Among this people, indeed, so wise in their generation, dinner has a kind of sanctity quite independent of the dishes that may be set upon the table; so that, if it be only a mutton-chop, they treat it with due reverence, and are rewarded with a degree of enjoyment which such reckless devourers as ourselves do not often find in our richest abundance.  It is good to see how stanch they are after fifty or sixty years of heroic eating, still relying upon their digestive powers and indulging a vigorous appetite; whereas an American has generally lost the one and learned to distrust the other long before reaching the earliest decline of life; and thenceforward he makes little account of his dinner, and dines at his peril, if at all.  I know not whether my countrymen will allow me to tell them, though I think it scarcely too much to affirm, that, on this side of the water, people never dine.  At any rate, abundantly as Nature has provided us with most of the material requisites, the highest possible dinner has never yet been eaten in America.  It is the consummate flower of civilization and refinement; and our inability to produce it, or to appreciate its admirable beauty, if a happy inspiration should bring it into bloom, marks fatally the limit of culture which we have attained.

It is not to be supposed, however, that the mob of cultivated Englishmen know how to dine in this elevated sense.  The unpolishable ruggedness of the national character is still an impediment to them, even in that particular line where they are best qualified to excel.  Though often present at good men’s feasts, I remember only a single dinner, which, while lamentably conscious that many of its higher excellences were thrown away upon me, I yet could feel to be a perfect work of art.  It could not, without unpardonable coarseness, be styled a matter of animal enjoyment, because out of the very perfection of that lower bliss there had arisen a dream-like development of spiritual happiness.  As in the master-pieces of painting and poetry, there was a something intangible, a final deliciousness that only fluttered about your comprehension, vanishing whenever you tried to detain it, and compelling you to recognize it by faith rather than sense.  It seemed as if a diviner set of senses were requisite, and had been partly supplied, for the special fruition of this banquet, and that the guests around the table (only eight in number) were becoming so educated, polished, and softened, by the delicate influences of what they ate and drank, as to be now a little more than mortal for the nonce.  And there was that gentle, delicious sadness, too, which we find in the very summit of our most exquisite enjoyments, and feel it a charm beyond all the gayety through which it keeps breathing its undertone.  In the present case, it was worth a heavier sigh, to reflect that such a festal achievement,—­the production of so much art, skill, fancy, invention, and perfect taste,—­the growth of all the ages, which