The Lord Mayor entertained the representatives of Literature at a
public dinner at the Mansion House this day week, the speeches at which can hardly be regarded as any accession to the literature on behalf of which they were delivered. Lord Houghton com- pared the men of Letters and the men of the Press to the Lords and Commons of Literature, the former holding the chief rank, and the latter the chief power,—which was an ingenious but hardly an accurate comparison, as not only do a great many Lords sit in the Commons, or Commoners in the Lords, but it is a great deal more usual, we suspect, for Lords to go down into the Commons than for the Commoners to be elevated to the Lords. Mr. Froude recalled an ancient banquet, in which there "was a porpoise at one end of the table and a sturgeon at the other ;" and Mr. Sala, having pledged himself to remember "long, joy- fully, and with heartfelt gratitude," the compliment paid to Literature by the Lord Mayor,—a promise lightly made, we fear, and perhaps, by this time, lightly broken,—recounted with some- what quaint candour, in answer to the toast of "The Drama," his own dead failure in producing a burlesque. Men of literature had better enjoy themselves in private, if they cannot give WI better gleanings- than these. City hospitalities, apparently, do not invigorate the brain.
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