harm beyond all the gayety through
which it keeps breathing its undertone. In the present case, it was
worth a heavier sigh, to reflect that such a festal achievement,--the
production of so much art, skill, fancy, invention, and perfect
taste,--the growth of all the ages, which appeared to have been ripening
for this hour, since man first began to eat and to moisten his food with
wine,--must lavish its happiness upon so brief a moment, when other
beautiful things can be made a joy forever. Yet a dinner like this is no
better than we can get, any day, at the rejuvenescent Cornhill
Coffee-House, unless the whole man, with soul, intellect, and stomach,
is ready to appreciate it, and unless, moreover, there is such a harmony
in all the circumstances and accompaniments, and especially such a pitch
of well-according minds, that nothing shall jar rudely against the
guest's thoroughly awakened sensibilities. The world, and especially our
part of it, being the rough, ill-assorted and tumultuous place we find
it, a beefsteak is about as good as any other dinner.

The foregoing reminiscence, however, has drawn me aside from the main
object of my sketch, in which I purposed to give a slight idea of those
public or partially public banquets, the custom of which so thoroughly
prevails among the English people, that nothing is ever decided upon, in
matters of peace or war, until they have chewed upon it in the shape of
roast-beef, and talked it fully over in their cups. Nor are these
festivities merely occasional, but of stated recurrence in all
considerable municipalities and associated bodies. The most ancient
times appear to have been as familiar with them as the Englishmen of
to-day. In many of the old English towns, you find some stately Gothic
hall or chamber in which the Mayor and other authorities of the place
have long held their sessions; and always, in convenient contiguity,
there is a dusky kitchen, with an immense fireplace, where an ox might
lie roasting at his ease, though the less gigantic scale of modern
cookery may now have permitted the cobwebs to gather in its chimney. St.
Mary's Hall, in Coventry, is so good a specimen of an ancient
banqueting-room that perhaps I may profitably devote a page or two to
the description of it.

In a narrow street, opposite to St. Michael's Church, one of the three
famous spires of Coventry, you behold a mediaeval edifice, in the
basement of which is such a venerable and now deserted