prove each other; the time, the place, the mode, the thing.  Well might man eat standing, or eat in public, such a trifle as this.  Go home to such a breakfast as this!  You would as soon think of ordering a cloth to be laid in order to eat a peach, or of asking a friend to join you in an orange.  No man makes “two bites of a cherry.”  So let us pass on to the other stages of the day.  Only in taking leave of this morning stage, throw your eyes back with us, Christian reader, upon this truly heathen meal, fit for idolatrous dogs like your Greeks and your Romans; survey, through the vista of ages, that thrice-cursed biscuit, with half a fig, perhaps, by way of garnish, and a huge hammer by its side, to secure the certainty of mastication, by previous comminution.  Then turn your eyes to a Christian breakfast—­hot rolls, eggs, coffee, beef; but down, down, rebellious visions:  we need say no more!  You, reader, like ourselves, will breathe a malediction on the classical era, and thank your stars for making you a Romanticist.  Every morning we thank ours for keeping us back, and reserving us to an age in which breakfast had been already invented.  In the words of Ovid we say:—­

“Prisca juvent alios:  ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor.  Haec aetas moribus apta meis.”

Our friend, the Roman cit, has therefore thus far, in his progress through life, obtained no breakfast, if he ever contemplated an idea so frantic.  But it occurs to you, our faithful reader, that perhaps he will not always be thus unhappy.  We could bring waggon-loads of sentiments, Greek as well as Roman, which prove, more clearly than the most eminent pikestaff, that, as the wheel of fortune revolves, simply out of the fact that it has carried a man downwards, it must subsequently carry him upwards, no matter what dislike that wheel, or any of its spokes, may bear to that man:  “non, si male nunc sit, et olim sic erit:”  and that if a man, through the madness of his nation, misses coffee and hot rolls at nine, he may easily run into a leg of mutton at twelve.  True it is he may do so:  truth is commendable; and we will not deny that a man may sometimes, by losing a breakfast, gain a dinner.  Such things have been in various ages, and will be again, but not at Rome.  There are reasons against it.  We have heard of men who consider life under the idea of a wilderness—­dry as “a remainder biscuit after a voyage:”  and who consider a day under the idea of a little life.  Life is the macrocosm, or world at large; day is the microcosm, or world in miniature.  Consequently, if life is a wilderness, then day, as a little life, is a little wilderness.  And this wilderness can be safely traversed only by having relays of fountains, or stages for refreshment.  Such stages, they conceive, are found in the several meals which Providence has stationed at due intervals through the day, whenever the perverseness of man does not break the chain, or derange the order of succession.