resorted to by the flower of the national youth, Oxford is always elegant and even splendid in her habits.  Yet, on the other hand, as a grave seat of learning, and feeling the weight of her position in the commonwealth, she is slow to move:  she is inert as she should be, having the functions of resistance assigned to her against the popular instinct of movement.  Now, in Oxford, about 1804-5, there was a general move in the dinner hour.  Those colleges who dined at three, of which there were still several, now dined at four; those who had dined at four, now translated their hour to five.  These continued good general hours, but still amongst the more intellectual orders, till about Waterloo.  After that era, six, which had been somewhat of a gala hour, was promoted to the fixed station of dinner-time in ordinary; and there perhaps it will rest through centuries.  For a more festal dinner, seven, eight, nine, ten, have all been in requisition since then; but we have not yet heard of any man’s dining later than 10, P.M., except in that single classical instance (so well remembered from our father Joe) of an Irishman who must have dined much later than ten, because his servant protested, when others were enforcing the dignity of their masters by the lateness of their dinner hours, that his master dined “to-morrow.”

Were the Romans not as barbarous as our own ancestors at one time?  Most certainly they were; in their primitive ages they took their coena at noon,[12] that was before they had laid aside their barbarism; before they shaved:  it was during their barbarism, and in consequence of their barbarism, that they timed their coena thus unseasonably.  And this is made evident by the fact, that, so long as they erred in the hour, they erred in the attending circumstances.  At this period they had no music at dinner, no festal graces, and no reposing upon sofas.  They sate bolt upright in chairs, and were as grave as our ancestors, as rabid, and doubtless as furiously in haste.

With us the revolution has been equally complex.  We do not, indeed, adopt the luxurious attitude of semi-recumbency; our climate makes that less requisite; and, moreover, the Romans had no knives and forks, which could scarcely be used in that posture:  they ate with their fingers from dishes already cut up—­whence the peculiar force of Seneca’s “post quod non sunt lavandae manus.”  But exactly in proportion as our dinner has advanced towards evening, have we and has that advanced in circumstances of elegance, of taste, of intellectual value.”  That by itself would be much.  Infinite would be the gain for any people that it had ceased to be brutal, animal, fleshly; ceased to regard the chief meal of the day as a ministration only to an animal necessity; that they had raised it to a far higher standard; associated it with social and humanizing feelings, with manners, with graces both moral and intellectual; moral in the self-restraint; intellectual