w--to canvass for patients, in the
character of my father's hopeful successor. Never have I been so ill at
ease in prison, as I was in that carriage. I have felt more at home
in the dock (such is the natural depravity and perversity of my
disposition) than ever I felt in the drawing-rooms of my father's
distinguished patrons and respectable friends. Nor did my miseries end
with the morning calls. I was commanded to attend all dinner-parties,
and to make myself agreeable at all balls. The dinners were the worst
trial. Sometimes, indeed, we contrived to get ourselves asked to the
houses of high and mighty entertainers, where we ate the finest French
dishes and drank the oldest vintages, and fortified ourselves sensibly
and snugly in that way against the frigidity of the company. Of these
repasts I have no hard words to say; it is of the dinners we gave
ourselves, and of the dinners which people in our rank of life gave to
us, that I now bitterly complain.

Have you ever observed the remarkable adherence to set forms of speech
which characterizes the talkers of arrant nonsense! Precisely the same
sheepish following of one given example distinguishes the ordering of
genteel dinners.

When we gave a dinner at home, we had gravy soup, turbot and
lobster-sauce, haunch of mutton, boiled fowls and tongue, lukewarm
oyster-patties and sticky curry for side-dishes; wild duck,
cabinet-pudding, jelly, cream and tartlets. All excellent things, except
when you have to eat them continually. We lived upon them entirely in
the season. Every one of our hospitable friends gave us a return dinner,
which was a perfect copy of ours--just as ours was a perfect copy of
theirs, last year. They boiled what we boiled, and we roasted what they
roasted. We none of us ever changed the succession of the courses--or
made more or less of them--or altered the position of the fowls opposite
the mistress and the haunch opposite the master. My stomach used to
quail within me, in those times, when the tureen was taken off and
the inevitable gravy-soup smell renewed its daily acquaintance with my
nostrils, and warned me of the persistent eatable formalities that were
certain to follow. I suppose that honest people, who have known what it
is to get no dinner (being a Rogue, I have myself never wanted for one),
have gone through some very acute suffering under that privation. It may
be some consolation to them to know that, next to absolute starvation,
the sam