A DINNER SCENE FROM MAXWELL.*

THE following is a cabinet picture in

the old manner of the author: it

pos

sesses all the minuteness of the Dutch style-its truth and more than its spirit. The subject is a dinner of pretension, given by people who are unequal to and unprepared for the task. Mr. Palmer, a man of business in Hunter-street, Brunswick-square, proposes to entertain a Mr. Overall, who has just married an heiress, and whose affairs the said Mr. Palmer is about to manage during his absence abroad: (Spectator.)

"I have said this much to show, that in a family like Mr. Palmer's, the nonarrival of the company' would have been a severe disappointment.

Mrs. Overall was known to be a lady of fortune, used to every thing nice and comfortable;' she kept her own carriage, her men- servants, and all that; and therefore they must be very particular, and have every thing uncommonly nice for her. And so Miss Palmer, the night before, had a white basin of hot water up into the parlour to bleach almonds, with which to stick a tipsy cake,' after the fashion of a hedgehog; and Mrs. Palmer sent to the pastry-cook's for some raspberry jam, to make creams in little jelly-glasses, looking like inverted extinguishers, and spent half the morning in whipping up froth with a cane whisk to put on their tops, like shaving lather. And Miss Palmer cut bits of paper, and curled them with the scissors, to put round the wax-ends' in the glass lustres on the chimney-piece; and the three-cornered lamp in the drawingroom was taken out of its brown holland bag, and the maid set to clean it, on a pair of ricketty steps; and the cases were taken off the bell-pulls, and the picture-frames were dusted, and the covers taken off the card-tables-all in honour of the approaching féte.

"Then came the agonies of the father, mother, and daughter, just about five o'clock of the day itself when the drawing-room chimney smoked, and apprehensions assailed them lest the fish should be overdone; the horrors excited by a noise in the kitchen, as if the cod's head and shoulders had tumbled into the sand on the floor: that cod's head and shoulders which Mr. Palmer had himself gone to the fishmonger's to buy, and in determining the excellence of which, had poked his fingers into fifty cods, and forty turbots, to ascertain which was firmest, freshest, and best;

* Our "Laconics" from this work shall appear

next week.

and then the tremour caused by the stoppages of different hackney-coaches in the neighbourhood, not to speak of the smell of roasted mutton, which perwith an occasional whiff of celery, attrivaded the whole house, intermingled

butable to the assiduous care of Mrs. Palmer, who always mixed the salad herself, and smelt of it all the rest of the day; the disagreeable discovery just made that the lamp on the staircase would not burn; the slight inebriation of the cook, bringing into full play a latent animosity towards the housemaid, founded on jealousy, and soothed by the mediation of the neighbouring greengrocer, hired for five shillings to wait at table on the great occasion.

"Just as the Major and Mrs. Overall actually drove up, the said attendant green-grocer, the Cock Pomona of the neighbourhood, had just stepped out to The door was of course opened by the public-house to fetch the 'porter.'

the housemaid.

The afternoon being windy, the tallow candle which she held was instantaneously blown out; at the same instant the back kitchen door was blown to, with a tremendous noise, occasioning, by the concussion, the fall of a pile of plates, put on the dresser ready to be carried up into the parlour, and the overthrow of a modicum of oysters, in a blue basin, which were subsequently, but with difficulty, gathered up individually from the floor by the hands of the cook, and converted in due tioned cod's head and shoulders. season into sauce, for the before-men

"At this momentous crisis, the greengrocer (acting waiter) returned with two pots of Meux and Co.'s entire, upon the tops of which stood heads not a little resembling the whipped stuff upon the raspberry creams ;-open goes the door again, puff goes the wind, and off go the heads' of the porter pots, into the faces of the refined Major Overall and his adorable bride, who was disrobing at the foot of the stairs.

"The Major, who was a man of the world, and had seen society in all its grades, bore the pelting of this pitiless storm with magnanimity, and without surprise; but Jane, whose sphere of motion had been somewhat more limited, and who had encountered but very little variety either of scenery or action, beyond the everyday routine of a quiet country-house, enlivened periodically by a six weeks' trip to London, was somefusion, the banging of doors, the clatwhat astounded at the noise and contering of crockery, and the confusion of tongues, which the untimely arrival of

the company and the porter at the same moment had occasioned; nor was the confusion less confounded by the thundering double knock of Mr. Olinthus Crackenthorpe, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, who followed the beer (which, as Shakspeare has it, was at the door,') as gravely and methodically as an undertaker.

"Up the precipitous and narrow staircase were the Major and Mrs. Overall ushered; she having been divested of her shawl and boa by the housemaid, who threw her 'things' into a dark hole, ycleped the back parlour, where boots and umbrellas, a washingstand, the canvass-bag of the drawingroom lamp, the table-covers, and master's' great-coats, were all huddled in one grand miscellany. Just as the little procession was on the point of climbing, Hollingsworth the waiter coming in, feeling the absolute necessity of announcing all the company himself, sets down the porter-pots upon the mat in the passage, nearly pushes down the housemaid, who was about to usurp his place, and who, in her anxiety to please Mr. Crackenthorpe (who was what she called a nice gentleman), abandons her position at the staircase, and flies to the door for the purpose of admitting him; in her zeal and activity to achieve this feat, she most unfortunately upsets one of the porter-pots, and inundates the little passage, miscalled the hall, with a sweeping flood of the aforementioned mixture of Messrs. Meux and Co.

"Miss Engleheart, of Bernard-street, Russell-square, who had been invited to meet the smart folks, because she was a smart person herself, arrived shortly after; indeed so rapidly did she, like Rugby, follow Mr. Crackenthorpe's heels, that he had but just time to deposit his great-coat and goloshes (in which he had walked from chambers) in the black hole where every thing was thrust, before the lovely Charlotte made her appearance.

"Here then, at length, was the snug little party assembled, and dinner was forthwith ordered. Miss Engleheart made the amiable to Mrs. Overall, who was received by both the young ladies with all that deference and respect which the formidable rank and title of wire commands. The three ladies sat together; Mr. Palmer performed fire-screen with his face to the company; and Major Overall, having first looked at Crackenthorpe for about five minutes, with an expression of countenance indicative of thinking him capable of cutting a throat or picking a pocket, at

length disturbed the téte-à-tête which that respectable young lawyer was carrying on with the head of the house.

"Mrs. Palmer at this period suddenly disappeared, to direct the serving up,' and regulate the precedence of butter-boats, and the arrangements of the vegetables, which were put down to steam on the dinner-table in covered dishes, two on a side; a tureen of mockturtle from Mr. Tiley, in Tavistockplace, being at the bottom, and our old friend, the cod's head and shoulders, dressed in a horse-radish wig and lemonslice buttons, at the top; an oval pond of stewed calves' head, dotted with dirt balls, and surrounded by dingy brain and egg pancakes, stood next the fish; and a couple of rabbits, smothered in onions, next the soup. In the centre of the table towered a grotesque pyramid, known as an epergne, at the top of which were large pickles in a glass dish, and round which hung divers and sundry cut-glass saucers, in which were deposited small pickles and lemons, alternately dangling gracefully; at the corners of the table were deposited the four masses of vegetable matter before mentioned; and in the interstices, a pretty little saucer of currant-jelly, with an interesting companion full of horseradish ;-all of which being arrranged. to her entire and perfect satisfaction, Mrs. Palmer again hurried up to the drawing-room, as red as a turkey-cock, in order to appear as if she had been doing nothing at all, and to be just in time to be handed down again by the Major.

The table was soon arranged; the Major, on the right hand of Mrs. Palmer, was doomed to be roasted by the flame of the fire; and the bride, on the right hand of Mr. Palmer, was destined to be blown to shivers by the wind from the door. Mr. Crackenthorpe, who stood six feet three without his shoes, coiled up his legs under his chair, to the direful inconvenience of the green-grocer 'daily waiter,' who regularly stumbled over them whenever he approached his mistress on the sinister side, and much to the annoyance of Miss Charlotte Engleheart, who had long had a design upon the said Crackenthorpe for a husband, and who was in the habit of toetreading and foot-feeling, after the custom of the tribes with whom she had been habituated to dwell.

"Miss Palmer's whole anxiety was in the dinner; her heart was in the tipsy-cake, and all her hopes and wishes centered in the little jelly-glasses ;divers and sundries were the hems and

OF

No. 464.]

[PRICE 2d.

FROM the Lord Chancellor (in our last), to the King's Council Chamber, would be no very great transit to make, did not the above print carry us back to the early portion of the sixteenth century.

The History of the Engraving is curious, and its pictorial interest by no means uninviting: its circumstances are thus related in Mr. E. W. Brayley's Londiniana, vol. ii., a work of considerable research and authority, as the respected name of the Editor would lead the reader to anticipate:

"In the first edition of Hall's Chronicle,' printed by Richard Grafton, in 1548, at the back of fol. cclxiij., is a very beautiful and spiritedly-executed wood-cut, representing Henry the Eighth presiding in council. The king is seated VOL. XVI. 2 F

upon his throne, in a chamber lined with tapestry, wrought into a regular pattern of alternate roses and fleurs-de-lis. The roof is of arched timber work, divided, into square compartments, diagonally intersected. and having an ornamental pendant at each point of intersection. At the back of the throne, which has a fringed canopy, enriched with festoons and tassels, are the royal arms and supporters of the Tudor family.

"That most industrious inquirer into T. F. Dibdin, has published an exact the history of printing, the Rev. Dr. fac-simile of this extraordinary specimen of art,' in the third volume of his

Typographical Antiquities,' and from that copy the annexed print has been reduced. Dr. Dibdin imagines it to

464

have been designed by Hans Holbein, and engraven by some foreign artist in Germany, or the Low Countries. The original drawing,' he remarks, if in being, must be invaluable, as there is every reason to think that the portraits, as well as the architectural disposition of the room, are copies from the originals.' The impression in Hall's Chronicle,' when in large and fine condition, is highly estimated by collectors."

LETTER FROM SCOTLAND.
Tevoit Head, 1st November, 1830.

Scotland, Roxbroughshire. MR. YEDITOR,-You will nae doubt think it strange to receive a comunication frae the like o' me, wha ye never heard o' afore, and a thousand chances never wull agen; but I hae taent i' my head to write ye, letting the result thereof be sic as it likes; and ye maun excuse i' the first place my forwardness in sae doing, and in the second, the nonsense that I may mak my goose's feather dictate to you.

Howsomever, after I hae once broken the ice, I must neist let ye ken my reasons for writing to you, wha, as a' the warld weel knows, is as afar aboon me as I'm aboon my colley;-but to the purpose, as I hate ganging about the bush. Weel, ye see I hae a friend that stops i' your town-he being my wife's brother's son-a nice young man as ye can clap yer ee on in a simmer's day, and he sends a bit box at an orra time to his relations-us like-containing a pickle tea and shugar, and a wheen auld claes as he caes them: (auld, my certy, I hae seen the day the best man i' Tevoit Water wad nae lukit down at wearin them; but times are sair altered sin I was a callant.) Now it happened, that amang other bits o' odds and ends i' the last box, he sent down a wheen Numbers o' the Mirror, which I think he had bought just to pit aff the time a wee i' the gloamin; and they were carefully tied thegither, and specially directit to me, wha he kent was the only ane i' the family that could mak best use o' them; and I, after haeing perused the same to the rest o' the family, and much to the yedification o' us all, lent them to a' the neibours round about, which are at maist but thinly spread, this being a verra hilly county as ye nae doot ken, and I just received them back the other night, they a' showing undoubtable marks o' being weel thumbed, if no weel read; but my neibours a' certify to me that they hae received great store o' knowledge frae them, which maks me proud at haeing a freend that

sends sic buiks. Howsomever, I took it i' my head that the yeditor must be a knowen sort o' chap, to write sae weel as he does; and thinks I to mysel, it wad nae doot gie him great satisfaction to hear that folk at sic a distance had been much yedified by the perusal o' his writings. Weel, as sune as the thought strak me, I grew a wee dumfounder'd at first, and thought and better thought, how to accomplish sic an undertaking; but at lang and last I fell on a plan, and gin this gets safe to ye, its accomplisht. We being situate a gey bit frae ony post toun or public road-(and if I had een been nearer them, I durstna hae putten it into the post, for fear o' expense-for I hate needless expense aboon a' things, considering a wilfu' waste o' siller a thrawing away o' God's blessings, which every ane that reads the Bible may ken); and, as I was sayin, there being but few opportunities to get a parcel conveyed sic a far distance; but I had lang meditated sending a bit box up to my freend wi' some new serks and other usefu's, as the lad had hinted his needin sic things, and I now determined to dispatch it, as the gudewife had gotten a wheen nice bonny anes ready, and send it by the way o' Edinbrough, and sae by sea as I considered that the cheapest mode. Weel, after letting the gudewife ken my determination, so that she might be prepared, I sat myways down at the chimley lug, and having prepared my pens and paper, sic as I had, I hae wrote at bye hours what you see.

But I've now said eneuch, perhaps ower muckle, and what's down must just remain. I hae ordered my freend to continue to send yer valuable work, whenever opportunity occurs, as twae or three o's has clubbed for't, and ane pays twae shares and keeps it. Our library's but sma, for how can't be expectit that the like o' us should be yeble to afford to buy mony buiks. For my part, my auld father left me walth o' them, he being a douce weel informed man, and could argue on points o' doctrinal faith wi' the minister himsel. Moreover he had been an elder in his time, and the auld family Bible testifys to this day how weel it was used by him.

But I maun now conclude, and wishing you and your publication muckle success, sae lang as ye do the way yer doin, I beg till finish wi' subscribin mysel,

Yer verra humble servant and admirer,
WATTIE COLTherd.

P.S. Haein kept a bit buik, whereon I copy ony bits o' scraps that please me in newspapers, &c., I hae caused our Dominee to copy a ween o' them for