Fifty years had passed, and a Ball Supper was (and for all I know may still be) much the same. "The bright moments flew on. Suddenly there was a mysterious silence in the hall, followed by a kind of suppressed stir. Every one seemed to be speaking with bated breath, or, if moving, walking on tiptoe. It was the supper-hour-- 'Soft hour which wakes the wish and melts the heart.' 'What a perfect family!' exclaimed Hugo Bohun as he extracted a couple of fat little birds from their bed of aspic jelly. 'Everything they do in such perfect taste! How safe you were here to have ortolans for supper!'" But, after all, Ball Suppers are frivolities, and College Suppers scarcely more serious; although a modern bard has endeavoured to give them a classical sanction by making young Horace at the University of Athens thus address himself to his new acquaintance Balbus:-- "A friend has sent me half-a-dozen brace Of thrush and blackbird from a moor in Thrace. These we will have for supper, with a dish Of lobster-patties and a cuttle-fish." And we may be sure that a meal where Horace was host was not unaccompanied by wine and song. But the Supper which I have in mind is the substantial meal which, during the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, formed the nightly complement to the comparatively early dinner. "High Tea" such as Dickens loved and described--"Bagman's Tea," as I was taught to call it,--became popular as tea became cheaper. You dined, say, at one, and drank tea (and ate accompaniments) at seven. But Supper, eaten at nine or ten o'clock, was a more substantial affair, and the poison of Tea, so much deprecated by our modern Coroners, was never suffered to pollute it. In the account of a supper in 1770 I have read this exhilarating item: "A turtle was sent as a Present to the Company and dress'd in a very high _Gout_, after the West Indian manner;" and such a dish, eaten at bedtime, of course required vinous assistance. A forefather of my own noted in his diary for 1788, "The man who superintends Mrs. Cazalan's of New Cavendish Street suppers has a salary of £100 a year for his trouble;" and one may rest assured that Mrs. Cazalan's guests drank something more exhilarating than tea at her famous supper-table. "Guy Mannering" depicts the habits of Scotch Society at the close of the eighteenth century; and Counsellor Pleydell, coming hungry from a journey, suggests that a brace of wild ducks should be added to the "light family supper." These he ate "without prejudice to a subsequent tart," and with these viands he drank ale and Burgundy, moralizing thus: "I love the _Coena_, the supper of the ancients, the pleasant meal and social glass that washes out of one's mind the cobwebs that business or gloom have been spinning in our brains all day." On the point of precedent, the Counsellor, or rather Sir Walter Scott, is at issue with Lord John Russell, who said,