e conversation has taken its steady turn into
shorthorns, Swedish turnips, subsoiling, and southdowns.

Artists are occasionally well enough, if only for their vanity and
self-conceit.

Authors are better still, for ditto and ditto.

Actors are most amusing from the innocent delusion they labour under
that all that goes on in life is unreal, except what takes place in
Covent Garden or Drury Lane.

In a word, professional cliques are usually detestable, the individuals
who compose them being frequently admirable ingredients, but intolerable
when unmixed; and society, like a _macedoine_, is never so good as when
its details are a little incongruous.

For my own part, I knew few things better than a table d'hote, that
pleasant reunion of all nations, from Stockholm to Stamboul; of every
rank, from the grand-duke to the bagman; men and women, or, if you like
the phrase better, ladies and gentlemen--some travelling for pleasure,
some for profit; some on wedding tours, some in the grief of widowhood;
some rattling along the road of life in all the freshness of youth,
health, and well-stored purses, others creeping by the wayside
cautiously and quietly; sedate and sententious English, lively Italians,
plodding Germans, witty Frenchmen, wily Russians, and stupid Belgians--
all pell-mell, seated side by side, and actually shuffled into momentary
intimacy by soup, fish, fowl, and entremets. The very fact that you are
_en route_ gives a frankness and a freedom to all you say. Your passport
is signed, your carriage packed; to-morrow you will be a hundred miles
away. What matter, then, if the old baron with the white moustache has
smiled at your German, or if the thin-faced lady in the Dunstable bonnet
has frowned at your morality?--you 'll never, in all likelihood,
meet either again. You do your best to be agreeable--it is the only
distinction recognised; here are no places of honour, no favoured
guests--each starts fair in the race, and a pleasant course I have
always deemed it.

Now, let no one, while condemning the vulgarity of this taste of
mine--for such I anticipate as the ready objection, though the
dissentient should be a tailor from Bond Street or a schoolmistress from
Brighton--for a moment suppose that I mean to include all tables d'hote
in this sweeping laudation; far, very far from it. I, Arthur O'Leary,
have travelled some hundreds of thousands of miles in every quarter
and region of the globe, and yet would ha