ust have the same right
over yours. For Dr. Southey has shown plainly in the "Doctor," that every
man having four grand parents in the second stage of ascent, (each of whom
having four, therefore,) sixteen in the third, and so on, long before you
get to the Conquest, every man and woman then living in England will be
wanted to make up the sum of my separate ancestors; consequently, you must
take your ancestors out of the very same fund, or (if you are too proud for
that) you must go without ancestors. So that, your ancestors being clearly
mine, I have a right in law to call the whole "kit" of them monsters. _Quod
erat demonstrandum_. Really and upon our honor, it makes one, for the
moment, ashamed of one's descent; one would wish to disinherit one's-self
backwards, and (as Sheridan says in the _Rivals_) to "cut the connection."
Wordsworth has an admirable picture in Peter Bell of "A snug party in a
parlor," removed into _limbus patrum_ for their offences in the flesh:--

"Cramming, as they on earth were cramm'd;
All sipping wine, all sipping tea;
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent, and all d--d."

How well does that one word describe those venerable ancestral
dinners--"All silent!" Contrast this infernal silence of voice and fury
of eye with the "risus amabilis," the festivity, the social kindness, the
music, the wine, the "dulcis insania," of a Roman "coena." We mentioned
four tests for determining what meal is, and what is not, dinner; we may
now add a fifth, viz. the spirit of festal joy and elegant enjoyment, of
anxiety laid aside, and of honorable social pleasure put on like a marriage
garment.

And what caused the difference between our ancestors and the Romans? Simply
this--the error of interposing dinner in the middle of business, thus
courting all the breezes of angry feeling that may happen to blow from the
business yet to come, instead of finishing, absolutely closing, the account
with this world's troubles before you sit down. That unhappy interpolation
ruined all. Dinner was an ugly little parenthesis between two still uglier
clauses of a tee-totally ugly sentence. Whereas with us, their enlightened
posterity, to whom they have the honor to be ancestors, dinner is a great
reaction. There lies our conception of the matter. It grew out of the very
excess of the evil. When business was moderate, dinner was allowed to
divide and bisect it. When it swelled into that vast strife and agony, as
o