the elegances of the table,
in plate, crystal, china, and so forth; but an English dinner is not an
elegant meal. The guests are supposed, by a _polite_ fiction, to have
the hunger of the whole day to satisfy, and provision is made
accordingly. Varieties of soup, fish, flesh, fowl, game, rich-made
dishes, load the board spread for a group of well-dressed men and women,
known to have already dined, and who would affect to shudder at so heavy
a meal, if it was termed supper. There is a grossness in this
arrangement which is strangely at variance with the real advancement of
the age in refinement; but it has likewise a paralysing effect both upon
the freedom and delicacy of social intercourse. These show-dinners are
too costly to be numerous. Even a comparatively wealthy man is compelled
to look closely to the number of his entertainments. He scrutinises the
claims of his acquaintance; he keeps a debtor and creditor account of
dinners with them; and if now and then he invites a guest for the sake
of his social qualities, he sets him down in the bill of cost. This does
away with all the finer social feelings which it should be the province
of such meetings to foster and gratify, and adds a tone of moral
vulgarity to the material vulgarity of the repast.

Is it impossible to bring about a reform in this important matter?
Difficult, not impossible. Dinner-giving is not an integral part of the
monarchy, and it might therefore be touched--if not too rudely--without
a political revolution. The grand obstacle would be the unsettled
claims. A has given B a show-dinner, and it is the duty of B to return
it. Invitation for invitation is the law of the game. How, then, stands
the account? Would it be necessary to institute a dinner-insolvency
court, where all defaulters might take the benefit of the act? We think
not. No creditor in his senses would refuse a handsome composition; and
if it could be shewn--as it might in the present case--that the
composition was in real, though not ostensible value, equivalent to the
debt, hesitation would vanish. Before proceeding to shew this, we shall
present what may be called the common-sense statement of the whole
case:--

Mankind in their natural state dine at noon, or at least in the middle
of the working-day. It is the middle meal of the day--the central of
three. In our artificial system of society, it has been postponed to a
late hour of the afternoon, so as either to become the second of