n, 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 _coena_ at
noon,[12] _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 _coena_ 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 semi-recumbency; 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
lavandae 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
fervor 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 h