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This slight article on the civic banquets of England would be too wretchedly imperfect, without an attempted description of a Lord-Mayor’s dinner at the Mansion-House in London.  I should have preferred the annual feast at Guildhall, but never had the good-fortune to witness it.  Once, however, I was honored with an invitation to one of the regular dinners, and gladly accepted it,—­taking the precaution, nevertheless, though it hardly seemed necessary, to inform the City-King, through a mutual friend, that I was no fit representative of American eloquence, and must humbly make it a condition that I should not be expected to open my mouth, except for the reception of his Lordship’s bountiful hospitality.  The reply was gracious and acquiescent; so that I presented myself in the great entrance-hall of the Mansion-House, at half-past six o’clock, in a state of most enjoyable freedom from the pusillanimous apprehensions that often tormented me at such times.  The Mansion-House was built in Queen Anne’s days, in the very heart of old London, and is a palace worthy of its inhabitant, were he really as great a man as his traditionary state and pomp would seem to indicate.  Times are changed, however, since the days of Whittington, or even of Hogarth’s Industrious Apprentice, to whom the highest imaginable reward of life-long integrity was a seat in the Lord-Mayor’s chair.  People nowadays say that the real dignity and importance have perished out of the office, as they do, sooner or later, out of all earthly institutions, leaving only a painted and gilded shell like that of an Easter egg, and that it is only second-rate and third-rate men who now condescend to be ambitious of the Mayoralty.  I felt a little grieved at this; for the original emigrants of New England had strong sympathies with the people of London, who were mostly Puritans in religion and Parliamentarians in politics, in the early days of our country; so that the Lord-Mayor was a potentate of huge dimensions in the estimation of our forefathers, and held to be hardly second to the prime-minister of the throne.  The true great men of the city now appear to have aims beyond city-greatness, connecting themselves with national politics, and seeking to be identified with the aristocracy of the country.

In the entrance-hall I was received by a body of footmen dressed in a livery of blue and buff, in which they looked wonderfully like American Revolutionary generals, only bedizened with far more lace and embroidery than those simple and grand old heroes ever dreamed of wearing.  There were likewise two very imposing figures, whom I should have taken to be military men of rank, being arrayed in scarlet coats and large silver epaulets; but they turned out to be officers of the Lord-Mayor’s household, and were now employed in assigning to the guests the places which they were respectively to occupy at the dinner-table.  Our names (for I had included myself in a little group of friends) were