian mutton ?

If I had my way, and my plans could be carried out, dinnergiving would increase as much on the one hand as dinner-giving Snobbishness would diminish:-to my mind the most amiable part of the work lately published by my esteemed friend (if upon a very brief acquaintance he will allow me to call him so), Alexis Soyer, the Regenerator; what he (in his noble style) would call the most succulent, savory, and elegant passages; are those which relate, not to the grand banquets and ceremonial dinners, but to "his dinners at home."

The "dinner at home" ought to be the centre of the whole system of dinner-giving. Your usual style of meal that is plenteous, comfortable, and in its perfection, should be that to which you welcome your friends, as it is that of which you partake yourself.

For, towards what woman in the world do I entertain a higher regard than towards the beloved partner of my existence, Mrs. Snob? who should have a greater place in my affections than her six brothers (three or four of whom we are pretty sure will favour us with their company at seven o'clock), or her angelic mother, my own valued mother-in-law ?-for whom, finally would I wish to cater more generously than for your very humble servant, the present writer? Now, nobody supposes that the Birmingham plate is had out, the disguised carpet-beaters introduced to the

exclusion of the neat parlour-maid, the miserable entrées from the pastrycook's ordered in, and the children packed off (as it is supposed) to the nursery, but really only to the staircase, down which they slide during the dinner-time, waylaying the dishes as they come out, and fingering the round bumps on the jellies, and the forcedmeat balls in the soup. Nobody, I say, supposes that a dinner at home is characterised by the horrible ceremony, the foolish makeshifts, the mean pomp and ostentation which distinguish our banquets on grand field-days.

Such a notion is monstrous. I would as soon think of having my dearest Bessy sitting opposite me in a turban and bird of Paradise, and showing her jolly mottled arms out of blond sleeves in her famous red satin gown: aye, or of having Mr. Toole every day, in a white waistcoat, at my back, shouting, "Silence faw the chair!"

Now, if this be the case; if the Brummagem-plate pomp and the processions of disguised footmen are odious and foolish in everyday life, why not always? Why should Jones and I, who are in the middle rank, alter the modes of our being to assume an éclat which does not belong to us-to entertain our friends, who (if we are worth anything, and honest fellows at bottom) are men of the middle rank too, who are not in the least deceived by our temporary splendour; and who play off exactly the same absurd trick upon us when they ask us to dine?

If it be pleasant to dine with your friends, as all persons with good stomachs and kindly hearts will, I presume, allow it to be, it is better to dine twice than to dine once. It is impossible for men of small means to be continually spending five-andtwenty or thirty shillings on each friend who sits down to their table. People dine for less. I myself have seen, at my favourite Club (the Senior United Service), His Grace the Duke of Wellington quite contented with the joint, one-andthree, and half-pint of Sherry wine nine; and if his Grace, why

not

you and I?

Whenever I

This rule I have made, and found the benefit of. ask a couple of Dukes and a Marquis or so to dine with me, I set them down to a piece of beef, or a leg of mutton and trimmings. The grandees thank you for this simplicity, and appreciate the