Now the question is easily solved: because, upon reviewing the idea of dinner, we soon perceive that time has little or no connection with it: since, both in England and France, dinner has travelled, like the hand of a clock, through _every_ hour between ten, A.M. and ten, P.M. We have a list, well attested, of every successive hour between these limits having been the known established hour for the royal dinner-table within the last three hundred and fifty years. Time, therefore, vanishes from the equation: it is a quantity as regularly exterminated as in any algebraic problem. The true elements of the idea, are evidently these:--1. That dinner is that meal, no matter when taken, which is the principal meal; _i.e._ the meal on which the day's support is thrown. 2. That it is the meal of hospitality. 3. That it is the meal (with reference to both Nos 1 and 2) in which animal food predominates. 4. That it is that meal which, upon necessity arising for the abolition of all _but_ one, would naturally offer itself as that one. Apply these four tests to _prandium_:--How could that meal answer to the first test, as _the day's support_, which few people touched? How could that meal answer to the second test, as the _meal of hospitality_, at which nobody sate down? How could that meal answer to the third test, as the meal of animal food, which consisted exclusively and notoriously of bread? Or to the fourth test, of the meal _entitled to survive the abolition of the rest_, which was itself abolished at all times in practice? Tried, therefore, by every test, _prandium_ vanishes. But we have something further to communicate about this same _prandium_. I. It came to pass, by a very natural association of feeling, that _prandium_ and _jentuculum_, in the latter centuries of Rome, were generally confounded. This result was inevitable. Both professed the same basis Both came in the morning. Both were fictions. Hence they were confounded.