Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/93

90 the guests had reached the Omega. The soup was brought back. H. averred that it was moot fortunate for him; he had been kept talking, and had not eaten half a dinner; so he started fresh with me, and went bona fide through, covering me with his ægis as I run my gauntlet through the courses. The age of chivalry is not past. Match this deed of courtesy, if you can, from the lives of the preux chevaliersknights [sic], taken from their sunrising to their sunsetting. This dinner, like many other things in life, was bitter in its experience and sweet in its remembrance.

Our pleasantest dinner, I think, was at K.'s; he who gave us "the ticket for six" to his breakfast; I knew him before coming here as the friend of many of our friends, and the author of very charming published poetry. He seems to me the personification of the English gentleman of Addison's time, "a heart of gold." I do not know that he is celebrated for wit, but I have heard more clever things from him than from any one else in London. No, it is not wit; in that I think there is a drop—it may not be more, but a drop—a tang of bitterness; but wit's innocent, sportive, and most lovely child, humour—the infant Bacchus among the higher divinities. K.'s manners are those of a man who has all the world's conventionalities at bis command, and yet whose nature is too strong for them, so that the stream of humanity comes gushing fresh from its fountain, without heeding the prescribed channels, watermarks and barriers that custom and fashion