manner succeeding to the boisterous hubbub of the day, the soft glowing lights, the wine, the intellectual conversation, life in London is now come to such a pass, that in two years all nerves would sink before it.  But for this periodic reaction, the modern business which draws so cruelly on the brain, and so little on the hands, would overthrow that organ in all but those of coarse organization.  Dinner it is,—­meaning by dinner the whole complexity of attendant circumstances,—­which saves the modern brain-working men from going mad.

This revolution as to dinner was the greatest in virtue and value ever accomplished.  In fact, those are always the most operative revolutions which are brought about through social or domestic changes.  A nation must be barbarous, neither could it have much intellectual business, which dined in the morning.  They could not be at ease in the morning.  So much must be granted:  every day has its separate quantum, its dose (as the doctrinists of rent phrase it) of anxiety, that could not be digested so soon as noon.  No man will say it.  He, therefore, who dined at noon, was willing to sit down squalid as he was, with his dress unchanged, his cares not washed off.  And what follows from that?  Why, that to him, to such a canine or cynical specimen of the genus homo, dinner existed only as a physical event, a mere animal relief, a mere carnal enjoyment.  For what, we demand, did this fleshly creature differ from the carrion crow, or the kite, or the vulture, or the cormorant?  A French judge, in an action upon a wager, laid it down in law, that man only had a bouche, all other animals had a gueule:  only with regard to the horse, in consideration of his beauty, nobility, use, and in honor of the respect with which man regarded him, by the courtesy of Christendom, he might be allowed to have a bouche, and his reproach of brutality, if not taken away, might thus be hidden.  But surely, of the rabid animal who is caught dining at noonday, the homo ferus, who affronts the meridian sun like Thyestes and Atreus, by his inhuman meals, we are, by parity of reason, entitled to say, that he has a “maw,” (so has Milton’s Death,) but nothing resembling stomach.  And to this vile man a philosopher would say—­“Go away, sir, and come back to me two or three centuries hence, when you have learned to be a reasonable creature, and to make that physico-intellectual thing out of dinner which it was meant to be, and is capable of becoming.”  In Henry VII.’s time the court dined at eleven in the forenoon.  But even that hour was considered so shockingly late in the French court, that Louis XII. actually had his gray hairs brought down with sorrow to the grave, by changing his regular hour of half-past nine for eleven, in gallantry to his young English bride.[11] He fell a victim to late hours in the forenoon.  In Cromwell’s time they dined at one, P.M.  One century and a half had carried them on by two hours.