ne may call it, that boils along the tortured streets of modern London or
other capitals, men began to see the necessity of an adequate counterforce
to push against this overwhelming torrent, and thus maintain the
equilibrium. Were it not for the soft relief of a six o'clock dinner, the
gentle manner succeeding to the boisterous hubbub of the day, the soft
glowing lights, the wine, the intellectual conversation, life in London is
now come to such a pass, that in two years all nerves would sink before it.
But for this periodic reaction, the modern business which draws so cruelly
on the brain, and so little on the hands, would overthrow that organ in
all but those of coarse organization. Dinner it is,--meaning by dinner
the whole complexity of attendant circumstances,--which saves the modern
brain-working men from going mad.

This revolution as to dinner was the greatest in virtue and value ever
accomplished. In fact, those are always the most operative revolutions
which are brought about through social or domestic changes. A nation must
be barbarous, neither could it have much intellectual business, which dined
in the morning. They could not be at ease in the morning. So much must be
granted: every day has its separate _quantum_, its dose (as the doctrinists
of rent phrase it) of anxiety, that could not be digested so soon as noon.
No man will say it. He, therefore, who dined at noon, was willing to sit
down squalid as he was, with his dress unchanged, his cares not washed off.
And what follows from that? Why, that to him, to such a canine or cynical
specimen of the genus _homo_, dinner existed only as a physical event, a
mere animal relief, a mere carnal enjoyment. For what, we demand, did this
fleshly creature differ from the carrion crow, or the kite, or the vulture,
or the cormorant? A French judge, in an action upon a wager, laid it down
in law, that man only had a _bouche_, all other animals had a _gueule_:
only with regard to the horse, in consideration of his beauty, nobility,
use, and in honor of the respect with which man regarded him, by the
courtesy of Christendom, he might be allowed to have a _bouche_, and his
reproach of brutality, if not taken away, might thus be hidden. But surely,
of the rabid animal who is caught dining at noonday, the _homo ferus_, who
affronts the meridian sun like Thyestes and Atreus, by his inhuman meals,
we are, by parity of reason, entitled to say, that he has a "maw," (so has
Milt