or
to any record of antiquity. It is true, no trace of wit is going to be
here preserved, for the flashes were too general, and what is the
critical sagacity of a Scaliger compared to our chairman? Ancients
believe it! We were not dead drunk, and therefore lie quiet under the
table for once, and let a few moderns be uppermost."

The following chronicle of the third dinner and second anniversary
records an interesting little personal incident:--

"After Lord Spencer left the chair, it was taken, I believe, by Mr
Heber, who kept it up to a late hour,--Mr Dodd very volatile and
somewhat singular, at the same time quite novel, in amusing the company
with Robin Hood ditties and similar productions. I give this on after
report, having left the room very early from severe attack of sickness,
which appeared to originate in some vile compound partook of at
dinner."]

When Dibdin protested against the publication of this record, he
described it a great deal too attractively when he called it "the
concoction of one in his gayer and unsuspecting moments--the repository
of private confidential communications--a mere memorandum-book of what
had passed at convivial meetings, and in which 'winged words' and flying
notes of merry gentlemen and friends were obviously incorporated." No!
certainly wings and flying are not the ideas that naturally associate
with the historian of the Roxburghe, although, in one instance, the
dinner is sketched off in the following epigrammatic sentence, which
startles the reader like a plover starting up in a dreary moor:
"Twenty-one members met joyfully, dined comfortably, challenged eagerly,
tippled prettily, divided regretfully, and paid the bill most
cheerfully." On another occasion the historian's enthusiasm was too
expansive to be confined to plain prose, and he inflated it in lyric
verse:--

"Brave was the banquet, the red red juice,
Hilarity's gift sublime,
Invoking the heart to kindred use,
And bright'ning halo of time."

This, and a quantity of additional matter of like kind, was good fun to
the scorners, and, whether any of the unskilful laughed at it, scarcely
made even the judicious grieve, for they thought that those who had
embarked in such pompous follies deserved the lash unconsciously
administered to them in his blunders by an unhappy member of their own
order.

In fact, however, this was the youthful giant sowing his wild oats.
Along with them there lay also,