y make believe to dine. _They_ dine here,
Lord bless you! They go to some of the swell clubs, or else to some
grand dinner-party. You see their names in the _Morning Post_ at all the
fine parties in London. They dine! They won't dine these two hours, I
dare say.' 'But why should you like to mess with them, if they don't
eat any dinner?' Pen asked, still puzzled. 'There's plenty, isn't
there?' 'How green you are,' said Lowton. 'Excuse me, but you are green!
They don't drink any wine, don't you see, and a fellow gets the bottle
to himself, if he likes it, when he messes with those three chaps.
That's why Corkoran got in with them.'"

Such were dinners at the Temple in Thackeray's time, and such they were
in mine. My legal studies were superintended by my friend Mr. J. S. Fox,
now K.C., and Recorder of Sheffield. Should this book ever fall under
his learned eye, I should be interested to know if he has ever completed
the erudite work which in those distant days he contemplated
undertaking,

"Tell a Lie and Stick to it:"
A Treatise on the Law of Estoppel.

But this is a digression.

Before I leave London as it was when first I dwelt in it, I ought to
recall some of the eminent persons who adorned it. Lord Beaconsfield was
at the zenith of his power and popularity. Mr. Gladstone, though the
crowning triumph of 1880 was not far off, was so unpopular in Society
that I was asked to meet him at a dinner as a favour to the hostess, who
found it difficult to collect a party when he was dining. Lord Salisbury
had just emerged from a seven years' retirement, and was beginning to
play for the Premiership. Mr. Chamberlain was spoken of with a kind of
awe, as a desperate demagogue longing to head a revolution; and Lord
Randolph Churchill was hardly known outside the Turf Club.

Law was presided over, as I have already said, by the brilliant
Cockburn, and the mellifluous Coleridge was palpably preparing to
succeed him. People whispered wonders about Charles Bowen; and Henry
James and Charles Russell had established their positions. In the
hierarchy of Medicine there were several leaders. Jenner ruled his
patients by terror; Gull by tact, and Andrew Clark by religious
mysticism. To me, complaining of dyspepsia, he prescribed a diet with
the Pauline formula: "I seek to impose a yoke upon you, that you may be
truly free." In the chief seat of the Church sat Archbishop Tait, the
most dignified prelate whom I have ever