Many people are of opinion that the Romans only understood what the capabilities of dinner were. It is certain that they were the first great people that discovered the true secret and meaning of dinner, the great office which it fulfils, and which we in England are now so generally acting on. Barbarous nations,--and none were, in that respect, more barbarous than our own ancestors,--made this capital blunder; the brutes, if you asked them what was the use of dinner, what it was meant for, stared at you and replied--as a horse would reply if you put the same question about his provender--that it was to give him strength for finishing his work! Therefore, if you point your telescope back to antiquity about twelve or one o'clock in the daytime, you will descry our most worthy ancestors all eating for their very lives, eating as dogs eat, viz. in bodily fear that some other dog will come and take their dinner away. What swelling of the veins in the temples! (see Boswell's natural history of Dr. Johnson at dinner;) what intense and rapid deglutition! what odious clatter of knives and plates! what silence of the human voice! what gravity! what fury in the libidinous eyes with which they contemplate the dishes! Positively it was an _indecent_ spectacle to see Dr. Johnson at dinner. But, above all, what maniacal haste and hurry, as if the fiend were waiting with red-hot pincers to lay hold of the hindermost! Oh, reader, do you recognize in this abominable picture your respected ancestors and ours? Excuse us for saying--"What monsters!" We have a right to call our own ancestors monsters; and, if so, we must 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."