lemonade seasoned with pepper and allspice
instead of lemon. This fashionable beverage
is a combination of sugar, seltzer-water, and
ginger—amongst the most combustible of
spices. The refreshment sets your palate in
a blaze. After the fish succeed entrées à la
Française, consisting of game too much
roasted, poultry too much done, or pastry too
heavy. The roast, proportioned to the quality
of the guests and their number, is worthy of
the Homeric epochs. The acme of luxury
consists in serving several different fish at
the same time, and several roasts. The
hors-d'Å“uvre (supplementary dishes, such as cold
ham, tongue, &c.) are numerous, and the
entremets (kickshaws which serve as
interludes to the solid dishes) are singular. One
of the most common is a cake illustrated
with sourish herbs, which are the stalks of
rhubarb, or perhaps mackerel gooseberries,
gathered green, which are the object of a
considerable sale. Frequently salad is offered
on a dish, in the shape of a lettuce-heart cut
in two. Some people eat it in this way with
their fingers, simply dipping the extremity of
the leaves in salt. The vegetables are
generally boiled and offered without any seasoning;
they are delivered over to circulation about
the table, at the same time with the roast
meat. At dessert, enormous Chester and
Stilton cheeses make their appearance, and
boats'-load of fresh butter; fruit and melon
succeed to them; after which, everything is
cleared away, to the very cloth; and glasses
and wine are brought.

Wine alone enjoys the privilege of being
placed upon the table. For beer and Scotch
ale, family drinks, there is a special ceremonial.
One of the domestics who wait at
table comes and presents to you an empty
tray, and if you are not warned beforehand,
you will not fail to be a little surprised. [In
the beer and cider-drinking departments of
France, these liquids are placed on the table
in carafes—large glass decanters without
stoppers—and everyone helps his neighbours
and himself. It is polite to fill your neighbour's
glass. In the south, where beer,
bitter ale, and porter are much dearer than
ordinary wine, they are placed on the table
respectfully, and with a certain degree of
state, in the black bottle.] If such a thing
should happen, reader, to yourself, and you
bear no animosity to hops, take your glass,
place it upon the tray, and the servant, after
having filled it at the sideboard, will offer it
to you. Without this ingenious combination,
your tumbler, O, reader! would suffer the
contact of a valet's fingers, which would
shock both modesty and strict propriety.

A dinner at the Trafalgar Hotel, Greenwich,
to which Monsieur Wey and several of
his compatriots were invited, greatly
astonished them by its thirty entrées of fish.
This culinary Odyssey interested them from
being such an exhibition of new, unknown,
or unrecognisable dishes, that it possessed all
the charm of a museum. Like the tongues
in Æsop's dinner, the fish underwent
innumerable disguises; every species appeared
in several costumes; turbot, salmon, sole,
and sturgeon were bedecked with the most
splendid sauces; pepper, phosphorescent
gravies [curry, possibly,] and incendiary
piments, excited wonderment and thirst. But
these dishes of energetic condiments paled
before a certain friture or fry, composed of
little fishlings which, in point of volume,
bear the same proportion to the bleak that
the pike does to the whale. The whitebait
are caught only in the Thames before
Greenwich (?) While analysing these various dishes,
certain conscientious tourists took notes,
unwilling to neglect any subject of study; and,
with the fork in one hand and the pencil
in the other, they stuffed themselves with
documents which, at the same time, were
gravely annotated.

England produces three objects which are
met with everywhere; but, which, in this
island, are remarkable for their marvellous
beauty; the women, the trees, and the horses.
Moreover, every place which raises a race of
horses worthy of admiration, is also peopled
by pretty women. What is the cause of the
coincidence, it is not easy to say; but this
strange correlation is not the less real. Georgia
rears the best horses of the East. The plains
of La Camargue, in the neighbourhood of
Arles, famous for its lovely girls, preserve the
blood of the Moorish coursers in a state of
nature; the Andalusian maid attains her
perfection of form by the side of the most
symmetrical steeds of the Peninsula; at
Mecklenburg you behold the purest blood of
Germany; and, when a phalanx of amazons
gallop along the avenues of the London parks,
the dazzled eye cannot fix itself with
indifference either on the écuyère, or the animal
on which she is mounted. Let a young girl
draw up her horse beneath a lofty tree, and
you will contemplate, grouped into a single
picture, the three marvels of Angleterre.
[Please observe, that young girl, is not
tautology, in French. French females are filles
till they get married, no matter what their
age; the same of garçon, and even of jeune
homme. The funeral of a jeune homme,
turned of seventy-two has just passed in the
direction of the cemetery. An old maid in
England becomes an old girl in France.]

Beauty under a different aspect was to be
gazed at, at the late Covent Garden theatre,
which was as gay and pretty as Her Majesty's
theatre is cold and sombre. It was the
evening after a drawing-room, though the
traveller did not seem to know it. Court
etiquette, he tells us, requires that the ladies
should be coiffed with one or two marabout
plumes, mostly placed in a reversed position,
and falling back upon the neck, like the ears
of a frightened spaniel. Few persons are less
interested in the observance of this usage
than Queen Victoria, whose visage is round,