We presume that no rational man will henceforth look for “dinner”—­that great idea according to Dr. Johnson—­that sacred idea according to Cicero—­in a bag of moonshine on one side, or a bag of pollution on the other. Prandium, so far from being what our foolish dictionaries pretend—­dinner itself—­never in its palmiest days was more or other than a miserable attempt at being luncheon.  It was a conatus, what physiologists call a nisus, a struggle in a very ambitious spark, or scintilla, to kindle into a fire.  This nisus went on for some centuries; but finally issued in smoke.  If prandium had worked out his ambition, had “the great stream of tendency” accomplished all his wishes, prandium never could have been more than a very indifferent luncheon.  But now,

II.  We have to offer another fact, ruinous to our dictionaries on another ground.  Various circumstances have disguised the truth, but a truth it is, that “prandium”, in its very origin and incunabula, never was a meal known to the Roman culina.  In that court it was never recognized except as an alien.  It had no original domicile in the city of Rome.  It was a vot casfren-sis, a word and an idea purely martial, and pointing to martial necessities.  Amongst the new ideas proclaimed to the recruit, this was one—­“Look for no ‘coenu’, no regular dinner, with us.  Resign these unwarlike notions.  It is true that even war has its respites; in these it would be possible to have our Roman coena with all its equipage of ministrations.  Such luxury untunes the mind for doing and suffering.  Let us voluntarily renounce it; that when a necessity of renouncing it arrives, we may not feel it among the hardships of war.  From the day when you enter the gates of the camp, reconcile yourself, tyro, to a new fashion of meal, to what in camp dialect we call prandium.”  This “prandium,” this essentially military meal, was taken standing, by way of symbolizing the necessity of being always ready for the enemy.  Hence the posture in which it was taken at Rome, the very counter-pole to the luxurious posture of dinner.  A writer of the third century, a period from which the Romans naturally looked back upon everything connected with their own early habits, and with the same kind of interest as we extend to our Alfred, (separated from us as Romulus from them by just a thousand years,) in speaking of prandium, says, “Quod dictum est parandium, ab eo quod milites ad bellum paret.”  Isidorus again says, “Proprie apud veteres prandium vocatum fuisse oinnem militum cibum ante pugnam;” i.e. “that, properly speaking, amongst our ancestors every military meal taken before battle was termed prandium.”  According to Isidore, the proposition is reciprocating, viz., that, as every prandium was a military meal, so every military meal was called prandium.  But, in fact, the reason of that is apparent.