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Even the booksellers themselves feast one another before they buy and
sell; and a trade sale, without a trade dinner to precede it, would be
a very poor concern indeed. Fire companies and water companies, bubble
companies and banking companies, all must be united and consolidated by
a good dinner company. Your fat citizen, with a paunch that will scarce
allow him to pass through the side avenue of Temple Bar, marks his feast
days upon his sheet almanack, as a lawyer marks his term list with a
double dash, thus =, and shakes in his easy chair like a sack of blubber
as lie recapitulates the names of all the glorious good things of which
he has partaken at the annual civic banquet at Fishmonger's Hall, or the
Bible Association dinner at the City of London Tavern: at the mention
of white bait, his lips smack together with joy, and he lisps out
instinctively Blackwall: talk of a rump steak and Dolly's, his eyes grow
wild with delight; and just hint at the fine green fat of a fresh
killed turtle dressed at Birch's, and his whole soul's in arms for a
corporation dinner. Reader, I have been led into this strain of thinking
by an excursion I am about to make with Alderman Marigold and family,
~89~~to enjoy the pleasures of a Sunday ordinary in the suburbs of
the metropolis; an old fashioned custom that is now fast giving way
to modern notions of refinement, and is therefore the more worthy of
characteristic record.
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