high teas might be recommended as a step towards seriousness. Some, even to-day, fly speedily from tea to work. Upon others, and in some degree upon these, dinner lays a cheerful hand in anticipation. The optimist becomes “happier and wiser both.” The very pessimist rises at least to a cynic. Under the head of dinner I include, first and least, the discussion of the cook’s poetry and prose, if one may be permitted to make the distinction, since his joints have been called “poems in prose”; second, the feast of reason, etc.; third, those acts of pleasure or duty which came naturally to the wise diner. The first two are hardly distinct acts. “We _devour_” says Leigh Hunt, “wit and argument, and _discuss_ a turkey and chine.” The word “dinner” was once derived from the Greek word for terrible, and was held to imply not so much its terrors for the after-dinner speaker, as for the man who came simply to eat. Most Oxford colleges have accordingly an elaborate and forcible set of rules for humiliating the sordid man. In old days he apparently quoted from the Bible, which every one knew, just as every one knows the _Times_ to-day; and consequently a quotation from the Bible was punished along with puns, quotations from Latin and Greek, and oaths. As unbecoming to a feast of reason, flannels and other clothes belonging to the barbaric hours of life are forbidden. The unpunctuality of such as obviously come only to devour is treated in the same way. Gross inadvertence or apparent physical incapacity to do anything but eat have also been punished in gentlemen both punctual and suitably clothed; but these and other excesses of virtuous intention are not always sanctioned by the High Table. The punishment usually takes the form of a fine to the extent of two quarts of beer, which the sufferer has to put in circulation among his judges. Punning, too, is attacked. It was time that the pun should go. It was becoming too perfect, and a monopoly of the mathematical mind. Two hundred years ago men laughed at this:--“A chaplain in the University of Oxford, having one leg bigger than the other, was told that his legs might be _chaplains_ too, for they were never like to be _fellows_.” To-day, it is doubtful whether it would be honoured by the fine or “sconce.” Yet the pun has in a sense been supplanted not very worthily by the “spoonerism.” That, too, has become a very solemn affair. It is in the hands of calculating prodigies, and men are expected to laugh at “pictures defeated” instead of “features depicted” and the like. It smacks of the logic required for a pass degree, while the old puns _sentent plus le vin que l’huile_. Yet the spoonerism is venerable in years; and Anthony Wood records among his pieces of humour the saying of Dr. Ratcliff of Brasenose, that “a proud man will buy a dagger or die a beggar.” Nor is the anecdote extinct, as one may learn from the laughter at any High Table, where it is known that men do not discuss ontology.