y dressed men,"
(they were in fact Titus and his staff, then occupied with the siege of
Jerusalem,) "attended by a crowd of domestics, attired with scarcely less
splendor; for no man thought of coming to the banquet in the robes of
ordinary life. The embroidered couches, themselves striking objects,
allowed the ease of position at once delightful in the relaxing climates of
the South, and capable of combining with every grace of the human figure.
At a slight distance, the table loaded with plate glittering under a
profusion of lamps, and surrounded by couches thus covered by rich
draperies, was like a central source of light radiating in broad shafts of
every brilliant hue. The wealth of the patricians, and their intercourse
with the Greeks, made them masters of the first performances of the arts.
Copies of the most famous statues, and groups of sculpture in the precious
metals; trophies of victories; models of temples; were mingled with vases
of flowers and lighted perfumes. Finally, covering and closing all, was
a vast scarlet canopy, which combined the groups beneath to the eye, and
threw the whole into the form that a painter would love."

Mr. Croly then goes on to insist on the intellectual embellishments of the
Roman dinner; their variety, their grace, their adaptation to a festive
purpose. The truth is, our English imagination, more profound than the
Roman, is also more gloomy, less gay, less _riante_. That accounts for our
want of the gorgeous _trictinium_, with its scarlet draperies, and for many
other differences both to the eye and to the understanding. But both we and
the Romans agree in the main point; we both discovered the true purpose
which dinner might serve,--1, to throw the grace of intellectual enjoyment
over an animal necessity; 2, to relieve and antagonize the toil of brain
incident to high forms of social life.

Our object has been to point the eye to this fact; to show uses imperfectly
suspected in a recurring accident of life; to show a steady tendency to
that consummation, by holding up, as in a mirror, (together with occasional
glimpses of hidden corners in history,) the corresponding revolution
silently going on in a great people of antiquity.

NOTES.

[NOTE 1.

"_In procinct_."--Milton's translation (somewhere in The Paradise Regained)
of the technical phrase "in procinctu."]

[NOTE 2.

"_Geologists know not_."--Observe, reader, we are not at all questioning
the Scriptural Chro