“SENSATIONS” AT FEASTS.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XV, Issue 886, 28 February 1907, Page 20

“SENSATIONS” AT FEASTS.

Sages of all time have assured us that excitement of any sort during meals is fa'al to digestion—especially, it may be presumed, when they express themselves in action. The truth of this being admitted, the melancholy conclusion is forced upon us, that throughout the ages history has been made, and fiction written by people absolutely regardless of their own epigastric economy, or that of any one e’.se, for meal times have been chosen with malicious frequency for the enactment of some of the most sensational incidents in history and romance. A god many early instances might be quoted, but perhaps the most picturesque of all was that banquet scene in the Palace of Ulysses, where the suitors were disposing themselves to feast with copious cups of the wine they so appreciated, when the long absen-hero revealed himself on the threshold, and from his mighty bow flew hurling the arrows of death. There was

admittedly a good deal that was sensational and dramatic in the banquets of the Romans —collapsing seats, Jhe sweet stifling with rose-leaves, the “surprise dishes; swimming fish, perfume-scatter-ing birds, and costly gifts, descending from the roof—but there were tragic sensations enough and to spare, where those who came to feast remained to die. And none is more lurid than that banquet in the halls of Nero, :at which young Britannicus was done to death. The boy had a slave to taste for him, but the precaution availed nothing to the apt pupil of Locusta. A dish was danded so hot that, though the taster duly performed his office, it was unpalateable to Britannicus. So water was added to make it cooler. Cooler in truth it was, with the co.d of death; there are gasps, convulsions, change of colour, and then —exit the rightful heir to the throne of the Caesars. One can imagine the sensation when, at that Easter Feast at Winchester —so, at least, said the Norman tradition —the mighty Earl Godwin prayed that the mouthful he was aout to ett might choke him if he had ought to do with young Alfred’s death. Men said that the saintly Confessor blessed the morsel, and that Godwin could never swallow it, but choked and died. And almost more sensational at any rate in its bearing on English history, was that banquet at York where Harold, victor at Stamord Bridge, was feasting among his thanes, when a breathless messenger arrived with the news that the Normans had landed. The history books, indeed, are full of these sensations a meals, instances of which, will occur to everyone. Not" so familiarly known, perhaps, is the pretty dramatic trick played by Frederick William of Prussia on his old general, Koeckewitz. The fiftieth year of the latter’s mi.itary service found him alone in the world and by no means overburdened with riches. After a review held in his birthday honour, the King invited himself back to lunch with his old officer. Koeckewitz thought with dismay of his frugal table, and stammered out all manner of excuses. But the King was affectionately insistent, and would not even allow him to go and make preparations. And so the Royal party with their miserab'e host arrived at the latter’s humble quarters. And lo; a whole retinue of servants met them, a blaze of trumpets announced their arrival, flowers crowned the entrance, and, an elaborate banquet, with costly wines, graced the unaccustomed table. Nor where the King and his suite the, only guests, for awaiting Kim in the dining hall were three old men, who hastened to embrance him. They were three friends of his early days, with whom he had fought side by side in many a fierce battle, but had ’ost sigfit of for many years ti’l now, when the royal kindliness and endeavour had brought them together once more. So highly appreciated is the value of sensation al meals in fiction that the choice of samples is embarrassing. Intensely dramatic, with the right note of a happy enuding was that wild banquet in the castle of huge Earl Doorm, with shameless license and coarse riot ho ding orgie over the rude plenty on the boards, and, a little apart, a girl in the first flush of womanhood weeping over the lifeless body of her lord. There is the sound of an unknightly bow, a pitiful little wail, and the seeming corpse springs into life with flashing glaive and gleaming eyes, and, “like a ball, the russet-bearded head” of the would-be ravisher rolled upon the ground. There are a whole family of sensational feasts of the hyper-gruesome sort to be found in the old balladists and romancers, of which the hideous repasts in ‘T'itus Andronicus” and “The Lady Isabe la’s Tragedy” may stand for samples ; feasts in which the principal dish is a human body, the victim of lust, revenge, or cruelty—but the subject is scarely inviting enough to dwell on. Occasionally the sensations are due to supernatural agency. There was the marriage feast, of young Lycius to the beautiful Lamia. Never had the assembled Corinthians seen such beauty as the bride’s, seldom gathered at a more sumptuous board. But among them was the magician Apollonius, and at the height of the festivity, he was seen to fix his cold eye on the bride. A silence fell, a sense of terror brooded over the room, flowers and lights faded, and the bride seemed to wither under that stony gaze. Then, in awful, pitiless tones, the old man uttered the word, “serpent,” and with a scream of anguish the wretched Lamia vanished, and Lycius, bereft of his love, swooned and died. Something akin to this, though burlesqued, is the familiar Ingoldsby Legend of St. Nicholas, when a too hospitable abbot entertains too sumptou sly—not to say affectionately—a vagrant lady of bewitching charms. Fortunately for the good cleric’s reputation, St. Nicholas happened to look in in the nick of time, sprinkled some holy water on that lady' fair, and she s t oo d—or. sat —revealed as the foulest of all imaginable fiends. Still more sensational, though not so lurid, was a banquet gravely described in a history of Norfolk, one of the guests produced an

acorn which after it had been inspected, he planted in the middie of the hall. Before the company had time to empty another bumper a stately oak tree sprang up to its full height. Wonderful as this was, it was obviously in the way, and a couple of workmen were summoned, who with infinite labour felled the tree. But to' get it out of the hall baffled everybody’s endeavour, till the same marvelworking guest called in a coup.e of young geese he saw outside, who promptly and unaided walked off with the ponderous m aS3. Scott gives us a good many sensations at feasts; those in “Ivanhoe,” at the Sack of Liege and the Court of Burgundy, in “Quentin Durward, and the happy finale to “Waverley” wid at once suggest themselves. But for dramatic effect nothing equals the scene at Saladin’s banquet, where the guilty Templar is killed by his royal host ere his lips can touch the p.edge cup. There was plenty of sensation, too, in that marriage feast in “The Lord of the Isles,” when the chance guest stood revealed among his enemies as the Royal Bruce. Marryatt has a most effectual “situation” in Percival Keene, where Mammy Criscobella revenges herself on her turbulent and undesired guests by telling them the meal they had just partaken of had been poisoned, and that she herself, to avoid the penalties of the law, had taken a similar fata, draught from the glass she then held in her hand. The scene is pure comedy, and, like most of Marryatt’s work, admirably executed. There was, unfortunately, more fact than fiction about the grim “sensations” the Borgias were in the habit of providing at their banquets. The “food of the gods” of the old Romans had survived the deities of Olympus, and, as one of Dumas’ characters puts it, death sentences were no longer conveyed in the formula, “Caesar orders you to die,” but “His Holiness requests you to sup with him.” In this connection one recalls that dainty meal in “The Honour of Savelli,” where d’Amboise and Machiavelli are about to drink the choice old Fa ernian which Alexander has so kindly sent. Luckily the Italian statesman bethinks him of testing it. Had they drunk they would have been dead in a few hours. It was, perhaps, less a feast than an impromptu drinking bout that Blackmore tells us of when, Tn the ruined Hall of the Warren, Carver Doone rose, glass in hand, to propose a health to the ghost of the murdered squire, and then “in the broken doorway stood a press of men with pointed muskets covering every drunken Doone.”

So many and graphic are these sensations at feasts in fiction that it is no easy task to choose one, on the principle of keeping the best to the last, to terminate the selection. But one seldom goes amiss when one trusts to Charles Reade for dramatic co'our and virile force, and a certain dinner scene in “The Cloister and the Hearth” will ,in sporting parlance, take a deal of beating. Gerard had just learned of the treachery of his brothers, by which, believing his love, Margaret, to be dead, he had taken Holy Orders. Eli and his family are just about to dine when, like some whirlwind of wrath, a Dominican friar rushed into the room, and, throwing “his tall body over the narrow table, and with two hands hovering above the shrinking heads like eagles over a quarry, he cursed the delinquents by name, soul, and body, in this world, and the next.” It is not surprising to learn that this sensation effectually put an end to the feast. —“The Globe.”