le of friends with English fare and a
superabundance of choice port in Great Ormond Street. Throughout his
public career, Alexander Wedderburn was a lavish and delightful host,
amply atoning in the opinion of frivolous society for his political
falsity by the excellence and number of his grand dinners. On entering
the place of Solicitor-General, he spent L8000 on a service of plate;
and as Lord Loughborough he gratified the bar and dazzled the
fashionable world by hospitality alike sumptuous and brilliant.

Several of the Georgian lawyers had strong predilections for particular
dishes or articles of diet. Thurlow was very fanciful about his fruit;
and in his later years he would give way to ludicrous irritability, if
inferior grapes or faulty peaches were placed before him. At Brighton,
in his declining years, the ex-Chancellor's indignation at a dish of
defective wall-fruit was so lively that--to the inexpressible
astonishment of Horne Tooke and other guests--he caused the whole of a
very fine dessert to be thrown out of the window upon the Marine Parade.
Baron Graham's weakness was for oysters, eaten as a preparatory whet to
the appetite before dinner; and it is recorded of him that on a certain
occasion, when he had been indulging in this favorite pre-prandial
exercise, he observed with pleasant humor--"Oysters taken before dinner
are said to sharpen the appetite; but I have just consumed half-a-barrel
of fine natives--and speaking honestly, I am bound to say that I don't
feel quite as hungry as when I began." Thomas Manners Button's peculiar
_penchant_ was for salads; and in a moment of impulsive kindness he gave
Lady Morgan the recipe for his favorite salad--a compound of rare merit
and mysterious properties. Bitterly did the old lawyer repent his unwise
munificence when he read 'O'Donnell.' Warmly displeased with the
political sentiments of the novel, he ordered it to be burnt in the
servants' hall, and exclaimed, peevishly, to Lady Manners, "I wish I
had not given her the secret of my salad." In no culinary product did
Lord Ellenborough find greater delight than lobster-sauce; and he gave
expression to his high regard for that soothing and delicate compound
when he decided that persons engaged in lobster-fishery were exempt from
legal liability to impressment. "Then is not," inquired his lordship,
with solemn pathos, "the lobster-fishery a fishery, and a most important
fishery, of this kingdom, though carried on i