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please herself; he himself loved her. But, if she would persist, all which remained for a decayed poet was respectfully to cut his stick, and retire. Whether Pope ever put with four o'clock dinners again, I have vainly sought to fathom. Some things advance continuously, like a flood or a fire, which always make an end of A, eat and digest it, before they go on to B. Other things advance per saltum : they do not silently cancer their way onwards, but lie as still as a snake after they have made some notable conquest, -then, when unobserved, they make themselves up for mischief" and take a flying bound onwards. Thus advanced dinner, and by these fits got into the territory of evening. And ever, as it made a motion onwards, it found the nation more civilised (else the change could not have been effected), and co-operated in raising them to a still higher civilisation. The next relay on that line of road, the next repeating frigate, is Cowper in his poem on "Conversation." He speaks of four o'clock as still the elegant hour for dinner-the hour for the lautiores and the lepidi homines. Now, this might be written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, therefore, just one generation after Pope's Lady Suffolk. But then Cowper was living amongst the rural gentry, not in high life; yet, again, Cowper was nearly connected by blood with the eminent Whig house of Cowper, and acknowledged as a kinsman. About twenty-five years after this we may take Oxford as a good exponent of the national advance. As a magnificent body of "foundations," endowed by kings, nursed by queens, and resorted to by the flower of the national youth, Oxford ought to be elegant and even splendid in her habits. Yet, on the other hand, as a grave seat of learning, and feeling the weight of her position in the commonwealth, she is slow to move: she is inert as she should be, having the functions of resistance assigned to her against the popular instinct (surely active enough) of movement. Now, in Oxford, about 1804-5, there was a general move in the dinner hour. Those colleges who dined at three, of which there were still several, now began to dine at four: those who had dined at four now translated their hour to five. These continued good general hours till about Waterloo. After that era, six, which had been somewhat of a gala hour, was promoted to

the fixed station of dinner-time in ordinary; and there perhaps it will rest through centuries. For a more festal dinner, seven, eight, nine, ten, have all been in requisition since then; but I am not aware of any man's habitually dining later than ten P.M., except in that classical case, recorded by Mr. Joseph Miller, of an Irishman who must have dined much later than ten, because his servant protested, when others were enforcing the dignity of their masters by the lateness of their dinner hours, that his master invariably dined "to-morrow."

Were the Romans not as barbarous as our own ancestors at one time? Most certainly they were. In their primitive ages they took their cœna at noon 1: that was before they had laid aside their barbarism, before they shaved: it was during their barbarism, and in consequence of their barbarism, that they timed their cana thus unseasonably. And this is made evident by the fact that, so long as they erred in the hour, they erred in the attending circumstances. At this period they had no music at dinner, no festal graces, and no reposing upon sofas. They sat bolt upright in chairs, and were as grave as our ancestors, as rabid, as libidinous in ogling the dishes, and doubtless as furiously in haste.

With us the revolution has been equally complex. We do not, indeed, adopt the luxurious attitude of semi-recumbency; our climate makes that less requisite; and, moreover, the Romans had no knives and forks,-which could scarcely be used in that recumbent posture; they ate with

1 "Took their coena at noon" :-And, by the way, in order to show how little cœna had to do with any evening hour (though, in any age but that of our fathers, four in the afternoon would never have been thought an evening hour), the Roman gourmands and bons vivants continued through the very last ages of Rome to take their cœna, when more than usually sumptuous, at noon. This, indeed, all people did occasionally, just as we sometimes give a dinner even now so early as four P. M. under the name of a breakfast. Those who took their cana as early as this were said de die cœnare-to begin dining from high day. That line in Horace-"Ut jugulent homines, surgunt de nocte latrones"-does not mean that the robbers rise when others are going to bed, viz. at nightfall, but at midnight. For, says one of the three best scholars of this earth, de die, de nocte, mean from that hour which was most fully, most intensely day or night-viz. the centre, the meridian. This one fact is surely a clencher as to the question whether cœna meant dinner or supper.

their fingers from dishes already cut up-whence the peculiar force of Seneca's "post quod non sunt lavandæ manus." But, exactly in proportion as our dinner has advanced towards evening, have we and has that advanced in circumstances of elegance, of taste, of intellectual value. This by itself would be much. Infinite would be the gain for any people that it had ceased to be brutal, animal, fleshly; ceased to regard the chief meal of the day as a ministration only to an animal necessity; that they had raised it to a higher office; associated it with social and humanising feelings, with manners, with graces moral and intellectual: moral in the self-restraint; intellectual in the fact, notorious to all men, that the chief arenas for the easy display of intellectual power are at our dinner tables. But dinner has now even a greater function than this: as the fervour of our day's business increases, dinner is continually more needed in its office of a great reaction. I repeat that, at this moment, but for the daily relief of dinner, the brain of all men who mix in the strife of capitals would be unhinged and thrown off its

centre.

If we should suppose the case of a nation taking three equidistant meals, all of the same material and the same quantity-all milk, for instance, all bread, or all rice-it would be impossible for Thomas Aquinas himself to say which was or was not dinner. The case would be that of the Roman ancile which dropped from the skies: to prevent its ever being stolen, the priests made eleven facsimiles of it, in order that a thief, seeing the hopelessness of distinguishing the true one, might let all alone. And the result was that, in the next generation, nobody could point to the true one. But our dinner, the Roman cœna, is distinguished from the rest by far more than the hour; it is distinguished by great functions, and by still greater capacities. It is already most beneficial; if it saves (as I say it does) the nation from madness, it may become more so.

In saying this, I point to the lighter graces of music, and conversation more varied, by which the Roman cœna was chiefly distinguished from our dinner. I am far from agreeing with Mr. Croly that the Roman meal was more "intellectual" than ours. On the contrary, ours is the more

intellectual by much; we have far greater knowledge, far greater means for making it such. In fact, the fault of our meal is that it is too intellectual; of too severe a character; too political; too much tending, in many hands, to disquisition. Reciprocation of question and answer, variety of topics, shifting of topics, are points not sufficiently cultivated. In all else I assent to the following passage from Mr. Croly's eloquent Salathiel :— "If an ancient Roman could start from his slumber into the "midst of European life, he must look with scorn on its "absence of grace, elegance, and fancy. But it is in its fes"tivity, and most of all in its banquets, that he would feel "the incurable barbarism of the Gothic blood. Contrasted "with the fine displays that made the table of the Roman "noble a picture, and threw over the indulgence of appetite "the colours of the imagination, with what eyes must he contemplate the tasteless and commonplace dress, the coarse attendants, the meagre ornament, the want of mirth, "music, and intellectual interest—the whole heavy machinery "that converts the feast into the mere drudgery of devouring!" Thus far the reader knows already that I dissent violently; and by looking back he will see a picture of our ancestors at dinner in which they rehearse the very part in relation to ourselves that Mr. Croly supposes all moderns to rehearse in relation to the Romans; but in the rest of the beautiful description, the positive, though not the comparative part,—we must all concur :- "The guests before me were fifty or sixty splendidly dressed men" [they were in fact Titus and his staff, then occupied with the siege of Jerusalem] "attended by a crowd of domestics, attired with scarcely less splendour ; "for no man thought of coming to the banquet in the robes "of ordinary life. The embroidered couches, themselves striking objects, allowed the ease of position at once de66 lightful in the relaxing climates of the south, and capable "of combining with every grace of the human figure. At a 66 slight distance, the table loaded with plate glittering under a profusion of lamps, and surrounded by couches thus "covered by rich draperies, was like a central source of light radiating in broad shafts of every brilliant hue. The "wealth of the patricians, and their intercourse with the "Greeks, made them masters of the first performances of

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"the arts. Copies of the most famous statues, and groups "of sculpture in the precious metals, trophies of victories, "models of temples, were mingled with vases of flowers and lighted perfumes. Finally, covering and closing all, was a "vast scarlet canopy, which combined the groups beneath to "the eye, and threw the whole into the form that a painter "would love."

Mr. Croly then goes on to insist on the intellectual embellishments of the Roman dinner, their variety, their grace, their adaptation to a festive purpose. The truth is, our English imagination, more profound than the Roman, is also more gloomy, less gay, less riante. That accounts for our want of the gorgeous triclinium, with its scarlet draperies, and for many other differences both to the eye and to the understanding. But both we and the Romans agree in the main point: we both discovered the true purpose which dinner might serve-1, to throw the grace of intellectual enjoyment over an animal necessity; 2, to relieve and to meet by a benign antagonism the toil of brain incident to high forms of social life.

My object has been to point the eye to this fact: to show uses imperfectly suspected in a recurring accident of life; to show a steady tendency to that consummation, by holding up, as in a mirror, a series of changes corresponding to our own series, with regard to the same chief meal, silently going on in a great people of antiquity.