HIGH DINNERS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3933, 27 February 1884, Page 4

HIGH DINNERS.

Tho annual round of public banquets and private dinners that mark the Winter season in New York has commenced. Henry Irving, Matthew Arnold, Gerald Massey, Lord Bury and other English celebrities, have all recently enjoyed the hospitality of their ne-w--fouml friends in this aird other cities. Irving, when iv town, was dined and wined by the Lotos and Lamb's Clubs, and by General Horace Porter, W. IT. Vanderbilt and others. General Porter's dinner took place at, the Union League Club, ono Saturday night, at 11.30 o'clock, after the theatre, and the company "ate, drank and wore merry " until the bells on Sunday morning called church-goers to worship. The dinner was very elaborate, as may be inferred from the fact that the cost for twenty-two covers was §1,200. Apropos of expensive dinners, that of the Chamber of Commerce, at Delmonico's, last Monday night, in celebration of Education Day, cost §3.500, and that of tho sons and grandsons of New Yorkers, at the Brunswick, the same night, §2,800. Flowers and wine mako up the chief items of expense, the actual cost of the dinner being insignificant, as it were. The annual game dinner at the Grand Pacific Hotel, Chicago, given by the senior proprietor, Mr J. B. Drake, for twenty-eight consecutive years, occurred on the 11th, and, as usual, was a notable and unique gastronomic event-