Read "A Little Dinner at Timmins's" by William Makepeace Thackeray online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Of course it does not become the present writer, who has partaken of the / best entertainment which his friends could supply, to make fun of their / (somewhat ostentatious, as it must be confessed) hospitality. If they / gave a dinner beyond their means, it is no business of mine. I hate a / man who goes and eats a friend's meat, and then blabs the secrets of / the mahogany. Such a man deserves never to be asked to dinner again; and / though at the close of a London season that seems no great loss, and / you sicken of a whitebait as you would of a whale -- yet we must always / remember that there's another season coming, and hold our tongues for / the present.
As for describing, then, the mere victuals on Timmins's table, that / would be absurd. Everybody -- (I mean of the genteel world of course, of / which I make no doubt the reader is a polite ornament) -- Everybody has / the same everything in London. You see the same coats, the same dinners, / the same boiled fowls and mutton, the same cutlets, fish, and / cucumbers, the same lumps of Wenham Lake ice, &c. The waiters with white / neck-cloths are as like each other everywhere as the peas which they / hand round with the ducks of the second course. Can't any one invent / anything new?