How should he know better, poor benighted creature; or she, dear
good soul that she is? If they would have a leg-of-mutton and
an apple-pudding, and a glass of sherry and port (or simple
brandy-and-water called by its own name) after dinner, all would be very
well; but they must shine, they must dine as their neighbors. There
is no difference in the style of dinners in London; people with five
hundred a year treat you exactly as those of five thousand. They WILL
have their Moselle or hock, their fatal side-dishes brought in the green
trays from the pastry-cook's.

Well, there is no harm done; not as regards the dinner-givers at least,
though the dinner-eaters may have to suffer somewhat; it only shows
that the former are hospitably inclined, and wish to do the very best in
their power,--good honest fellows! If they do wrong, how can they help
it? they know no better.

And now, is it not as clear as the sun at noonday, that A WANT exists
in London for a superintendent of the table--a gastronomic agent--a
dinner-master, as I have called him before? A man of such a profession
would be a metropolitan benefit; hundreds of thousands of people of the
respectable sort, people in white waistcoats, would thank him daily.
Calculate how many dinners are given in the City of London, and
calculate the numbers of benedictions that "the Agency" might win.

And as no doubt the observant man of the world has remarked that the
freeborn Englishman of the respectable class is, of all others, the most
slavish and truckling to a lord; that there is no fly-blown peer but he
is pleased to have him at his table, proud beyond measure to call him
by his surname (without the lordly prefix); and that those lords whom he