Alderman Mechi deserves a niche among these civic worthies, by the superior enterprise of his career. He is the son of a citizen of Bologna, was brought to England by his father, and, obtaining a clerkship in a house in the Newfoundland trade, he remained there eleven years. Whilst in this service, he turned the hour allowed for dinner to profitable account by selling, among his friends and acquaintance in the City, a small and inexpensive article, of which he had bought the patent. Mainly by these exertions, when in his twenty-fifth year, he commenced business as a cutler, with the success we have already intimated. He then studied how to remedy the defects of English farming by scientific processes; rose to be Sheriff and an Alderman; took an active part in the affairs of the Society of Arts, and was specially sent by her Majesty’s Government to the Industrial Exhibition at Paris in 1854. Addison, we know, says, “the City has always been the province for satire; and the wits of King Charles’s time jested upon nothing else during his whole reign.” Nevertheless, “the Merry Monarch” dined with the citizens no fewer than nine times in their Guildhall. Here also Whittington had feasted Henry V. and his Queen, when he threw the King’s bonds for 60,000_l._ into a fire of spice-wood. But a still more memorable feast was that in 1497, when at the table of the Lord Mayor, William Purchase, Erasmus first met Sir Thomas More; whence sprung one of the most interesting friendships in literary history. It has been well said that a dinner lubricates business; and it does more—it fosters charity and good works. The annual banquet on Lord-Mayor’s-day, in the Guildhall, is mostly to be viewed as a festival of civic state: “the loving-cup and the barons of beef carrying the mind back to medieval times and manners.”[111] The banquets at the Mansion House—one of the most palatial edifices in the kingdom—are of a like stately description; and for the more direct benefits of civic festivity we must look to the Ward dinners, and the meetings of public officers at table, when they forget the cares and heartburnings incident to every grade of office, and enjoy with the feast the higher luxury of doing good. --------------------- Footnote 109: Birch excelled in his art; and his _cuisine_ was unrivalled in the City. Kitchiner immortalised his soups in print, and the Mansion-House banquets and Court dinners of the Companies attested the alderman’s practical skill in his business. The shop in Cornhill was established in the reign of King George I. by Horton, who was succeeded by the father of Alderman Birch, whose successors, in 1836, were the present proprietors, Ring and Brymer. The premises present a curious specimen of the decorated shop-front of the early part of the last century. Footnote 110: See _Life of Alderman Kelly_, by the Rev. R. C. Fell. 1856. Footnote 111: Cunningham.