occasions, whereas it is strictly and literally true that not a single
gala takes place in the City without the circulating medium
percolating through every warehouse, magazine, shop, and stall within
the Bills of Mortality. Independently of this consideration, these
civic feasts are symbols of those great old Saxon institutions which
have made England the home and guardian of liberty. Our hearty and
large-souled ancestors never dreamed of weighing every miserable coin,
or of stinting the measure of their generous wines or foaming ale.
They gave not less to the poor because they delighted to honour the
brave and good, or to greet one another in the loving cup. Unlike the
coldly intellectual reformers and theorists of the present day, they
did not consider the gaol and the workhouse as the only asylums for
poverty. They were men of feeling and kindly impulse, not of abstract
principles. They gave their cheerful alms to the mendicants, and
spread a bounteous board for their neighbours. Fools that they were!
How is it that they did not recognize the mendicant to be an impostor
and a drone, or bethink them that the money with which they feasted
their neighbour might have purchased a field? It was because they were
warm-hearted, warm-blooded men, and not mere calculating machines.
They were glorious creatures, with thews and sinews, and they made
their country great and powerful among the nations of the world; but
they never paused to denounce the cost of a dinner, or to grudge a
flowing bowl to their kinsfolk and neighbours. Besides, our Pharisees
of reform conveniently forget that the copious banquets at which they
turn up their envious eyes are mostly defrayed from private funds.
The sheriffs, for instance, derive no aid from public moneys; their own
fortunes provide the means for handsomely entertaining friends and
strangers, and for dispensing open-handed charity. The Lord Mayor
himself almost invariably draws upon his own resources to a large
amount, in order to maintain the ancient reputation and actual present