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 down to a splendid banquet, anxiety probably prevents your sitting down at all; but, if you do, the same cause prevents your noticing what you eat.  So of the two pseudo meals of Rome, they came in the very midst of the Roman business; viz. from nine, A.M. to two, P.M.  Nobody could give his mind to them, had they been of better quality.  There lay one cause of their vagueness, viz.—­in their position.  Another cause was, the common basis of both.  Bread was so notoriously the predominating “feature” in each of these prelusive banquets, that all foreigners at Rome, who communicated with Romans through the Greek language, knew both the one and the other by the name of [Greek:  artositos], or the bread