The dinners were conducted on primitive principles. Except in great houses, where the meat and game were carved by the butler, everything was carved on the table. The host sat behind the haunch of mutton, and ‘helped’ with zeal; the guests took the ducks, the turkey, the hare, and the fowls, and did their part, conscious of critical eyes. A dinner was a terrible ordeal for a young man who, perhaps, found himself called upon to dissect a pair of ducks. He took up the knife with burning cheeks and perspiring nose; now, at last, an impostor, one who knew not the ways of polite society, would be discovered; he began to feel for the joints, while the cold eyes of his hostess gazed reproachfully upon him--ladies, in those days, knew good carving, and could carve for themselves. Perhaps he had, with a ghastly grin, to confess that he could not find those joints. Then the dish was removed and given to another guest, a horribly self-reliant creature, who laughed and talked while he dexterously sliced the breast and cut off the legs. If, in his agony, the poor wretch would take refuge in the bottle, he had to wait until some one invited him to take wine--horrible tyranny! The dinner-table was ornamented with a great épergne of silver or glass; after dinner the cloth was removed, showing the table, deep in colour, lustrous, well waxed; and the gentlemen began real business with the bottle after the ladies had gone. [Illustration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY] Very little need be said about the Court. It was then in the hands of a few families. It had no connection at all with the life of the country, which went on as if there were no Court at all. It is strange that in these fifty years of change the Court should have altered so little. Now, as then, the Court neither attracts, nor attempts to attract, any of the leaders in Art, Science, or Literature. Now, as then, the Court is a thing apart from the life of the country. For the best class of all, those who are continually advancing the country in science, or keeping alight the sacred lamp of letters, who are its scholars, architects, engineers, artists, poets, authors, journalists, who are the merchant adventurers of modern times, who are the preachers and teachers, the Court simply does not exist. One states the fact without comment. But it should be stated, and it should be clearly understood. _The whole of those men who in this generation maintain the greatness of our country in the ways where alone greatness is desirable or memorable, except in arms, the only men of this generation whose memories will live and adorn the Victorian era, are strangers to the Court._ It seems a great pity. An ideal Court should be the centre of everything--Art, Letters, Science, all.