peeches, conjectures about office,
speculations on impending elections, and above all, that heinous subject
on which enormous fibs are ever told, the registration. There are,
however, occasional glimpses in their talk which would seem to intimate
that they have another life outside the Houses of Parliament. But that
extenuating circumstance does not apply to the sporting dinner. There
they begin with odds and handicaps, and end with handicaps and odds, and
it is doubtful whether it ever occurs to any one present, that there
is any other existing combination of atoms than odds and handicaps.
A dinner of wits is proverbially a place of silence; and the envy and
hatred which all literary men really feel for each other, especially
when they are exchanging dedications of mutual affection, always ensure,
in such assemblies, the agreeable presence of a general feeling of
painful constraint. If a good thing occurs to a guest, he will not
express it, lest his neighbour, who is publishing a novel in numbers,
shall appropriate it next month, or he himself, who has the same
responsibility of production, be deprived of its legitimate appearance.
Those who desire to learn something of the manoeuvres at the Russian and
Prussian reviews, or the last rumour at Aldershot or the military clubs,
will know where to find this feast of reason. The flow of soul in these
male festivals is perhaps, on the whole, more genial when found in a
society of young gentlemen, graduates of the Turf and the Marlborough,
and guided in their benignant studies by the gentle experience and the
mild wisdom of White's. The startling scandal, the rattling anecdote,
the astounding leaps, and the amazing shots, afford for the moment a
somewhat pleasing distraction, but when it is discovered that all these
habitual flim-flams are, in general, the airy creatures of inaccuracy
and exaggeration--that the scandal is not true, the anecdote has no
foundation, and that the feats and skill and strength are invested with
the organic weakness of tradition, the vagaries lose something of the
charm of novelty, and are almost as insipid as claret from which the
bouquet has evaporated.

The male dinners of Mr. Bertie Tremaine were an exception to the general
reputation of such meetings. They were never dull. In the first place,
though to be known at least by reputation was an indispensable condition
of being present, he brought different classes together, and this, at
least for o