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ROMANCE AND REALITY.
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yourself. It may be questioned whether making pleasure a duty will add either to its flavour or its longevity. However, he was an alchemist of happiness, and considered a delight an experiment.

Mr. Trevyllian affected la gastronomie: he studied it as a science; thus vanity assisted luxury—for what professor of any science but has the pride of art? Nothing could be more eloquent than his disdain—unless it were his pity for the uncultivated palates that rejoiced in tender beefsteaks—mouths that champed at raw celery like horses at a bit—people who simply boiled their pease, and ate apples and pears, or, as he sweepingly phrased it, "other crude vegetables."

Dinner arrived, and with it soup, salmon, and silence. A person who talks at the commencement of the course must either have no feelings of his own, or no regard for those of others. At length light observations leaped up on the sunny tides of the French wines, and the more solid remark might be supposed to come with the sherry, bringing with it something of the gravity of its native Spain; while the wisdom floated in with the Madeira, which, having been twice round the world, must have