years ago. What prospectuses describe as
a want was felt for something of the sort,
at that time: and the house was built to
supply it. The eighty years have rolled
past; dinner after dinner has been eaten;
and the Tavern still remains open to fresh
meetings, ready for fresh banquets; keeping,
on the establishment, an army of servants
sixty or eighty strong; taking on auxiliary
legions during the dining season; and feeding
parties, varying in numbers from a
snug six to a multitudinous eight hundred.
Jack Snigsly, the commercial traveller, being
about to marry, may give a modest little dinner
to his bachelor friends, with reasonable port;
or De Bouchier may entertain his high-born
comrades with cobweb-woven champagne, still
radiant of the sun that warmed the vintage
of '37.

A dinner, then, at the London Tavern is
far from a heedless or inconsiderate proceeding.
It must be organised beforehand with
due deliberation and forethought. Let me tell
you, that whether you be Snigsly, or De
Bouchier, the promoter of a grand Whitte
Wheal Copper Mining Company, or the
treasurer of a Royal Strabismus Hospital, you will
do well to appoint a sub-committee for the
sole purpose of arranging preliminaries;
constituting yourself, as a matter of course, chairman.
"Your committee " being essentially a
committee of taste, will have to undergo a
small preliminary dinner; for how will " your
committee " be able to settle the bill of fare
with that sound judgment which is only the
result of experience, without a full-dressed
rehearsal? Take care that, on this occasion,
you submit your sketch of the bill of fare
to your host. He will see by it, at a glance,
your position in life, and what class of palates
you represent. " Tell me what you eat, and
I 'll tell you what you are," saith the great
gastronomic lawgiver. With the hand of a
master-artist, he will dash in— according to
the rank and station of yourself and your
dinner—a soup here, a side-dish there; he
will, peradventure, lighten up your roasts with
a hors d'oeuvre, or give aplomb to your sweets
with an entrée of game. That settled, he will
tell you with what wines your dinner can be
(according to the price per head) and ought to
be irrigated. If he thinks " your committee"
worthy of the honour, he will propose a
descent into his cellars—in the morning about
eleven, " when," he will say, " your palate is
clean."  Go, by all means. I shall accompany
you.

We descend, not by a narrow ladder, but
over a regular flight of stairs. We begin by
remarking a singular honour paid to our
venerated friend the Turtle.  An important
vault has been sacrificed to him; positively
a whole wine-cellar has been appropriated to
his tanks. Before, he was not kept in a favourable
temperature; his artificial habitat was

        . . . . " too cold and damp,
        For a soul so warm and true!"
And such is his importance (for, says the
worthy proprietor, "Turtle must be had
properly! ") that, as I say again, yon vault is given
to his use. We approach the recess of a somewhat
sepulchral appearance, and gaze into a
little lake. The brown shells are heaving
dimly on the surface of the water; the round,
podgy heads are peering out. We muse over
the picture: our first thoughts are of zoology;
our second of soup.  We remember that the
turtle is called Testudo; that he is a West
Indian, and amphibious; and that he is
generally " caught napping."  We learn that
he, above all, loveth an equal temperature of
fifty-five degrees. That abstemious animal
(who is not the cause of abstemiousness in
others) lives for three months upon a little
rough salt in a great deal of water, and does
not decrease more in weight than ten per
cent. The smallest turtle weighs (you calculate
turtle by weight) thirty-five pounds; the
largest, one hundred and twenty pounds. It
is only one-third of him that is used for
soup: the upper part makes the coveted
callipash; the lower, the celebrated callipee.
We turn away from the vat, wherein two
tons of turtle are ponderously swimming, and
pass on through the wine-vaults—our footsteps
falling light and silently upon the
muffling sawdust.

On the end of a stick gleams a morsel of
candle, which sends a light flickering over
the place like a Jack o'Lantern; running
down the low-vaulted roof; dancing among
the cobwebs as if it would tear them; and
lighting up walls of bottle-ends, that point
grimly towards us like batteries of cannon.
This is the region of bins. Here there are
bins six bottles deep; for of bottles full of
port there are four thousand three hundred.
Our attention is directed to the port of Sir
Charles Wetherall; port, we are given to
understand, worthy of a lawyer, a wit, and
(remember the antique, respectable orthodoxy
of the wine) a Tory. The light falls next on
some champagne of fourteen years' bottling;
each bottle trailing a venerable beard, and
slowly maturing into mellowed glory in its
recess. These bottles, like

        . . "the actions of the just,
        Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust."

Here, also, is some champagne of the vintage
of '46—a peculiarly good champagne vintage;
a happy year for champagne lovers. Lucky
the man who secures the wine of that year; it
being common among dealers to mix the wines
of various vintages. Denouncing the practice
with considerable emphasis, we pass on—
between hecatombs of Johannisberg, Tokay, and
Burgundy—to more port in what is happily
named " a rising bin."  Port keeps its ancient
popularity still; for wine-bibbing people obey
the French adage, and always return to their
first love. In this bin is some very fair port,
through which Jones, a full-bodied member of
"your committee," looks knowingly as he