tinuity of arid soil which else disfigures that long dreary level. This happens to all; but was dinner not dinner, and did supper become dinner, because Sir Isaac Newton ate nothing at the first, and threw the whole day's support upon the last? No, you will say, a rule is not defeated by one casual deviation, nor by one person's constant deviation. Everybody else was still dining at two, though Sir Isaac might not; and Sir Isaac himself on most days no more deferred his dinner beyond two than he sat in public with one stocking off. But what if everybody, Sir Isaac included, had deferred his substantial meal until night, and taken a slight refection only at two? The question put does really represent the very case which has happened with us in England. In 1700 a large part of London took a meal at two P.M., and another at seven or eight P.M. At present, a large part of London is still doing the very same thing, taking one meal at two, and another at seven or eight. But the names are entirely changed: the two o'clock meal used to be called dinner, whereas at present it is called luncheon; the seven o'clock meal used to be called supper, whereas at present it is called dinner; and in both cases the difference is anything but verbal: it expresses a translation of that main meal on which the day's support rested from mid-day to evening. Upon reviewing the idea of dinner, we soon perceive that time has little or no connexion with it: since, both in England and France, dinner has travelled, like the hand of a clock, through every hour between ten A.M. and ten P.M. We have a list, well attested, of every successive hour between these limits having been the known established hour for the royal dinner-table within the last three hundred and fifty years. Time, therefore, vanishes from the problem; it is a quantity regularly exterminated. The true elements of the idea are evidently these:-1. That dinner is that meal, no matter when taken, which is the principal meal, ¿.e. the meal on which the day's support is thrown. 2. That it is therefore the meal of hospitality. 3. That it is the meal (with reference to both Nos. 1 and 2) in which animal food predominates. 4. That it is that meal which, upon a necessity arising for the abolition of all but one, would naturally offer - How itself as that one. Apply these four tests to prandium :-) could that meal prandium answer to the first test, as the day's support, which few people touched? How could that meal prandium answer to the second test, as the meal of hospitality, at which nobody sat down? How could that meal prandium answer to the third test, as the meal of animal food, which consisted exclusively and notoriously of bread? Or answer to the fourth test, as the privileged meal entitled to survive the abolition of the rest, which was itself abolished at all times in practice? Tried, therefore, by every test, prandium vanishes. But I have something further to communicate about this same prandium. 1. It came to pass, by a very natural association of feeling, that prandium and jentaculum, in the latter centuries of Rome, were generally confounded. This result was inevitable. Both professed the same basis. Both came in the morning. Both were fictions. Hence they melted and collapsed into each other. The fact speaks for itself. The modern breakfast and luncheon never could have been confounded; but who would be at the pains of distinguishing two shadows? In a gambling-house of that class where you are at liberty to sit down to a splendid banquet, anxiety probably prevents your sitting down at all; but, if you do, the same cause prevents you noticing what you eat. So of the two pseudo meals of Rome they came in the very midst of the Roman business -viz. from nine A.M. to two P.M. Nobody could give his mind to them, had they been of better quality. There lay one cause of their vagueness-viz. in their position. Another cause was the common basis of both. Bread was so notoriously the predominating "feature" in each of these prelusive banquets that all foreigners at Rome, who communicated with Romans through the Greek language, knew both the one and the other by the name of apтоσiтos, or the bread repast. Originally, this name had been restricted to the earlier meal. But a distinction without a difference could not sustain itself; and both alike disguised their emptiness under this pompous quadrisyllable. All words are suspicious, there is an odour of fraud about them, which-being con cerned with common things-are so base as to stretch out to four syllables. What does an honest word want with more than two? In the identity of substance, therefore, lay a second ground of confusion. And then, thirdly, even as to the time, which had ever been the sole real distinction, there arose from accident a tendency to converge. For it happened that, while some had jentaculum but no prandium, others had prandium but no jentaculum; a third party had both; a fourth party, by much the largest, had neither. Out of which four varieties (who would think that a nonentity could cut up into so many somethings?) arose a fifth party of compromisers, who, because they could not afford a regular cœna, and yet were hospitably disposed, fused the two ideas into one; and so, because the usual time for the idea of a breakfast was nine to ten, and for the idea of a luncheon twelve to one, compromised the rival pretensions by what diplomatists call a mezzo termine; bisecting the time at eleven, and melting the two ideas into one. But, by thus merging the separate times of each, they abolished the sole real difference that had ever divided them. Losing that, they lost all. Perhaps, as two negatives make one affirmative, it may be thought that two layers of moonshine might coalesce into one pancake, and two Barmecide banquets might be the square root of one poached egg. Of that the company were the best judges. But, probably, as a rump and dozen, in our land of wagers, is construed with a very liberal latitude as to the materials, so Martial's invitation, "to take bread with him at eleven," might be understood by the ovvero (the knowing ones) as significant of something better than aρTоσTоs. Otherwise, in good truth, "moonshine and turn-out" at eleven A.M. would be even worse than "tea and turn-out" at eight P.M., —which the “fervida juventus” of Young England so loudly deprecates. But, however that might be, in this convergement of the several frontiers, and the confusion that ensued, one cannot wonder that, whilst the two bladders collapsed into one idea, they actually expanded into four names-two Latin and two Greek, gustus and gustatio, yevois and yevoμa—which all alike express the merely tentative or exploratory act of a prægustator or professional "taster" in a king's household: what, if applied to a fluid, we should denominate sipping. At last, by so many steps all in one direction, things had come to such a pass-the two prelusive meals of the Roman morning, each for itself separately vague from the beginning, had so communicated and interfused their several and joint vaguenesses that at last no man knew or cared to know what any other man included in his idea of either; how much or how little. And you might as well have hunted in the woods of Ethiopia for Prester John, or fixed the parish of the Everlasting Jew,1 as have attempted to say what "jentaculum" certainly was, or what "prandium" certainly was not. Only one thing was clear, that neither was anything that people cared for. They were both empty shadows; but, shadows as they were, we find from Cicero that they had a power of polluting and profaning better things than themselves. We presume that no rational man will henceforth look for "dinner "—that great idea according to Dr. Johnson— that sacred idea according to Cicero-in a bag of moonshine on one side, or a bag of pollution on the other. Prandium, so far from being what our foolish dictionaries pretenddinner itself—never in its palmiest days was more or other than a miserable attempt at being luncheon. It was a conatus, what physiologists call a nisus, a struggle in a very ambitious spark, or scintilla, to kindle into a fire. This nisus went on for some centuries, but finally evaporated in smoke. If prandium had worked out its ambition, had "the great stream of tendency" accomplished all its purposes, prandium never could have been more than a very indifferent luncheon. But now, 2. I have to offer another fact, ruinous to our dictionaries on another ground. Various circumstances have disguised the truth, but a truth it is, that "prandium," in its very origin and incunabula, never was a meal known to the Roman culina. In that court it was never recognised except as an alien. It had no original domicile in the city of Rome. It 1 "The Everlasting Jew" :—The German name for what we English call the Wandering Jew. The German imagination has been most struck by the duration of the man's life, and his unhappy sanctity from death the English, by the unrestingness of the man's life, his incapacity of repose. was a vox castrensis, a word and an idea purely martial, and pointing to martial necessities. Amongst the new ideas proclaimed to the recruit this was one—“Look for no 'cœna,' no regular dinner, with us. Resign these unwarlike notions. It is true that even war has its respites; in these it would be possible to have our Roman cœna with all its equipage of ministrations. But luxury untunes the mind for doing and suffering. Let us voluntarily renounce it; that, when a necessity of renouncing it arrives, we may not feel it among the hardships of war. From the day when you enter the gates of the camp, reconcile yourself, tiro, to a new fashion of meal,—to what in camp dialect we call prandium." This "prandium," this essentially military meal, was taken standing, by way of symbolising the necessity of being always ready for the enemy. Hence the posture in which it was taken at Rome, the very counter-pole to the luxurious posture of dinner. A writer of the third century,—a period from which the Romans naturally looked back upon everything connected with their own early habits with much the same kind of interest as we extend to our Alfred (separated from us, as Romulus from them, by just a thousand years),—in speaking of prandium, says, "Quod dictum est parandium, ab eo quod milites ad bellum paret." Isidorus again says, "Proprie apud veteres prandium vocatum fuisse omnem militum cibum ante pugnam": i.e. " that, properly speaking, amongst our ancestors every military meal taken before battle was termed prandium." According to Isidore, the proposition is reciprocating; viz. that, as every prandium was a military meal, so every military meal was called prandium. But, in fact, the reason of that is apparent. Whether in the camp or the city, the early Romans had probably but one meal in a day. That is true of many a man amongst ourselves by choice; it is true also, to our knowledge, of some horse regiments in our service, and may be of all. This meal was In called cœna or dinner in the city—prandium in camps. the city it would always be tending to one fixed hour. In the camp innumerable accidents of war would make it very uncertain. On this account it would be an established rule to celebrate the daily meal at noon, if nothing hindered; not that a later hour would not have been preferred, had the |