That this is really the common-sense view of the question, can hardly be doubted.  By bringing the cost within reasonable limits, the plan proposed relieves the entertainment from moral vulgarity; and by avoiding all suggestion of a meeting for the gratification of mere physical hunger, it relieves it from material vulgarity.  We have laughed too heartily at the dinner of the ancients in ‘Peregrine Pickle,’ to wish to lead back the age to a classic model; and yet on all subjects connected with taste, there are some things to be learned from that people whose formative genius is still the wonder of the world.  The meal of society among the Greeks consisted of only two courses, or, to speak more strictly, of one course and a dessert; and the first or solid course was in all probability made up of small portions of each kind of food.  The more vulgar Romans added in all cases a third, but occasionally a fourth, fifth, sixth, even a seventh course; and at the fall of the empire, barbarian taste uniting with the blase luxury of Rome, heaped viand upon viand, and course upon course, till the satire of a later poet became mere common-place:—­

    ’Is this a dinner, this a genial room? 
    No; ‘tis a temple, and a hecatomb!’

This extravagance has gradually given way in the course of civilisation.  We have no more meals consisting of a score of courses; no more gilded pigs, fish, and poultry; no more soups, each of three or four different colours:  but as yet we are only in the midst of the transition, and have not got back even to the comparative refinement of the Greeks.  At the end of their first course, the more earthly part of the entertainment was already over.  Then the guests washed their hands; then they were presented with perfumes and garlands of flowers; and then they drank wine, accompanied with the singing of the paean and the sound of flutes.  Such adjuncts, with us, would for the most part be out of place and time; but some of them might be taken metaphorically, and others entirely changed—­such as the libation to the gods—­to suit a new religious feeling, and a new form of manners.  The modern coena might thus be made to surpass that of the ancients in refinement and elegance; and it would include, as a matter of course, some of the amusements—­varying from a song to a philosophical discussion—­which gave the charm to their symposia.

As for the symposium, we shall have nothing to do with that vexed subject, further than just to hint—­for we should be loath to exclude from the benefit of our proposed reform a certain numerous and respectable class of the community—­that in ancient times it had no necessary connection with the dinner at all.  A little wine-and-water was drunk during the dessert—­never during the first course—­and then the meal was over.  The symposium was literally a drinking-party, given, for the sake of convenience, after the dinner-party; but so far from forming a part of the latter, the guests were sometimes different.  It was, in fact, in this respect, like the evening company we occasionally find assembled in the drawing-room on getting up from our show-dinners.