Breakfast, luncheon, and tea / by Marion Harland.

  • Harland, Marion, 1830-1922.
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Breakfast, luncheon, and tea / by Marion Harland. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    learned at night after work-hours were over. I recollect that the biographer of the “ marvellous boy ” has w ritten of him—“ Twelve hours he was chained to the office ; i.e., from eight in the morning until eight at night, the dinner- hour only excepted ; and in the house he was confined to the kitchen ; slept w'ith the foot-boy, and was subjected to indignities of a like nature. Yet here it was, during this life of base humiliation, that Thomas Chatterton worked out the splendid creations of his imagination. In less than three years of the life of a poor attorney’s apprentice, fed in the kitchen and lodged with the foot-boy, did he here achieve an immortality such as the whole life of not one in millions is sufficient to create.” N ote here, too, that Chatterton died of a broken heart; was not driven to suicide by hard work. Please be patient with me while I tell you of an incident that seems to me pretty, and comes in patly Just at this point. I have a friend—my heart bounds with prideful pleasure while I call her such!—who is the most scholarly woman, and also the best housekeeper I know. She is, moreover, one of the sweetest of our native poets—one to whose genius and true womanhood even royalty has done grateful honor ; a woman who “ has used her ” every “ talent to her own and her friends’ advantage” in more ways than one. She had a call one day from a neighbor, an eminent professor, learned in dead and spoken tongues. In the passage of the conver- sation from trifles to weightier matters, it chanced that she differed in opinion from him upon two points. He refused to believe that potatoes could ever be made into a palatable sweet by any ingenuity of the culinary art, and he took exception to her rendering of a certain passage of VirgiL In the course of the afternoon he received from his fair neighbor a folded paper and a covered dish. Opening the former, he read a metrical translation of the disputed passage, so beautiful and striking he could no longer doubt that she had discovered the poet’s meaning more tnily than had he. The dish contained a delicious potato custard. A foolscap page of rhymed thanks went back with the empty pudding dish. It was mere doggerel, for the pundit was no poet, and meant his note for nothing more than jingle and fun, but his tribute of admiration was sincere. I forget the form of its expression, except that the concluding lines ran somewhat thus :— “ From Virgil and potatoes, too. You bring forth treasures rich and new.