“The guests before me were fifty or sixty splendidly dressed men,” (they were in fact Titus and his staff, then occupied with the siege of Jerusalem,) “attended by a crowd of domestics, attired with scarcely less splendor; for no man thought of coming to the banquet in the robes of ordinary life.  The embroidered couches, themselves striking objects, allowed the ease of position at once delightful in the relaxing climates of the South, and capable of combining with every grace of the human figure.  At a slight distance, the table loaded with plate glittering under a profusion of lamps, and surrounded by couches thus covered by rich draperies, was like a central source of light radiating in broad shafts of every brilliant hue.  The wealth of the patricians, and their intercourse with the Greeks, made them masters of the first performances of the arts.  Copies of the most famous statues, and groups of sculpture in the precious metals; trophies of victories; models of temples; were mingled with vases of flowers and lighted perfumes.  Finally, covering and closing all, was a vast scarlet canopy, which combined the groups beneath to the eye, and threw the whole into the form that a painter would love.”

Mr. Croly then goes on to insist on the intellectual embellishments of the Roman dinner; their variety, their grace, their adaptation to a festive purpose.  The truth is, our English imagination, more profound than the Roman, is also more gloomy, less gay, less riante.  That accounts for our want of the gorgeous trictinium, with its scarlet draperies, and for many other differences both to the eye and to the understanding.  But both we and the Romans agree in the main point; we both discovered the true purpose which dinner might serve,—­1, to throw the grace of intellectual enjoyment over an animal necessity; 2, to relieve and antagonize the toil of brain incident to high forms of social life.

Our object has been to point the eye to this fact; to show uses imperfectly suspected in a recurring accident of life; to show a steady tendency to that consummation, by holding up, as in a mirror, (together with occasional glimpses of hidden corners in history,) the corresponding revolution silently going on in a great people of antiquity.

NOTES.

[NOTE 1.

“In procinct.”—­Milton’s translation (somewhere in The Paradise Regained) of the technical phrase “in procinctu.”]

[NOTE 2.

“Geologists know not.”—­Observe, reader, we are not at all questioning the Scriptural Chronology of the earth as a habitation for man, for on the pre-human earth Scripture is silent:  not upon the six thousand years does our doubt revolve, but upon a very different thing, viz. to what age in man these six thousand years correspond by analogy in a planet.  In man the sixtieth part is a very venerable age.  But as to a planet, as to our little earth, instead of arguing dotage, six thousand years may have scarcely carried her beyond babyhood.  Some people think she is cutting her first teeth; some think her in her teens.  But, seriously, it is a very interesting problem.  Do the sixty centuries of our earth imply youth, maturity, or dotage?]