I am afraid the poet wants his usual decorum in this place.Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge?This was a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus.The whole banquet is too civic and culinary, and the accompaniments altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted, holy scene.The mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain hunger of the guest.He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been taught better.To the temperate fantasies of the famished Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves?

He dreamed indeed, As appetite is wont to dream,Of meats and drinks, nature’s refreshment sweet.But what meats? Him thought, he by the brook of Cherith stood,And saw the ravens with their horny beaksFood to Elijah bringing, even and morn;Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:He saw the prophet also how he fledInto the desert, and how there he sleptUnder a juniper; then how awakedHe found his supper on the coals prepared,And by the angel was bid rise and eat,And ate the second time after repose,The strength whereof sufficed him forty days:Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook,Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse.

Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer.To which of these two visionary banquets, think you, would the introduction of what is called the grace have been most fitting and pertinent?Theoretically I am no enemy to graces; but practically I own that (before meat especially) they seem to involve something awkward and unseasonable.

Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and continuing the species.They are fit blessings to be contemplated at a distance with a becoming gratitude; but the moment of appetite (the judicious reader will apprehend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season for that exercise.The Quakers who go about their business, of every description, with more calmness than we, have more title to the use of these benedictory prefaces.

I have always admired their silent grace, and the more because I have observed their applications to the meat and drink following to be less passionate and sensual than ours.They are neither gluttons nor wine bibbers as a people.They eat, as a horse bolts his chopt hay, with indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances.They neither grease nor slop themselves.When I see a citizen in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice.I am no Quaker at my food.I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it.

Those unctuous morsels of deer’s flesh were not made to be received with dispassionate services.I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating.I suspect his taste in higher matters.I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal.There is a physiognomical character in the tastes for food.C holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.I am not certain but he is right.With the decay of my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates.The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me.Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts.

I am impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments, as to come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some savoury mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless.Butter ill melted that commonest of kitchen failures puts me beside my tenour. The author of the Rambler used to make inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food.Was this the music quite proper to be preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have done better to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing might be contemplated with less perturbation?

I quarrel with no man’s tastes, nor would set my thin face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity and feasting.But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to some great fish his Dagon with a special consecration of no ark but the fat tureen before him.

Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the banquets of angels and children; to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse; to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged, refection of the poor and humble man: but at the heaped up boards of the pampered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, less timed and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the noise of those better befitting organs would be, which children hear tales of, at Hog’s Norton.

We sit too long at our meals, or are too curious in the study of them, or too disordered in our application to them, or engross too great a portion of those good things (which should be common) to our share, to be able with any grace to say grace.To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice.

A lurking sense of this truth is what makes the performance of this duty so cold and spiritless a service at most tables.In houses where the grace is as indispensable as the napkin, who has not seen that never settled question arise, as to who shall say it; while the good man of the house and the visitor clergyman, or some other guest belike of next authority from years or gravity, shall be bandying about the office between them as a matter of compliment, each of them not unwilling to shift the awkward burthen of an equivocal duty from his own shoulders?

I once drank tea in company with two Methodist divines of different persuasions, whom it was my fortune to introduce to each other for the first time that evening.Before the first cup was handed round, one of these reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he chose to say anything.It seems it is the custom with some sectaries to put up a short prayer before this meal also.

His reverend brother did not at first quite apprehend him, but upon an explanation, with little less importance he made answer, that it was not a custom known in his church: in which courteous evasion the other acquiescing for good manner’s sake, or in compliance with a weak brother, the supplementary or tea-grace was waived altogether.With what spirit might not Lucian have painted two priests, of his religion, playing into each other’s hands the compliment of performing or omitting a sacrifice, the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going away in the end without his supper.

A short form upon these occasions is felt to want reverence; a long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence.I do not quite approve of the epigrammatic conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant school fellow) C. V. L., when importuned for a grace used to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, “Is there no clergyman here?” significantly adding, “thank G .”

Nor do I think our old form at school quite pertinent, where we were used to preface our bald bread and cheese suppers with a preamble, connecting with that humble blessing a recognition of benefits the most awful and overwhelming to the imagination which religion has to offer.Non tunc illis erat locus.

I remember we were put to it to reconcile the phrase “good creatures,” upon which the blessing rested, with the fare set before us, wilfully understanding that expression in a low and animal sense, till some one recalled a legend, which told how in the golden days of Christ’s, the young Hospitallers were wont to have smoking joints of roast meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious benefactor, commiserating the decencies, rather than the palates, of the children, commuted our flesh for garments, and gave us horresco referens trowsers instead of mutton.