old ones were neglected, proves that decisively. And as 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 "transferring" the capital eastwards; in reality, for breaking up one monster capital into two of more manageable dimensions. Two o'clock was often 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.

And now, at last, bathing finished, and the exercises of the palestra, at half-past two, or three, our friend finds his way home-not again to leave it for that day. He is now a new man; refreshed, oiled with perfumes, his dust washed off by hot water, and ready for enjoyment. These were the things that determined the time for dinner. Had there been no other proof that cana 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.

:

It does come :-Dinner, the great meal of "cona;" 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

NO. CCXC. VOL. XLVI,

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 in 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 hindmost!

Oh, reader, do you recognise in this abominable picture your respected ancestors and ours? Excuse us for saying-" what monsters!" We have a right to call our own ancestors mon◄ sters; and, if so, we must have the same right over yours. For Dr Southey has shown plainly in the "Doctor," that every man having four grand parents in the second stage of ascent, (each of whom having four, therefore,) sixteen in the third, and so on, 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 our 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 of "a snug party

3 G

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

"Cramming, as they on earth were
cramm'd;

All sipping wine, all sipping tea;
But, as you by their faces see,

All silent, and all d-d."

How well does that one word 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 "cœna." We 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 tee-totally ugly sentence. Whereas with us, their enlightened posterity, to whom they have the honour to be ancestors, dinner is a great reaction. There lies our 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 manner 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 business which draws so cruelly on the brain, and so little on the hands, would overthrow that

organ in all but those of coarse organization. Dinner it is, meaning by dinner the whole complexity of attendant circumstances, which saves the modern brain-working men 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 (as the doctrinists of rent phrase it) of anxiety, that could not be digested so soon as noon. No man will say it. He, therefore, who dined at noon, was 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 mere carnal enjoyment. For what, we 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 in law, that man only had abouche, all other animals had 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 noon-day, the homo ferus, who af fronts 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 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 physico-intellectual 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

dined at four now translated their hour to five. These continued good general hours, but still amongst the more in. tellectual orders, 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 we have not yet heard of any man's dining later than 10 P.M., except in that single classical instance (so well remembered from our father Joe) 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 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 cæna at noon, 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 cœna 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 sate bolt upright in chairs, and were as grave as our ancestors, as rabid, and doubtless as furiously in haste.

With us the revolution has been equally complex. We do not, indeed, adopt the luxurious attitude of semirecumbency; our climate makes that less requisite; and moreover the Romans had no knives and forks, which could scarcely be used in that posture: they ate with 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." That 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 far higher standard; associated it with social and humanizing feelings, with manners, with graces both 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. We 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, 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, that the 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 cana, is distinguished from the rest by far more than the hour; it is dis

tinguished by great functions, and by still greater capacities. It is most beneficial; it may become more so.

In saying this, we point to the lighter graces of music, and conversation more varied, by which the Roman cana was chiefly distinguished from our dinner. We are 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 we 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 festivity, 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 we 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 delightful in the relaxing climates of the South, and capable of combining with every grace of the human figure. At a 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 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 antagonize the toil of brain incident to high forms of social life.

Our 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, (together with occasional glimpses of hidden corners in history,) the corresponding revolution silently going on in a great people of antiquity.