provides the wines, I am told, and it might be expected that they should
be particularly good,--at least, those which improve by age, for a
quarter of a century should be only a moderate age for wine from the
cellars of centuries-long institutions, like a corporate borough. Each
Mayor might lay in a supply of the best vintage he could find, and trust
his good name to posterity to the credit of that wine; and so he would be
kindly and warmly remembered long after his own nose had lost its
rubicundity. In point of fact, the wines seem to be good, but not
remarkable. The dinner was good, and very handsomely served, with
attendance enough, both in the hall below--where the door was wide open
at the appointed hour, notwithstanding the cold--and at table; some
being in the rich livery of the borough, and some in plain clothes.
Servants, too, were stationed at various points from the hall to the
reception-room; and the last one shouted forth the name of the entering
guest. There were, I should think, about fifty guests at this dinner.
Two bishops were present. The Bishops of Chester and New South Wales,
dressed in a kind of long tunics, with black breeches and silk stockings,
insomuch that I first fancied they were Catholics. Also Dr. McNeil, in a
stiff-collared coat, looking more like a general than a divine. There
were two officers in blue uniforms; and all the rest of us were in black,
with only two white waistcoats,--my own being one,--and a rare sprinkling
of white cravats. How hideously a man looks in them! I should like to
have seen such assemblages as must have gathered in that reception-room,
and walked with stately tread to the dining-hall, in times past, the
Mayor and other civic dignitaries in their robes, noblemen in their state
dresses, the Consul in his olive-leaf embroidery, everybody in some sort
of bedizenment,--and then the dinner would have been a magnificent
spectacle, worthy of the gilded hall, the rich table-service, and the
powdered and gold-laced servitors. At a former dinner I remember seeing
a gentleman in small-clothes, with a dress-sword; but all formalities of