appeared to have been ripening for this hour, since man first began to eat and to moisten his food with wine,—­must lavish its happiness upon so brief a moment, when other beautiful things can be made a joy forever.  Yet a dinner like this is no better than we can get, any day, at the rejuvenescent Cornhill Coffee-House, unless the whole man, with soul, intellect, and stomach, is ready to appreciate it, and unless, moreover, there is such a harmony in all the circumstances and accompaniments, and especially such a pitch of well-according minds, that nothing shall jar rudely against the guest’s thoroughly awakened sensibilities.  The world, and especially our part of it, being the rough, ill-assorted and tumultuous place we find it, a beefsteak is about as good as any other dinner.

The foregoing reminiscence, however, has drawn me aside from the main object of my sketch, in which I purposed to give a slight idea of those public or partially public banquets, the custom of which so thoroughly prevails among the English people, that nothing is ever decided upon, in matters of peace or war, until they have chewed upon it in the shape of roast-beef, and talked it fully over in their cups.  Nor are these festivities merely occasional, but of stated recurrence in all considerable municipalities and associated bodies.  The most ancient times appear to have been as familiar with them as the Englishmen of to-day.  In many of the old English towns, you find some stately Gothic hall or chamber in which the Mayor and other authorities of the place have long held their sessions; and always, in convenient contiguity, there is a dusky kitchen, with an immense fireplace, where an ox might lie roasting at his ease, though the less gigantic scale of modern cookery may now have permitted the cobwebs to gather in its chimney.  St. Mary’s Hall, in Coventry, is so good a specimen of an ancient banqueting-room that perhaps I may profitably devote a page or two to the description of it.

In a narrow street, opposite to St. Michael’s Church, one of the three famous spires of Coventry, you behold a mediaeval edifice, in the basement of which is such a venerable and now deserted kitchen as I have above alluded to, and, on the same level, a cellar, with low stone pillars and intersecting arches, like the crypt of a cathedral.  Passing up a well-worn staircase, the oaken balustrade of which is as black as ebony, you enter the fine old hall, some sixty feet in length, and broad and lofty in proportion.  It is lighted by six windows of modern stained glass, on one side, and by the immense and magnificent arch of another window at the farther end of the room, its rich and ancient panes constituting a genuine historical piece, in which are represented some of the kingly personages of old times, with their heraldic blazonries.  Notwithstanding the colored light thus thrown into the hall, and though it was noonday when I last saw it, the panelling of black oak, and some faded tapestry that hung round the walls,