Doubtless, old cooks and scullions wondered what the world would come to next.  Our French neighbors were in the same predicament.  But they far surpassed us in veneration for the meal.  They actually dated from it.  Dinner constituted the great era of the day. L’apres diner is almost the sole date which you find in Cardinal De Retz’s memoirs of the Fronde.  Dinner was their Hegira—­dinner was their line in traversing the ocean of day:  they crossed the equator when they dined.  Our English revolution came next; it made some little difference, we have heard people say, in Church and State; but its great effects were perceived in dinner.  People now dined at two.  So dined Addison for his last thirty years; so dined Pope, who was coeval with the revolution through his entire life.  Precisely as the rebellion of 1745 arose, did people (but observe, very great people) advance to four, P.M.  Philosophers, who watch the “semina rerum,” and the first symptoms of change, had perceived this alteration singing in the upper air like a coming storm some little time before.  About the year 1740, Pope complains to a friend of Lady Suffolk’s dining so late as four.  Young people may bear those things, he observes; but as to himself, now turned of fifty, if such doings went on, if Lady Suffolk would adopt such strange hours, he must really absent himself from Marble Hill.  Lady Suffolk had a right to please herself:  he himself loved her.  But if she would persist, all which remained for a decayed poet was respectfully to “cut his stick, and retire.”  Whether Pope ever put up with four o’clock dinners again, we have vainly sought to fathom.  Some things advance continuously, like a flood or a fire, which always make an end of A, eat and digest it, before they go on to B. Other things advance per saltum—­they do not silently cancer their way onwards, but lie as still as a snake after they have made some notable conquest, then when unobserved they make themselves up “for mischief,” and take a flying bound onwards.  Thus advanced dinner, and by these fits got into the territory of evening.  And ever as it made a motion onwards, it found the nation more civilized, (else the change would not have been effected,) and raised them to a still higher civilization.  The next relay on that line of road, the next repeating frigate, is Cowper in his poem on Conversation.  He speaks of four o’clock as still the elegant hour for dinner—­the hour for the lautiores and the lepidi homines.  Now this was written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, therefore, just one generation after Pope’s Lady Suffolk.  But then Cowper was living amongst the rural gentry, not in high life; yet, again, Cowper was nearly connected by blood with the eminent Whig house of Cowper, and acknowledged as a kinsman.  About twenty-five years after this, we may take Oxford as a good exponent of the national advance.  As a magnificent body of “foundations,” endowed by kings, and