Oh, reader, do you recognize in this abominable picture your respected ancestors and ours?  Excuse us for saying—­“What monsters!” We have a right to call our own ancestors monsters; and, if so, we must have the same right over yours.  For Dr. Southey has shown plainly in the “Doctor,” that every man having four grand parents in the second stage of ascent, (each of whom having four, therefore,) sixteen in the third, and so on, long before you get to the Conquest, every man and woman then living in England will be wanted to make up the sum of my separate ancestors; consequently, you must take your ancestors out of the very same fund, or (if you are too proud for that) you must go without ancestors.  So that, your ancestors being clearly mine, I have a right in law to call the whole “kit” of them monsters. Quod erat demonstrandum.  Really and upon our honor, it makes one, for the moment, ashamed of one’s descent; one would wish to disinherit one’s-self backwards, and (as Sheridan says in the Rivals) to “cut the connection.”  Wordsworth has an admirable picture in Peter Bell of “A snug party in a parlor,” removed into limbus patrum for their offences in the flesh:—­

  “Cramming, as they on earth were cramm’d;
  All sipping wine, all sipping tea;
  But, as you by their faces see,
  All silent, and all d—­d.”

How well does that one word describe those venerable ancestral dinners—­“All silent!” Contrast this infernal silence of voice and fury of eye with the “risus amabilis,” the festivity, the social kindness, the music, the wine, the “dulcis insania,” of a Roman “coena.”  We mentioned four tests for determining what meal is, and what is not, dinner; we may now add a fifth, viz. the spirit of festal joy and elegant enjoyment, of anxiety laid aside, and of honorable social pleasure put on like a marriage garment.

And what caused the difference between our ancestors and the Romans?  Simply this—­the error of interposing dinner in the middle of business, thus courting all the breezes of angry feeling that may happen to blow from the business yet to come, instead of finishing, absolutely closing, the account with this world’s troubles before you sit down.  That unhappy interpolation ruined all.  Dinner was an ugly little parenthesis between two still uglier clauses of a tee-totally ugly sentence.  Whereas with us, their enlightened posterity, to whom they have the honor to be ancestors, dinner is a great reaction.  There lies our conception of the matter.  It grew out of the very excess of the evil.  When business was moderate, dinner was allowed to divide and bisect it.  When it swelled into that vast strife and agony, as one may call it, that boils along the tortured streets of modern London or other capitals, men began to see the necessity of an adequate counterforce to push against this overwhelming torrent, and thus maintain the equilibrium.  Were it not for the soft relief of a six o’clock dinner, the gentle