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_, and is now called _luncheon_; the
eight o'clock meal used to be called _supper_, and is now called _dinner_.

Now the question is easily solved: because, upon reviewing the idea of
dinner, we soon perceive that time has little or no connection 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 equation: it is
a quantity as regularly exterminated as in any algebraic problem. The true
elements of the idea, are evidently these:--1. That dinner is that meal, no
matter when taken, which is the principal meal; _i.e._ the meal on which
the day's support is thrown. 2. That it is 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 necessity arising for the
abolition of all _but_ one, would naturally offer itself as that one. Apply
these four tests to _prandium_:--How could that meal answer to the first
test, as _the day's support_, which few people touched? How could that meal
answer to the second test, as the _meal of hospitality_, at which nobody
sate down? How could that meal answer to the third test, as the meal of
animal food, which consisted exclusively and notoriously of bread? Or to
the fourth test, of the 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 we have something
further to communicate about this same _prandium_.

I. It came to pass, by a very natural association of feeling, that
_prandium_ and _jentuculum_, 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 were
confounded.

That fact speaks for itself,--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 do