some political partisan, one may evade it by pressing him to take a little of the dish before one; or, plagued for a reason which is not forthcoming, one may deprecate this logical rigour by inviting one's tormentor to wine. In short, what I mean to say is, that a dinner party, or any meal which is made the meal for intellectual relaxation, must for ever offer the advantages of a _palæstra_ in which the weapons are foils and the wounds not mortal: in which, whilst the interest is that of a real, the danger is that of a sham fight: in which whilst there is always an opportunity for swimming into deep waters, there is always a retreat into shallow ones. And it may be laid down as a maxim, that no nation is civilized to the height of its capacity until it _has_ one such meal. With our ancestors of sixty years back, this meal was supper: with the Athenians and Greeks it was dinner[128] (coena and [Greek: deipnon]), as with ourselves; only that the hour was a very early one, in consequence, partly, of the early bedtime of these nations (which again was occasioned by the dearness of candle-light to the mass of those who had political rights, on whose account the forensic meetings, the visits of clients to their patrons, &c., opened the political day by four hours earlier than with us), and partly in consequence of the uncommercial habits of the ancients--commerce having at no time created an aristocracy of its own, and, therefore, having at no time and in no city (no, not Alexandria nor Carthage) dictated the household and social arrangements, or the distribution of its hours. [128] A curious dissertation might be written on this subject. Meantime, it is remarkable that almost all modern nations have committed the blunder of supposing the Latin word for supper to be _coena_, and of dinner _prandium_. Now, the essential definition of dinner is, that which is the main meal--(what the French call the he great meal). By that or any test (for example, the _time_, three P.M.) the Roman coena was dinner. Even Louis XII, whose death is partly ascribed to his having altered his dinner hour from nine to eleven A.M. in compliment to his young English bride, did not _sup_ at three P.M.