by times to prosecute their journey. After the first
compliments had passed, they began to be particular
in their mutual inquiries as to the manner in which
the preceding night had been spent ; for nothing
could be more apparent than that neither had had his
needful repose. " A murrain take this inhospitable
town !" cries Gout, as he limped along with pain and
difficulty : " I never have been so scurvily treated in
all my life. I had hardly got footing in the house of
that rascally fisherman, before I was clapped into a
jack boot, and, tired as I was, carried out by this in-
human fellow into the midst of an eel pond, where I
was kept three miserable hours up to my calf in wa-
ter : judge if I have enjoyed a very refreshing repose.

3



N 58. LOOKER-ON. 85

I never was happy in low company. Give me a gen-
tleman, say I." " And give me," returned the Flea,
rubbing his eyes, and yawning piteously, " give me
any thing rather than a gentleman. No sooner had
I begun to stretch myself between the shoulder-
blades of Monsieur the Mayor, and taken a mouth-
ful of supper, before such a riot was commenced, as
was never heard before in the world : I thought all
the elements were coming together to destroy me.
The bell was rung a dozen times in a minute, and
the room was presently filled with a set of the most
determined assassins that were ever met for the pur-
poses of destruction. After being bruised in every
part of my body, and hunted about for the space of
two hours, I with great difficulty escaped with my
life. My dear friend, we must contrive better in fu-
ture : you are always boasting of your reception
among the great, where you are seated on satin sofas,
and have your toes as much regarded as if they were
the Pope's. In God's name keep these elegancies to
yourself; but give me content and a cottage as long
as I live."

As I reckon the concerns of eating and drinking
to involve a question of the most general conse-
quence to my readers, I design to continue my re-
marks through next Saturday's Paper, in which I
shall touch again on the uses and abuses of good din-
ners, and enter into a farther delineation of my
theory of the comfortable, and the nature and cri-
teria of true hospitality.



VOL. XLIII.



86 t.OOKER-ON. K* 5&



K' .59. SATURDAY, JUNE 29.



S T on alia lib am

Mercede. Ho hat.

On these terms only will I dine,
However excellent your wine.

It was my intention to have offered in this Paper
such rules of hospitality as I thought might help to
ascertain and fix its true character ; but upon re-
flection it occurred to me, that where there is the want
of openness of heart and accuracy of feeling, rules
could be of but little benefit, while they are neces-
sarily bred in the mind where these requisites subsist.
There is frequently a crossness in the decrees of na-
ture, which maintains a pertinacious struggle with
the dispositions of civilised life. Thus she continu-
ally withholds from the rich and lofty that liberal
conformation of mind which is so essential to the dig-
nity of their stations, while she lavishes her finest
qualities on the children of obscurity and want. I
look with no common compassion on those indigent
souls which are poverty-struck amidst piles of riches,
and, encumbered with their own magnificence, move
heavily under the weight of their trappings and in-
signia; condemned, by an in-born obtuseness and
contractedness of feeling, to be without grace in
their gifts, or welcome in their hospitality; to be sor-
didly sumptuous, and penuriously prodigal.

1 have always thought that the worst qualities a



S 59. LOOKKR-ON. 87

dish can have is the sour taste of obligation; and he
who lets it appear that his friendship and affection is
typified in his table, makes his meat cost more to
a spirited guest, than its price in the dearest market.
This poor appreciation of friendship was reprobated
by Juvenal as common among his countrymen.
" Friictus amicitids magna: cibus." And I fear the
present age is not yet corrected of these illiberal no-
tions. Friendship and a good dinner, though things
perfectly consistent, cannot be representative of each
other, and if friendship will not satisfy a man who
comes hungry within our threshold, so neither are
the demands of friendship to be paid with the hospi-
talities of our board.

When I enter the house of one of these wealthy ple-
beians, I am almost frozen at the entrance; and, how-
ever magnificently furnished his parlour may be, how-
ever briskly his fire may burn, there is the gloom of
a prison in my imagination ; and when I place myself
at table, I sit under the sword of Damocles, or, like
the Governor of Barataria, amidst contraband deli-
cacies. The real source of half the prodigality in the
world is not in the excess of generosity, or a consti-
tutional negligence of mind, but in a contractedness
of spirit, that cannot embrace the right and rational
uses of wealth, and a certain disproportion between
the man and his circumstances. Thus we should not
be prodigal, if we knew how to be generous ; and a
man is frequently luxurious or ostentatious, for want
of knowing how to be noble and hospitable.

Demades is a person of great property, and has an
undoubted share of good-nature ; he looks on nothing
with so much abhorrence as the character of a co-
vetous man ; and, rather than be thought to want
hospitality, would make his whole neighbourhood
swim in an ocean of Madeira. Nothing can be more
i2



88 LOOKER-ON. N 59.

costly than his furniture and his liveries; all his ap-
pointments are magnificent; and it is not easy to ex-
cel him in the splendour of his entertainments. But
Demades makes but a sorry figure in the midst of all
his profusion, with which he is evidently overstocked
and encumbered: he lets you perceive in a moment
how high he rates the honour he has done you, and
takes especial care that no part of his magnificence
shall escape your notice, which if it appear to dazzle
you, he cannot help betraying the delight your em-
barrassment affords him, in a smile of exultation. As
this sort of feeling in his guests is considered by him
as the most unequivocal praise that can be offered
to him, he is solicitous to produce it as often as pos-
sible, by playing off his grandeur before men of
broken fortunes and blushing indigence. Thus it is
a rule with him to propose a dozen sorts of wine to a
man who, he knows, has never tasted but two, and is
charmed with his perplexity of choice, and mistakes
of pronunciation. His table, for the same reason, is
filled with foreign dishes, " of exquisitest name," and
of most ambiguous forms ; and you might fancy
yourself at supper with Lucullus, on fattened thrushes
and the cranes of Malta. Most of his dishes have
such formidable names, that few care to risk the ridi-
cule of their host by venturing to ask for them ; and
if they name them rightly, it is ten to one but they
blunder in eating them, which answers equally well
to the facetious entertainer. If any thing is particu-
larly rare and out of season, you are told how much it
cost before you touch it, so that you eat with a sort of
grudge, and with that feeling which disappoints the
relish of the richest dainties. This ham was sent him
from Westphalia; this pickle was prepared from the
receipt of an Italian count; this wine was imported
for him by the Spanish ambassador; the venison he



X u 59. LOOKER-ON. 89

killed himself; the pig was fed with chesnuts and
apples. Every thing has its history : his potatoes
are not common potatoes ; they are the potatoes of
Demades; they have an anecdote belonging to them
touch one and you will hear it. His apartments
are replete with every imaginable contrivance for
elegance and accommodation ; but his manners ren-
der it plain that they are there, not for your conve-
nience, but your admiration. Whatever you touch,
taste, or use, you cannot forget for a moment who is
its owner. Egotism, and a certain stamp of property
and possession, accompany all his acts, and charac-
terise all his phrases. My is a monosyllable never
omitted, and always emphatic: thus it is my doors,
my hinges, my coals, and my carpet. Touch his po-
ker, and you will presently feel that it belongs to
Demades. You may always know in what part of
the room Demades is seated, without the trouble of
looking for him ; for, besides a magisterial cough, his
voice is the loudest in the company; and if he moves,
you are sure it is Demades, for 6ome ceremony at-
tends upon every act, that marks it for his own. He
breathes with a certain emphasis ; he has a motion
more than any man present in using his handker-
chief; there is a supererogatory flourish in his man-
ner of drinking your health ; his glass makes a turn
or two extraordinary in its journey to his lips; and
in seating himself in his chair, the toe of his right
foot describes on the floor a semicircle with the other
that is to say, he does it with a swing that shows
him to be the master of the house, and the chair to
be his own. Thus altogether his entertainment is
the grandest and the meanest, his viands the best and
the worst in the world. I prefer a radish with Mr.
All worth.
To complete my idea of true hospitality, I require
i3



90 LOOKER-ON. N 59.

three constituent qualities generosity of spirit, deli-
cacy of feeling, and a taste in the comfortable. The
two first demand no explanation: those only can com-
prehend them who feel them, and their rules and cri-
teria are supplied from nature and the heart alone.
They have their shrines in some certain bosoms,
where appropriate honours are paid them ; where
they are secretly adored with those rites and mys-
teries which no tongue can express, and which can-
not be revealed to the vulgar and profane. I am
persuaded, however, that these silent feelings of the
breast have a more kindly growth in our own coun-
try than any where besides; and that there runs
through English veins a fuller tide of sensibility, a
more vigorous current of humanity, than foreign
hearts can supply. When I regard the immensity of
our philanthropical institutions, and the vastness of
that capital which circulates in charitable uses, I
look upon this systematic humanity as one of the
great branches of our domestic commerce, as a staple
article of British produce, and as a noble medium of
circulation and employment peculiar to this generous
country. In what respects the comfortable, no na-
tion has ever enjoyed such lively and accurate ideas
as the natives of this island. The word itself, as well
as the idea, is peculiar to my countrymen, and only
an Englishman has a perfect sense of the charm it
expresses. In looking, however, for the origin of this
pre-eminence, we shall meet with some check to the
pride it suggests.

It is the nature of melancholy minds to seek with
earnestness all the relief and consolation which can
be derived from exterior circumstances, and to bor-
row a colour by reflection from the objects about
them, that may help to brighten the complexion of
their thoughts. In that state too of dissatisfaction



N 59. LOOKER-ON. 91

with the way of the world, which is so common with
minds of a delicate and susceptihle make, and a con-
stitutional bias towards melancholy, it is natural to
cast about with solicitude for such resources as can
be procured most independently of others, and, as
the phrase is, " to make much of ourselves ; " by
which I understand an attention to those little points
of order, of neatness, of cleanliness, of disencum-
brance, and of ease, comprehended under the gene-
ral idea of comfort.

It was in this shaded part of the English character
that our notions of comfort first took their rise; born
of necessity, like other arts, and nursed in the cradle
of want and solicitude. But the art of being com-
fortable, however sombre its origin, having once ob-
tained a name, and raised itself upon principles, has
proceeded in the same progress of improvement with
other arts, and undergone a variety of new modifica-
tions in a course of subsequent embellishments. It
has by degrees become a very principal feature of
our national hospitality; insomuch that, where it is
wanting, its loss is not to be redeemed by any waste
of opulence, or wantonness of expense, by any polish
of address, or courtesy of reception.

When thus the comfortable began to be generalised,
and to form itself into some kind of system ; when it
began to be blended with our characteristic hospita-
lity, and to take a higher colour of sociability, that
was considered as but a small part of its excellence
which was circumscribed to ourselves ; the noblest
use of it was implied in the art of dispensing it to
others, while its abuse consisted in that selfish excess
which induces a negligence of other men, or the sa-
crifice of our personal duties and regards.

I do not find in the Greek and Roman authors
any very accurate ideas of the comfortable. From



92 LOOKER-ON. X 59.

barbarous ages the want of repose must necessarily
exclude it, where there is no security of person and
property. In such times, the means of our preserva-
tion are a sufficient object for the employment of our
thoughts. In republican forms of government, do-
mestic refinements can have little place, amidst the
general interest and agitation in the concerns of the
commonwealth ; amidst the fluctuations of power,
and the struggles of ambition. Despotic govern-
ments, by destroying all personal independence and
individual consequence, by discouraging commerce,
and perpetuating poverty, by inspiring alarm and
distrust, by damping the exercise of ingenuity and
invention, by subjugating, contracting, and impo-
verishing men's minds, are still less calculated to
cherish a taste in the comfortable, and to foster the
growth of so perishable an art. In our own country,
where personal freedom conspires with public con-
troul ; in our own country, where it is not forgotten
that a nation is composed of individuals, and that
where individuals are ill at ease, it is idle to talk of
national prosperity; where every man's property is
as secure as his person is free; where there is a go-
vernment strong enough to oppose great fluctuations,
and good enough to make them unnecessary ; where
there are objects to excite activity, and pledges to
inspire security ; where there is wealth to support li-
berality, and liberality to employ wealth in our
own happy country has the comfortable been rightly
understood, generally systematised, and brought to
a dignified perfection.

It must be owned, however, that there are two
Latin authors in whom something like the comfort-
able is to be found. In Tibullus, and particularly
Horace, there are passages very descriptive of those
feelings which enter into its composition; but these



JC59. LOOKER-ON. 93

are rare instances, and are not only invalidated by
other passages in the same writers, containing very
contradictory sentiments, but are found not to cor-
respond with the state of manners at the time in
which they wrote. It was the boast of Augustus,
that he found Rome constructed with brick, but that
he should leave it a city of marble. It is a question,
however, if he left it much improved in its ideas of
comfort, and, indeed, according to the principles
here laid down, the kind of government which suc-
ceeded the reign of that emperor was very unfa-
vourable to the progress of this object.

In those times the comfortable had but an indiffe-
rent chance amidst an excess of luxury, debauchery,
and pride. The multitude of domestic slaves was it-
self an encumbrance sufficient to banish true com-
fort from their houses ; nor do I think I should have
made a comfortable supper with Cicero and Pompey,
in the Apollo of Lucullus. There is but little either
of true elegance or delicacy in Petronius, and surely
not enough to balance against the testimony of Ta-
citus, and the invectives of Juvenal. If we believe
either their gravest poet or most faithful historian,
the manners of the latter Romans were entirely ex-
clusive of every principle on which the comfortable
is founded. What ideas were entertained by them
analogous to this subject were in general borrowed
from the philosophy of Epicurus, which a little ex-
amination will convince us comprehended only that
negative and spurious description of it which consists
in a certain apathy and nonchalance, an indecorous
ease, and a selfish indolence.

The doctrines of Lucretius breathe no very com-
fortable spirit to a sensible mind; and even were
they of force to release us from all sense of constraint
and obligation, they would resign us over to a dull



4 LOOKER-ON. N 59.

and mechanical existence, to a torpid leisure, and
obtuse indifference. There are some ideas of snug-
ness in the four following lines of Tibullus ; but let
it be remembered that snugness is but a part of the
comfortable, and that the general turn of thought
throughout the elegy from which these lines are
taken is such as does not harmonise at all with the
description which has been given in tlus Paper of
the subject before us.

Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem,
Et dominam tenero continuisse sinu !
Aut gelidas hybemus aquas cum fuderit auster,
Sccurum somnos, imbre juvante, sequi!

In the sixth Satire of the first book, and the sixth
of the second, are found those ideas of Horace which
come nearest to the true description of the comfort-
able ; but the libertine and lazy notions of happiness
which are dispersed through his Odes are a proof
that he had formed no solid system of comfort in his
mind, and throw over his sober paroxysms a shade
of insincerity. His sentiments, too, on this head, are
generally more expressive of the snug, than the com-
fortable, and are such as could not easily enter into
social life: and when he takes in the social idea, he
degrades it with so much grossness and profligacy,
that the dignity of true comfort expires in debauch-
ery. I will not admit that to be the comfortable in
which I do not recognise the hospitable; nor do I set
any price upon that hospitality from which the com-
fortable is excluded. As far as snugness goes, I know
not a more delightful picture than that which Thom-
son has given us in his Winter.

Now all amid the rigours of the year,
In the wild depth of winter, while without
The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat
.Between the groaning forest and the shore.



N 59* LOOKER-ON. 95

Beat by a boundless multitude of waves,
A rural, shelter'd, solitary scene ;
Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join
To cheer the gloom ; there studious let me sit.

As I have already observed that in my notion of*
hospitality I include the comfortable, there is an ob-
vious reason for my silence about the hospitality of
the barbarous ages. The virtues of those times, those
virtues which have their birth in trouble, misery, and
disorganization ; those virtues which spring out of a
vicious constitution of human affairs, I regard with
some pleasure, as proofs that the mind of man can-
not be dismantled of all its distinctions and attri-
butes, under any depression of circumstances ; but
as common sense cannot desire a revival of those
situations which inspired those exertions, our busi-
ness is only with such qualities and virtues as belong
to man in his improved nature, as are answerable to
his present wants, and accommodated to the habits
and occasions of civil society. Such hospitality as
was exercised in those early times cannot find a
place in the present system, where the same objects
and the same opportunities do no longer occur.

New arrangements and dispositions of life establish
a new kind of intercourse between man and man, and
demand a new modification of hospitality ; in the
mean time charity springs up in the place of the old ;
so that in fact the same measure of virtue subsists,
under different denominations. There is, however,
an instance of hospitality recorded in Lucian, that
does honour to an early period of Athenian history,
and which has always afforded me a peculiar pleasure
in the perusal. The anecdote to which I allude is
the introduction of the Scythian Anacharsis to Solon,
by Toxaris his countryman. " Toxaris then went
up to Solon: ' I have brought you,' said he ' a valu-



96 LOOKER-ON. N" 59.

able present ; a stranger who stands in need of your
friendship and protection; a Scythian by birth, who
has left his country and family, to live with us, and
see the wonders of Greece. I would fain point out
to him the shortest way of being acquainted with
every thing and every body worth knowing here ;
and for this purpose, I have brought him to you. If
I have any knowledge of Solon, I may presume he
will treat him hospitably, pay him public honours,
and adopt him as a citizen of Greece.

" ' And now, Anacharsis, you have seen Solon,
and in him every thing. He is Athens, he is Greece.
You are no longer a stranger here. All men know,
all men love you. So much depends upon this good
old man. Living with him, you will soon forget
Scythia.' "

How much Solon was pleased with the present
which Toxaris had made him was soon proved by
the strict friendship which was formed between
them, and the profit which in the sequel Anacharsis
derived from his services and instructions.



No 60. LOOKER-ON. 9Y



N 60. SATURDAY, JULY 6-



Solutis gratia zonis. Horat.

Graceful with case, and loose without neglect,
With caution bold, without constraint correct,
Thus let translation hold that mellow'd mean,
A strait-lac'd prude and arrant romp between.

It is the peculiar hardship of my undertaking, that
while Homer was sometimes allowed to sleep, I can
at no time take a nap, without great danger to the in-
terests of my Paper ; unless, indeed, I have the luck
to dream of something that may turn to the profit
of my readers. Those authors who are judged of in
the gross have a much better chance with the public.
In the scope of a volume, they may sleep through a
dozen pages, provided they awake to some purpose at
last. It is thus that, in a very extensive prospect, a
few barren spots serve to brighten the effect of the
rest ; but, in an acre of garden -ground, we require
throughout a rich and cultivated appearance. The
privilege, however, which I enjoy, of flying from one
subject to another, as it may suit the occasional com-
plexion of my thoughts, I consider as a great relief
to the severity of this duty ; for, while in an almost
unbounded tract of country we are at liberty to fix
upon the happiest spots, we have certainly less to
plead in excuse for our miscarriages.

I am now going to say something on the subject
of translation, for which I should feel it necessary to
offer no further apology to my readers, than that it

VOL. XLIII. K



8 LOOKER-ON. N 60.

happens to come into my head, were it not for the
advantage of my paper to place before them the cir-
cumstance which put me upon this consideration.
The other day, during my last visit to London, as I
was reading the paper in the coffee-house, a person,
that had very much the appearance of a compositor,
entered the room, and put into my hands a packet di-
rected to Simon Olive-Branch. Upon opening it, I
found it to contain proposals for a new translation of
the yEneid of Virgil, together with one or two speci-
mens, on which, with some compliment to the clear-
ness of my judgement, I was requested to pronounce
my opinion. As I was not given to understand where
1 might find the author, or how I might privately
convey to him my sentiments, I concluded him to be
among my readers, and that, accordingly, he chose to
be conversed with through the channel of my paper.
I am pleased with this mode of consulting me, and
confess I would always choose rather, on a grave sub-
ject, to converse with my pen than with my lips ;
for, as it is my custom to be long in collecting myself,
before I can deliver my thoughts with ease, I have
no chance in an oral contest with the declaimers of
the present hour.

The literary present, of which I have been speak*
ing, was the more agreeable to me, as, on the princi-
ples on which I reason, in regard to the general cha-
racter of any particular period, it exhibits, as far as
it goes, a testimony to the honour of the times ; for
I consider that a spirit and taste in poetical labours,
as long as they hold a place in our minds, are a proof
that we are not yet abandoned by that vigorous
relish, and that keen sensibility, which belong to a
lively and sound organization, and which, in the