lest I should
be solitary for a moment. He at length takes his welcome leave at the
door; up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my
cares and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication: knock
at the door! In comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Martin Burney, or Morgan
Demi-gorgon, [1] or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating
alone,--a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion.
Oh, the pleasure of eating alone! Eating my dinner alone,--let me think
of it! But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should
open a bottle of orange; for my meat turns into stone when any one dines
with me, if I have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then that wine
turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters
(God bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly); and with the hatred, a still
greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring
upon me, choking and deadening; but worse is the deader dry sand they
leave me on, if they go before bedtime. Come never, I would say to these
spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this
interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes by
surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary
stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always like,
had I any mornings; but I am saturated with human faces (_divine_
forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a
week would be as much as I should covet to be in company; but I assure
you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to myself.
I am never C.L., but always C.L. & Co. He who thought it not good for
man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of
being never by myself! I forget bed-time; but even there these sociable
frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some singular
evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be
a-bed, just close to my bed-room window is the club-room of a
public-house, where a set of singers--I take them to be chorus-singers
of the two theatres (it must be _both of them_)--begin their orgies.
They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who, being limited by their
talents to the burden of the song at the playhouses, in revenge have got
the common popular airs by Bishop or some cheap composer, arranged for
choruses, that is, to be sang all in chorus,--at least, I never can
catch any