"Hues which have words, and speak to ye of heaven."
"Away! there need no words or terms precise,
The paltry jargon of the marble mart,
Where pedantry gulls folly: we have eyes."
We are told by the members of the silver-fork school, that no tale of fiction can be complete unless it embody the description of a dinner. Let us, therefore, shutting from our view that white-limbed gum-tree, and dismissing from our table tea and damper, [Footnote: Damper. Bushman's fare--unleavened bread] call on memory's fading powers, and feast once more with the rich, the munificent, the intellectual Belliston Graeme.
Dinner! immortal faculty of eating! to what glorious sense or pre-eminent passion dost thou not contribute? Is not love half fed by thy attractions? Beams ever the eye of lover more bright than when, after gazing with enraptured glance at the coveted haunch, whose fat--a pure white; whose lean--a rich brown--invitingly await the assault. When doth lover's eye sparkle more, than when, at such a moment, it lights on the features of the loved fair one? Is not the supper quadrille the most dangerous and the dearest of all?
Cherished venison! delicate white soup! spare young susceptible bosoms! Again we ask, is not dinner the very aliment of friendship? the hinge on which it turns? Does a man's heart expand to you ere you have returned his dinner? It would be folly to assert it. Cabinet dinners--corporation dinners--election dinners--and vestry dinners--and rail-road dinners--we pass by these things, and triumphantly ask--does not the Ship par excellence--the Ship of Greenwich--annually assemble under its revered roof the luminaries of the nation? Oh, whitebait! called so early to your last account! a tear is all we give, but it flows spontaneously at the memory of your sorrows!
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