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,