citizenship expanded by means of the easy terms on which it could be had, so did the bathers multiply. The population of Rome, in the century after Augustus, was far greater than during that era; and this, still acting as a vortex to the rest of the world, may have been one great motive with Constantine for translating the capital eastwards, in reality, for breaking up one monster capital into two of more manageable dimensions. Two o'clock was sometimes the earliest hour at which the public baths were opened. But in Martial's time a man could go without blushing (salva fronte) at eleven; though even then two o'clock was the meridian hour for the great uproar of splashing, and swimming, and "larking," in the endless baths of endless Rome.

He is now a

These were the

Had there been

And now, at last, bathing finished, and the exercises of the palæstra, at half-past two, or three, our friend finds his way home-not again to leave it for that day. new man, refreshed, oiled with perfumes, his dust washed off by hot water, and ready for enjoyment. things that determined the time for dinner. no other proof that cœna was the Roman dinner, this is an ample one. Now first the Roman was fit for dinner, in a condition of luxurious ease; business over—that day's load of anxiety laid aside-his cuticle, as he delighted to talk, cleansed and polished—nothing more to do or to think of until the next morning: he might now go and dine, and get drunk with a safe conscience. Besides, if he does not get dinner now, when will he get it? For most demonstrably he has taken nothing yet which comes near in value to that basin of soup which many of ourselves take at the Roman hour of bathing. No; we have kept our man fasting as yet. It is to be hoped that something is coming at last.

Yes, something is coming; dinner is coming, the great meal of " cœna," ," the meal sacred to hospitality and genial pleasure comes now to fill up the rest of the day, until light fails altogether.

Many people are of opinion that the Romans only understood what the capabilities of dinner were. It is certain that they were the first great people that discovered the true secret and meaning of dinner, the great office which it fulfils, and which we in England are now so generally acting on.

Barbarous nations-and none were, in that respect, more barbarous than our own ancestors-made this capital blunder: the brutes, if you asked them what was the use of dinner, what it was meant for, stared at you, and replied—as a horse would reply, if you put the same question about his provender-that it was to give him strength for finishing his work! Therefore, if you point your telescope back to antiquity about twelve or one o'clock of the daytime, you will descry our most worthy ancestors all eating for their very lives, eating as dogs eat-viz. in bodily fear that some other dog will come and take their dinner away. What swelling of the veins in the temples (see Boswell's natural history of Dr. Johnson at dinner)! what intense and rapid deglutition! what odious clatter of knives and plates! what silence of the human voice! what gravity! what fury in the libidinous eyes with which they contemplate the dishes! Positively it was an indecent spectacle to see Dr. Johnson at dinner. But, above all, what maniacal haste and hurry, as if the fiend were waiting with red-hot pincers to lay hold of the hindermost!

Oh, reader, do you recognise in this abominable picture your respected ancestors and ours? Excuse me for saying "What monsters!" I have a right to call my own ancestors monsters; and, if so, I must have the same right over yours. For Southey has shown plainly in the "Doctor" that, every man having four grand-parents in the second stage of ascent, consequently (since each of those four will have had four grand-parents) sixteen in the third stage, consequently sixtyfour in the fourth, consequently two hundred and fifty-six in the fifth, and so on, it follows that, long before you get to the Conquest, every man and woman then living in England will be wanted to make up the sum of my separate ancestors: consequently you must take your ancestors out of the very same fund, or (if you are too proud for that) you must go without ancestors. So that, your ancestors being clearly mine, I have a right in law to call the whole "kit" of them monsters. Quod erat demonstrandum. Really, and upon my honour, it makes one, for the moment, ashamed of one's descent; one would wish to disinherit one's-self backwards, and (as Sheridan says in the "Rivals ") to "cut the connexion." Wordsworth has an admirable picture in "Peter

Bell "1 of "

a snug party in a parlour" removed into limbus patrum for their offences in the flesh :

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'Crammed, just as they on earth were crammed ;

Some sipping punch, some sipping tea;

But, as you by their faces see,

All silent and all dd."

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How well does that one word silent describe those venerable ancestral dinners "All silent!" Contrast this infernal silence of voice, and fury of eye, with the "risus amabilis,” the festivity, the social kindness, the music, the wine, the "dulcis insania," of a Roman cona. I mentioned four tests for determining what meal is, and what is not, dinner : we may now add a fifth-viz. the spirit of festal joy and elegant enjoyment, of anxiety laid aside, and of honourable social pleasure put on like a marriage garment.

And what caused the difference between our ancestors and the Romans? Simply this-the error of interposing dinner in the middle of business, thus courting all the breezes of angry feeling that may happen to blow from the business yet to come, instead of finishing, absolutely closing, the account with this world's troubles before you sit down. That unhappy interpolation ruined all. Dinner was an ugly little parenthesis between two still uglier clauses of a teetotally ugly sentence. Whereas, with us, their enlightened posterity, to whom they have the honour to be ancestors, dinner is a great reaction. There lies my conception of the matter. It grew out of the very excess of the evil. When business was moderate, dinner was allowed to divide and bisect it. When

it swelled into that vast strife and agony, as one may call it, that boils along the tortured streets of modern London or other capitals, men began to see the necessity of an adequate counterforce to push against this overwhelming torrent, and thus maintain the equilibrium. Were it not for the soft

relief of a six o'clock dinner, the gentle demeanour succeeding to the boisterous hubbub of the day, the soft glowing lights, the wine, the intellectual conversation, life in London is now come to such a pass that in two years all nerves would sink before it. But for this periodic reaction, the modern

1 In the earliest editions, but not in the later.-M.

business which draws so cruelly on the brain, and so little on the hands, would overthrow that organ in all but those of coarse organisation. Dinner it is-meaning by dinner the whole complexity of attendant circumstances-which saves the modern brain-working man from going mad.

This revolution as to dinner was the greatest in virtue and value ever accomplished. In fact, those are always the most operative revolutions which are brought about through social or domestic changes. A nation must be barbarous, neither could it have much intellectual business, which dined in the morning. They could not be at ease in the morning. So much must be granted: every day has its separate quantum, its dose of anxiety, that could not be digested so soon as noon. No man will say it. He, therefore, who dined at noon showed himself willing to sit down squalid as he was, with his dress unchanged, his cares not washed off. And what follows from that? Why, that to him, to such a canine or cynical specimen of the genus homo, dinner existed only as a physical event, a mere animal relief, a purely carnal enjoyment. For in what, I demand, did this fleshly creature differ from the carrion crow, or the kite, or the vulture, or the cormorant ? A French judge, in an action upon a wager, laid it down as law that man only had a bouche, all other animals a gueule: only with regard to the horse, in consideration of his beauty, nobility, use, and in honour of the respect with which man regarded him, by the courtesy of Christendom he might be allowed to have a bouche, and his reproach of brutality, if not taken away, might thus be hidden. But, surely, of the rabid animal who is caught dining at noonday, the homo ferus who affronts the meridian sun, like Thyestes and Atreus, by his inhuman meals, we are, by parity of reason, entitled to say that he has a maw" (so has Milton's Death), but nothing resembling a stomach. And to this vile man a philosopher would say - “Go away, sir, and come back to me two or three centuries hence, when you have learned to be a reasonable creature, and to make that physicointellectual thing out of dinner which it was meant to be, and is capable of becoming." In Henry VII's time the Court dined at eleven in the forenoon. But even that hour was considered so shockingly late in the French Court that

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Louis XII actually had his grey hairs brought down with sorrow to the grave by changing his regular hour of half-past nine for eleven, in gallantry to his young English bride.1 He fell a victim to late hours in the forenoon, In Cromwell's time they dined at one P.M. One century and a-half had carried them on by two hours. Doubtless, old cooks and scullions wondered what the world would come to next. Our French neighbours were in the same predicament. But they far surpassed us in veneration for the meal. They actually dated from it. Dinner constituted the great era of the day. L'apres diner is almost the sole date which you find in Cardinal De Retz's memoirs of the Fronde. Dinner was their Hegira-dinner was their line in traversing the ocean of day they crossed the equator when they dined. Our English Revolution came next; it made some little difference, I have heard people say, in Church and State; I daresay it did; like enough, but its great effects were perceived in dinner. People now dined at two. So dined Addison for his last thirty years; so, through his entire life, dined Pope, whose birth was coeval with the Revolution. Precisely as the Rebellion of 1745 arose did people (but, observe, very great people) advance to four P.M. Philosophers, who watch the "semina rerum," and the first symptoms of change, had perceived this alteration singing in the upper air like a coming storm some little time before. About the year 1740, Pope complains of Lady Suffolk's dining so late as four. Young people may bear those things, he observed: but, as to himself, now turned of fifty, if such doings went on, if Lady Suffolk would adopt such strange hours, he must really absent himself from Marble Hill. Lady Suffolk had a right to

1 "His young English bride" :-The case of an old man, or one reputed old, marrying a very girlish wife is always too much for the gravity of history; and, rather than lose the joke, the historian prudently disguises the age,-which, after all, in this case was not above fifty-four. And the very persons who insist on the late dinner as the proximate cause of death elsewhere insinuate something more plausible, but not so decorously expressed. It is odd that this amiable prince, so memorable as having been a martyr to late dining at eleven A. M., was the same person who is so equally memorable for the noble, almost the sublime, answer about a King of France not remembering the wrongs of a Duke of Orleans.