Reader! we, as well as Pliny, had an uncle, an East Indian uncle; doubtless you have such an uncle; everybody has an Indian uncle.  Generally such a person is “rather yellow, rather yellow,” [to quote Canning versus Lord Durham:] that is the chief fault with his physics; but, as to his morals, he is universally a man of princely aspirations and habits.  He is not always so orientally rich as he is reputed; but he is always orientally munificent.  Call upon him at any hour from two to five, he insists on your taking tiffin:  and such a tiffin!  The English corresponding term is luncheon:  but how meagre a shadow is the European meal to its glowing Asiatic cousin!  Still, gloriously as tiffin shines, does anybody imagine that it is a vicarious dinner, or ever meant to be the substitute of dinner?  Wait till eight, and you will have your eyes opened on that subject.  So of the Roman prandium:  had it been as luxurious as it was simple, still it was always viewed as something meant only to stay the stomach, as a prologue to something beyond.  The prandium was far enough from giving the feeblest idea of the English luncheon; yet it stood in the same relation to the Roman day.  Now to English_men_ that meal scarcely exists; and were it not for women, whose delicacy of organization does not allow them to fast so long as men, would probably be abolished.  It is singular in this, as in other points, how nearly England and ancient Rome approximate.  We all know how hard it is to tempt a man generally into spoiling his appetite, by eating before dinner.  The same dislike of violating what they called the integrity of the appetite, [integram famem,] existed at Rome.  Every man who knows anything of Latin critically, sees the connection of the word integer with in and tetigi:  integer means what is intact, unviolated by touch.  Cicero, when protesting against spoiling his appetite for dinner, by tasting anything beforehand, says, integram famem ad coenam afferam; I shall bring to dinner an appetite untampered with.  Nay, so much stress did the Romans lay on maintaining this primitive state of the appetite undisturbed, that any prelusions with either jentaculum or prandium were said, by a very strong phrase indeed, polluere famem, to pollute the sanctity of the appetite.  The appetite was regarded as a holy vestal flame, soaring upwards towards dinner throughout the day:  if undebauched, it tended to its natural consummation in coena:  expired like a phoenix, to rise again out of its own ashes.  On this theory, to which language had accommodated itself, the two prelusive meals of nine o’clock, A.M., and of one, P.M., so far from being ratified by the public sense, and adopted into the economy of the day, were regarded gloomily as gross irregularities, enormities, debauchers of the natural instinct; and, in so far as they thwarted that instinct, lessened it, or depraved it, were universally held to be full of pollution; and, finally, to profane a motion of nature.  Such was the language.