Of course it does not become the present writer,who has partaken of the best entertainment which his friends could supply,to make fun of their (somewhat ostentatious,as it must be confessed)hospitality.If they gave a dinner beyond their means,it is no business of mine.I hate a man who goes and eats a friend's meat,and then blabs the secrets of the mahogany.Such a man deserves never to be asked to dinner again;and though at the close of a London season that seems no great loss,and you sicken of a whitebait as you would of a whale--yet we must always remember that there's another season coming,and hold our tongues for the present.
As for describing,then,the mere victuals on Timmins's table,that would be absurd.Everybody--(I mean of the genteel world of course,of which I make no doubt the reader is a polite ornament)--Everybody has the same everything in London.You see the same coats,the same dinners,the same boiled fowls and mutton,the same cutlets,fish,and cucumbers,the same lumps of Wenham Lake ice,&c.The waiters with white neck-cloths are as like each other everywhere as the peas which they hand round with the ducks of the second course.Can't any one invent anything new?
The only difference between Timmins's dinner and his neighbor's was,that he had hired,as we have said,the greater part of the plate,and that his cowardly conscience magnified faults and disasters of which no one else probably took heed.