PARK LODGE, GREENWICH, _Wednesday [end of November 1830]._ DEAREST THERESA, I shall take it as a great compliment being asked to dinner anywhere by anybody, but as a matter of choice I should prefer dining with the Lord Mayor habitually--not from any gourmandise, I beg to mention, for in my days I never saw such uneatable food. The soup had been saved, I imagine, from the day that the King did _not_ dine at the Guildhall, and consequently a little salt had been thrown in every day just to preserve it. The preservation had been effected, but how many pounds of salt had been used it is difficult to guess. Nobody offered me anything else but a slice of half-cold peacock, whose tail feathers were still spread and growing. However, though as mere dinner it was a failure, the flow of soul was prodigious. We were so unanimous, so fond of each other. Dear Don Key[360] himself in such spirits, and Mrs. Key and all the small bunch of Keys so polite and attentive. “What curious creatures we are,” as that old _Machy_ in _Destiny_[361] (have you read it?) keeps observing; and all the forms of civic life are more curious than the rest. The Lady Mayoress receives all her guests without stirring from her chair, though it is obvious from her old habit of attending to her shop that she is dying to get up to _serve_ them all. The Lord Mayor walks in to dinner before all his visitors, leaving the Duke of Sussex,[362] etc., to take care of themselves, and then he and his wife sit by each other without the relief of a third person. Their domestic felicity has, I fear, received a check for life, because every time Key got up to speak his sword hitched in his wife’s blonde, which, of course, was very unpleasant. It made the blonde all fuzzy. However, he is a good Lord Mayor, and so polite to His Majesty’s Ministers that they were some of them in agonies of fright he was going to propose all their healths individually, and it was only prevented by Lord Grey’s[363] getting up from dinner before one-third of the toasts had been given. That sort of audience is very alarming, I believe. Lord Grey said he never felt so frightened in his life, and Lord Lansdowne, whom I sat next to, told me that if his health came next, he had not an idea what was to be done. He felt sure he could not say a word. I quite understood it. An audience of ladies whom they all knew well, and who were all likely to laugh, besides 500 other people all staring at them as a show, must be rather trying.