are in a contemplative mood, or want to
observe the humours of your neighbours. It is
amusing to see old Major Crabtree write on the
back of his bill his indignation at the soapy potatoes,
for the seventeenth time soapy; or that
enormous eater Doctor Dodson, crown his cyclopean
meal by piles of pancakes and a bottle of
heavy port. But one soon exhausts the
humours of a club; a tavern presents a larger
and more varying flood of character. Another
charm about the solitary tavern dinner, such as
the Q.C. is now enjoying, is that it excites to
pleasant contemplation. One cannot think
when busy talking, and thinking excites
digestion and quickens the gastric juice. Solitude
and society are both good in their way;
but after the work of the morning a tired man is
sometimes glad to ruminate alone. It is only
the fanatic in business, or the mad hunter after
money who stand at a buffet, like horses at a
manger, gobble up their quantum, and madly
plunge again into business, to the total
destruction of their digestive powers, and to the
loss, perhaps for ever, of all spiritual enjoyment
in a good dinner.

The Q.C. eats his salad in the French way,
alone, and as he gazes his thoughts revert
pleasantly to old days in Paris with the salad
making Professor, long since laid at rest in
Pere la Chaise under shelter of Balzac's
tomb, on that rising ground where there is such
a fine view of Paris and the little blue dome of
the Invalides shows through the clear sapphirine
air of the smokeless and beautiful city. He
thinks of old student days, of a certain pretty
rosy brown face that used to haunt him
from an opposite attic window, of long walks
to Fontainebleau, of the table-d'hôte at
Meurice's, where he first met the lady who is now his
wife, of the lowering day there before the
revolution that drove out Charles the Tenth, with
its rumble of artillery and sound of distant firing.
Then suddenly breaking from this land of
memory he calls Edward, and says sternly:

"Bring me a pint of the port, mind it is
the port, and, Edward, some cheese."

The special charm of a salad, the poetry of it,
in fact, is on a hot day in summer, when the
London pavement is hot enough to cook a
chop; when the paint on the shop doors is
blistering, and policemen's brains are grilling
like toast cheese inside their helmets; when
cabmen, very choleric and short in temper,
keep taking blue handkerchiefs out of their
hats and dashing them in again as if they were
trying to knock out the crowns, and street apple
women fall asleep totally heedless of custom or
urchin thieves; when shop boys drip patterns
on the pavement with their water cans,
and splash any person they can safely; when
Clapham omnibus drivers are thirstier than
usual, and drain off stout faster than their
smoking horses suck up the pailsfull of water
held up to them by the ostlers at the half-way
house; when in the West-end squares pleasant
music oozes from open windows and venetian
blinds; when Covent Garden is one vast flowerbed,
and smells like Bucklersbury at "simple
time;" when dirty looking men, either burglars
tired of the night's prowl, or idle mechanics,
go to sleep face downwards in the parks, and
give them the appearance of battle-fields,
and the Achilles, though not over-clothed, is so
hot that he'd sorch you if you touched him—
then, I say, it is a pleasure to retire into some
old-fashioned tavern —the Mitre, where Doctor
Johnson planned with Boswell his venturous trip
to the Hebrides; or the Cheshire Cheese, which
Goldsmith used to frequent— go and refresh
your body with a steak, and your eyes with a
salad. As you stir up that moist foliage, the
fatigue, and dust, and heat, and stuffyness of
London pass from you, and there arise
thoughts of

Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth,

and of

Grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild,
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine,
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves.

At such times I fancy myself again in my own
country garden, beating the dark earth from the
fibrous root of the portly lettuces, whose large
hearts have almost burst the bass zones that bind
them, drawing carefully my pink radishes, or lifting
out tenderly the young onions with heads
scarcely bigger than bodkins; if I divest
myself of culinary thoughts, I imagine myself
lazily lying on my back, buried in flowering
grass, just ripe for the scythe, watching a foot
above me an orange-shelled ladybird climbing a
grass stalk, or some little blue butterflies flickering
round a honey-sweet clover-flower.

The old French proverb-maker, who said,

Qui vin ne boit après salade
Est en danger d'être malade,

had many other wise saws relating to food, of
more or less value, such as,

Old fish, old oil, and old friends are best.
Veal, fowls, and fish fill the churchyards.
Take the middle of wine, the top of oil, and the
bottom of honey.
After pears wine or the priest.
After melon wine is a felon.
You must drink as much after an egg as after
an ox.

Of all salads lobster salad is the most
picturesque. The red-skinned flesh of the creature
contrasts exquisitely (was surely intended
to contrast exquisitely) with the tender April
green of the virgin lettuce. To parody Brillat
Saverin, may I not say, Powerful kings,
invincible paladins, friends of Nero and
Heliogabalus, how I pity you, for you did not know
the lobster salad!  The very scarlet of the
lobster-shell gives one an appetite. With
what a keen pleasure one cleaves the crimson
plate-armour of the sea monster through, with
one steady, strong pressure from head to heel;
from his little black prominent beads of eyes
to the last brown filament of his fan-like
tail. Easily as an almond from its soft shell,