matter of fact, one person usually presided. A
musical historian tells us that in the summer of 1797 he was dining
with three friends at the Ship Tavern in Greenwich, when the waiter
came and laid a cloth for one person at the next table, placing
thereon a dish of boiled eels, one of fried flounders, a bowled fowl,
a dish of veal cutlets, and a couple of tarts. Then Dussek entered and
made away with the lot, leaving but the bones! In W. T. Parke's
"Musical Memoirs" justice is done to the appetite of one C. F.
Baumgarten, for many years leader of the band and composer at Covent
Garden Theatre. Once at supper after the play he and a friend ate a
full-grown hare between them. He would never condescend to drink out
of anything but a quart pot. On one occasion, at the request of his
friends, Baumgarten was weighed before and after dinner. There was
eight pounds difference! William Shield, the composer who wrote many
operas for Covent Garden Theatre, beginning aptly enough with one
called _The Flitch of Bacon_, was something of an eater. Parke tells
how at a dinner one evening there was a brace of partridges. The
hostess handed Shield one of these to carve and absent-mindedly he set
to and finished it, while the other guests were forced to make shift
with the other partridge. Handel was a great eater. He was called the
"Saxon Giant," as a tribute to his genius, but the phrase might have
had a satirical reference to his enormous bulk. Intending to dine one
day at a certain tavern, he ordered beforehand a dinner for three. At
the hour appointed he sat down to the table and expressed astonishment
that the dinner was not brought up. The waiter explained that he would
begin serving when the company arrived. "Den pring up de tinner
brestissimo," replied Handel, "I am de gombany." Lulli never forsook
the _casserole_. Paganini was as good a cook as he was a violinist.
Parke tells a story of Weichsell, not too celebrated a musician, but
the father of Mrs. Billington and Charles Weichsell, the violinist:
"He would occasionally supersede the labours of his cook, and pass a
whole day in preparing his favourite dish, rump-steaks, for the
stewing pan; and after the delicious viand had been placed on the
dinner-table, together with early green peas of high price, if it
happened that the sauce was not to his liking he has been known to
throw rump-steaks, and green peas, and all, out of the window, whilst
his wife and children thought themsel