The paltry jargon of the marble mart,
Where pedantry gulls folly: we have eyes."


We are told by the members of the silver-fork school, that no tale of
fiction can be complete unless it embody the description of a dinner.
Let us, therefore, shutting from our view that white-limbed gum-tree,
and dismissing from our table tea and damper, [Footnote: _Damper_.
Bushman's fare--unleavened bread] call on memory's fading powers, and
feast once more with the rich, the munificent, the intellectual
Belliston Graeme.

Dinner! immortal faculty of eating! to what glorious sense or
pre-eminent passion dost thou not contribute? Is not love half fed by
thy attractions? Beams ever the eye of lover more bright than when,
after gazing with enraptured glance at the coveted haunch, whose fat--a
pure white; whose lean--a rich brown--invitingly await the assault. When
doth lover's eye sparkle more, than when, at such a moment, it lights on
the features of the loved fair one? Is not the supper quadrille the most
dangerous and the dearest of all?

Cherished venison! delicate white soup! spare young susceptible bosoms!
Again we ask, is not dinner the very aliment of friendship? the hinge on
which it turns? Does a man's heart expand to you ere you have returned
his dinner? It would be folly to assert it. Cabinet dinners--corporation
dinners--election dinners--and vestry dinners--and rail-road
dinners--we pass by these things, and triumphantly ask--does not _the_
Ship par excellence--the Ship of Greenwich--annually assemble under its
revered roof the luminaries of the nation? Oh, whitebait! called so
early to your last account! a tear is all we give, but it flows