being used at all.  The fork is held in the right hand, and a piece of bread in the left.  For any dish in which cutting is not indispensable, the same arrangement is correct.  When you have upon your plate, before the dessert, anything partially liquid, or any sauces, you must not take them up with a knife, but with a piece of bread, which is to be saturated with the juices, and then lifted to the mouth.  If such an article forms part of the dessert, you should eat it with a spoon.  In carving, steel instruments alone are employed.  For fowls a peculiar knife is used, having the blade short and the handle very long.  For fish a broad and pierced silver blade is used.

A dinner—­we allude to dinner-parties—­in this country, is generally despatched with too much hurry.  We do not mean, that persons commonly eat too fast, but that the courses succeed one another too precipitately.  Dinner is the last operation of the day, and there is no subsequent business which demands haste.  It is usually intended, especially when there are no ladies, to sit at the table till nine, ten, or eleven o’clock, and it is more agreeable that the eating should be prolonged through a considerable portion of the entire time.  The conveniences of digestion also require more deliberation, and it would therefore not be unpleasant if an interval of a quarter of an hour or half an hour were allowed to intervene between the meats and the dessert.

At dinner, avoid taking upon your plate too many things at once.  One variety of meat and one kind of vegetable is the maximum. When you take another sort of meat, or any dish not properly a vegetable, you always change your plate.

The fashion of dining inordinately late in this country is foolish.  It is borrowed from England without any regard to the difference in circumstances between the two nations.  In London, the whole system of daily duties is much later.  The fact of parliament’s sitting during the evening and not in the morning, tends to remove the active part of the day to a much more advanced hour.  When persons rise at ten or two o’clock, it is not to be expected that they should dine till eight or twelve in the evening.  There is nothing of this sort in France.  There they dine at three, or earlier.  We have known some fashionable dinners in different cities in this country at so late an hour as eight or nine o’clock.  This is absurd, where the persons have all breakfasted at eight in the morning.  From four o’clock till five varies the proper hour for a dinner party here.

Never talk about politics at a dinner table or in a drawing room.