Let the jack go swiftly round,
       Let me have it nicely brown' d.

     On the table spread the cloth,
       Let the knives be sharp and clean,
     Pickles get and salad both,
       Let them each be fresh and green;
     Now small beer, good ale and wine,
       O ye gods, how I shall dine!

Mr. Gay the poet—that plump good-natured
man whom everybody loved—also tried his hand
at the same branch of literature. He sent some
portly, clerical, not unappreciative, friend of his,
this recipe to stew a knuckle of veal:

Take a knuckle of veal,
You may buy it or steal,
In a few pieces cut it,
In a stewing-pan put it;
Salt, pepper, and mace
Must season this knuckle.
Then what's joined to a place (salary)
With other herbs muckle
That which killed King Will (Sorrel, his horse),
And what never stands still (time),
Which much you will mend if
Both spinage and endive
And lettuce and beet
With marygold meet.
Put no water at all,
For it maketh things small,
Which, lest it should happen,
A close cover clap on,
Put this pot of Wood's metal
In a boiling hot kettle,
And there let it be
(Mark the doctrine I teach)
About—let me see—
Thrice as long as you preach;
And skimming the fat off,
Say grace with your hat off,
Oh, then with what rapture
Will it fill dean and chapter!

Both these sets of verse probably, (certainly
the latter) were written to friends, and have
all the careless freshness and ease that might
be expected. Mr. Sydney Smith wrote a recipe
for a winter salad, which is a highly finished
piece of Popian verse. It begins:

   Two large potatoes passed through kitchen sieve
   Unwonted softness to the salad give.

It contains some weak lines, and some which
are exquisitely worded.

These are two of the best:

   Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
   And, scarce suspected, animate the whole.

And it ends with a verse of admirable and
heroic grandiloquence:

   Serenely full the epicure may say,
   Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day.

It has been often disputed whether a
continued diet of beef or of mutton would soonest
grow intolerable. We give our black ball with
the firmness of an ancient Roman, against beef.
The more mannered a meat is, the sooner it
grows wearisome. Do we not all remember
how the old indentures of Newcastle apprentices
always contained a clause limiting the
number of salmon dinners? The poor lads would
have pined away upon a delicacy that never
changed. But in spite of this fact, Eton boys, who
are very injudiciously fed too often on mutton,
always delight in that meat in after life, which
seems to us a proof of its untiring savour and
gusto. Mutton, Ude says, is more frequently
served at dinner than any other dish, not that
it is half as fine flavoured as kid or fawn,
but then it is our adopted meat, and can be
so easily disguised and transformed. The most
imperial way of serving up lamb for a very
great dinner, where a central and lordly dish is
required, is thus given, and under a most quaint
title, by Lord Sefton's chef. " A ROAST BEEF OF
LAMB!" he styleth it. " Take the saddle and the
two legs of a lamb, cut out of the middle of each
leg a small rosette, which is to be larded, as
also the fillets. Roast the whole, and glaze the
larded parts of a good colour. Serve up with
gravy (mint sauce in a boat), or in the French
manner, with maître d'hôtel sauce i.e. béchamel
sauce, fresh butter, parsley, salt, pepper, and
lemon-juice."

And now with all the promptitude of our
nature, to a financial question. Does the price
of meat, as charged to a diner at a London
eating-house, bear any faint relation to the
original cost price of the joint? We determined
to benefit the world by an experiment that
would at once settle this question. We directed
our cook to buy a sirloin of beef weighing eight
pounds: cost, at tenpence a pound, six shillings
and eightpence. This was cooked. When it
was cold we set to work, and, in the true spirit
of the philanthropist, cut it into what in
dining-rooms they call " plates." We found that
it cut into eighteen fair plates, which (if the
tavern-keeper did not get the beef cheaper than
we did) would yield a profit of two shillings and
fourpence only a far less profit, we confess,
than we had expected.

As we have in our comparison of beef and
mutton perhaps rather run down our ancient
and truly English friend beef, and elevated
mutton at its expense, let us make the amende
honorable by a final fact which redounds to the
credit of the national dish. The late Duke
of Norfolk used seldom to eat less than
three or four steaks at the club over which
he often presided. The great man always
used to assert that every steak had a
physiognomy of its own; and that although the
club dinners always consisted of steaks, yet
that no dinner ever quite resembled its
predecessor. One night, the ox was from some
special county; another night, the cook was in
good humour, and excelled himself; a third
time, the meat had been kept to the very hour,
and was done to the very turn. He also
considered that in the middle of the rump " there
lurked a fifth essence, the perfect ideal of tenderness
and flavour." For this he always tarried
and recruited his forces, fortified by his second
bottle of port. It was reported by the
scandalous that the duke always preceded these
dinners at the " Steaks" by a secret preliminary
dish of fish. They say it was a grand sight to