sly, like a
flood or a fire, which always make an end of A, eat and digest it, before
they go on to B. Other things advance _per saltum_--they do not silently
cancer their way onwards, but lie as still as a snake after they have made
some notable conquest, then when unobserved they make themselves up "for
mischief," and take a flying bound onwards. Thus advanced dinner, and by
these fits got into the territory of evening. And ever as it made a motion
onwards, it found the nation more civilized, (else the change would not
have been effected,) and raised them to a still higher civilization. The
next relay on that line of road, the next repeating frigate, is Cowper in
his poem on _Conversation_. He speaks of four o'clock as still the elegant
hour for dinner--the hour for the _lautiores_ and the _lepidi homines_. Now
this was written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, therefore,
just one generation after Pope's Lady Suffolk. But then Cowper was living
amongst the rural gentry, not in high life; yet, again, Cowper was nearly
connected by blood with the eminent Whig house of Cowper, and acknowledged
as a _kinsman_. About twenty-five years after this, we may take Oxford as
a good exponent of the national advance. As a magnificent body of
"foundations," endowed by kings, and resorted to by the flower of the
national youth, Oxford is always elegant and even splendid in her habits.
Yet, on the other hand, as a grave seat of learning, and feeling the weight
of her position in the commonwealth, she is slow to move: she is inert as
she should be, having the functions of _resistance_ assigned to her against
the popular instinct of _movement_. Now, in Oxford, about 1804-5, there was
a general move in the dinner hour. Those colleges who dined at three, of
which there were still several, now dined at four; those who had dined
at four, now translated their hour to five. These continued good general
hours, but still amongst the more intellectual orders, till about Waterloo.
After that era, six, which had been somewhat of a gala hour, was promoted
to the fixed station of dinner-time in ordinary; and there perhaps it will
rest through centuries. For a more festal dinner, seven, eight, nine, ten,
have all been in requisition since then; but we have not yet heard of any
man's dining later than 10, P.M., except in that single classical instance
(so well remembered from our father Joe) of an Irishman who must have dined
_much_ later than te