Atlantic Monthly | Page 3

out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in a half-dozen half-sentences as he did. "He always made the best pun and the best remark in the course of the evening." Lamb was undoubtedly "matchless as a fireside companion," inimitable as a table-talker, "great at the midnight hour." The "wit-combats" at his Wednesday-evening parties were waged with scarcely inferior skill and ability to those fought at the old Mermaid tavern between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. Hazlitt, in his delightful essay intituled "Persons One would Wish to have Seen," gives a masterly report of the sayings and doings at one of these parties. It is to be regretted that he did not report the conversation at all of these weekly assemblages of wits, humorists, and good-fellows. He made a capital book out of the conversation of James Northcote: he could have made a better one out of the conversation of Charles Lamb. Indeed, Elia himself seems to have been conscious that many of his deepest, wisest, best thoughts and ideas, as well as wildest, wittiest, airiest fancies and conceits, were vented in conversation; and a few months before his death he noted down for the entertainment of the readers of the London "Athenaeum," a few specimens of his table-talk. Although these paragraphs of table-talk are not transcripts of their author's actual conversation, they doubtless contain the pith and substance of what he had really said in some of his familiar discourses with friends and acquaintances. They contain none of his "jests that scald like tears," none of his play upon words, none of his flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar, but some of his sweet, serious, beautiful thoughts and fancies.
Strange that Talfourd neglected to print "Table-Talk" in his edition of Lamb! He does not even mention it. It is certainly as good, if not a great deal better than some things of Lamb's which he saw fit to reprint. But the best way to praise Elia's "Table-Talk" is, as the "Tatler" says of South's wise and witty discourse on the "Pleasures of Religious Wisdom," to quote it; and therefore here followeth, without further comment or introduction,--
"TABLE-TALK. BY THE LATE ELIA.
"It is a desideratum in works that treat _de re culinaria_, that we have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavors: as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant-jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why loin of veal, (a pretty problem,) being itself unctuous, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter,--and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth from it; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead-set at mustard; why cats prefer valerian to heart's-ease, old ladies _vice versa_,--though this is rather travelling out of the road of the dietetics, and may be thought a question more curious than relevant; why salmon (a strong sapor _per se_) fortifieth its condition with the mighty lobster-sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the delicater relish of the turbot; why oysters in death rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam by turns court and are accepted by the compilable mutton-hash,--she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give a reason of the relish that is in us; so that, if Nature should furnish us with a new meat, or be prodigally pleased to restore the phoenix, upon a given flavor, we might be able to pronounce instantly, on philosophical principles, what the sauce to it should be,--what the curious adjuncts."
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"The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and to have it found out by accident."
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"'T is unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket."
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"Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it, how such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all. These I call _furniture wives_; as men buy _furniture pictures_, because they suit this or that niche in their dining-parlors.
"Your universally cried-up beauties are the very last choice which a man of taste would make. What pleases all