administration is in the hands of those foreigners who take our money
for learning English of us. But there is no such range of Italian and
French and German restaurants in London as in New York, and of what
there are none are at once so cheap and so good as ours. The cheaper
restaurants are apt to be English, sincere in material, but heavy and
unattractive in expression; in everything culinary the island touch
seems hopelessly inartistic. One Sunday morning, far from home, when the
lunch came prematurely, we found all the English eating-houses devoutly
shut, and our wicked hope was in a little Italian _trattoria_ which
opened its doors to the alien air with some such artificial effect as an
orange-tree in a tub might expand its blossoms. There was a strictly
English company within, and the lunch was to the English taste, but the
touch was as Latin as it could have been by the Arno or the Tiber or on
the Riva degli Schiavoni.

At the great restaurants, where one may see fashion lunching, the
kitchen seemed of an equal inspiration with Sherry's or Delmonico's, but
the _entourage_ was less oppressively glaring, and the service had
more moments of effacing itself, and allowing one to feel oneself a
principal part of the drama. That is often the case with us in the
simpler sort of eating-houses, where it is the neat hand of Phyllis that
serves rather than that of the white-aproned or dress-coated Strephon of
either color or any nationality. My profoundest and distinctest
impression of Phyllidian service is from a delightful lunch which I had
one golden noonday in that famous and beautiful house, Crosby Place,
Bishopsgate, which remains of much the perpendicular Gothic state in
which Sir John Crosby proudly built it from his grocer's and woolman's
gains in 1466. It had afterwards added to it the glory of lodging
Richard III., who, both as protector and as sovereign-prince made
appointments there, in Shakespeare's tragedy of him, for the Lady Anne,