Here is one of the Dean of Down's
bills of fare:-
Turkeys endove
Boyled leg of mutton
Greens, etc.
Soup
Plum Pudding
Roast loin of veal
Venison pasty
Partridge
Sweetbreads
Collared Pig
Creamed apple tart
Crabs
Fricassee of eggs
Pigeons
No dessert to be had.
Although there is no mention of beverages we may be sure that this
array of viands was not eaten dry, but was washed down with a
plentiful variety of wines and liquors.
The hosts, either in Dublin or London, who numbered among their
dinner guests such Irishmen as Sheridan or Lysaght, Mangan or Lever,
Curran or Lover, Father Prout or Dean Swift, had as great a feast of
wit and repartee as one will be apt soon to hear again; although it
must have been Lever or Lover who furnished the cream of Irish
humour, and Father Prout and Swift the curds.
If you are fortunate enough to be bidden to the right houses in
Ireland to-day, you will have as much good talk as you are likely to
listen to anywhere else in this degenerate age, which has mostly
forgotten how to converse in learning to chat; and any one who goes
to the Spring Show at Ball's Bridge, or to the Punchestown or
Leopardstown races, or to the Dublin horse show, will have to
confess that the Irishwomen can dispute the palm with any nation.
'Light on their feet now they passed me and sped,
Give you me word, give you me word,
Every girl wid a turn o' the head
Just like a bird, just like a bird;
And the lashes so thick round their beautiful eyes
Shinin' to tell you it's fair time o' day wid them,
Back in me heart wid a kind of surprise,
I think how the Irish girls has the way wid them!'
Their charm is made up of beautiful eyes and lashes, lustre of hair,
poise of head, shapeliness of form, vivacity and coquetry; and there
is a matchless grace in the way they wear the 'whatever,' be it the
chiffons of the fashionable dame, or the shawl of the country
colleen, who can draw the two corners of that faded article of
apparel shyly over her lips and look out from under it with a pair
of luminous grey eyes in a manner that is fairly 'disthractin'.
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