T. T. Greg

“ He should thieve in the grand style, and never condescend to take the heart out of a flask and fill the eviscerated shell with water; he should know that a bottle is of the aristocracy, and should ever treat it like a gentleman. What blow so hard to bear as the knowledge, years after you have sacked your incomparable butler for intemperance, that he had drunk three and a half dozen of your ’47 port, and filled the bottles with the pure lymph in which you condescend to wash, but never debase yourself by drinking? ”

“ The true butler, born as well as made, should supplement that scanty intelligence which is the endowment of too many hosts; he should differentiate between the quality and the fibre of his guests; he should divine that a parson’s glass should always be filled to the brim, for that he can take a little more than other people, and yet be ill-satisfied. ”

“ But it is part of a butler’s lot that he should do other tasks worse than keep watch and guard over the cellar key, and pour out wine for alien drinkers. He is responsible for the plate, and, if in nothing besides, he shows herein the marked superiority of his sex, for if he do not apply the rouge himself, he constrains the footman or the page-boy. In no house where woman predominates do we ever find plate kept as plate should, darkly lustrous and beautifully bright. ”

“ Yet must it be conceded that opportunity, the Parent of Crime, is more exclusively the Butlers prerogative than that of any other living man. By what process it is hard to say; but he has acquired a subterranean Headship, a cellared monarchy, from which it will need a bloody revolution to depose him. He is the despot of the servants’ hall, and the Plain Cook alone among women is held worthy to mate with him. ”

“ He should have a large sympathy with thirst; the void that nature and art alike abhor, he should ever be ready to fill; and if he cracks a bottle of your best Burgundy with your friend’s “man,” it may well be pardoned him, so that he sees you suffer no worse a fate. ”

“ These men deserve and receive no compensatory vail. They stand, impotent expectants as they are, at the door on the day of parting; they have unpacked no portmanteau nor laid out any shirts; they have let one go night after night suffering the aching void ”

“ For it is difficult to picture the use in the scale of creation of a chief baker, a superintendent of concocted flours, a viceroy of crust and crumb. Bread, corn stuffs, farinaceous medleys, are but incidents of life ”