to be nothing finer or
sweeter in the life of even Benvenuto Cellini, that rough-hewn saint, ten
centuries later. All the nobles of Britain, with their families, attended divine
service morning and night daily, in their private chapels, and even the worst of
them had family worship five or six times a day besides. The credit of this
belonged entirely to the Church. Although I was no friend to that Catholic
Church, I was obliged to admit this. And often, in spite of me, I found myself
saying, »What would this country be without the Church?«
    After prayers we had dinner in a great banqueting hall which was lighted by
hundreds of grease-jets, and everything was as fine and lavish and rudely
splendid as might become the royal degree of the hosts. At the head of the hall,
on a dais, was the table of the king, queen, and their son, Prince Uwaine.
Stretching down the hall from this, was the general table, on the floor. At
this, above the salt, sat the visiting nobles and the grown members of their
families, of both sexes, - the resident court, in effect, - sixty-one persons;
below the salt sat minor officers of the household, with their principal
subordinates: altogether a hundred and eighteen persons sitting, and about as
many liveried servants standing behind their chairs or serving in one capacity
or another. It was a very fine show. In a gallery a band, with cymbals, horns,
harps and other horrors, opened the proceedings with what seemed to be the crude
first-draft or original agony of the wail known to later centuries as In the
Sweet By and By. It was new, and ought to have been rehearsed a little more. For
some reason or other the queen had the composer hanged, after dinner.
    After this music the priest who stood behind the royal table said a noble
long grace in ostensible Latin. Then the battalion of waiters broke away from
their posts, and darted, rushed, flew, fetched and carried, and the mighty
feeding began: no words anywhere, but absorbing attention to business. The rows
of chops opened and shut in vast unison, and the sound of it was like to the
muffled burr of subterranean machinery. The havoc continued an hour and a half,
and unimaginable was the destruction of substantials. Of the chief feature of
the feast - the huge wild boar that lay stretched out so portly and imposing at
the start - nothing was left but the semblance of a hoop-skirt; and he was but