But there are plenty of good dinners going on at six o’clock in the evening, and plenty of good diners-out to attend them. Masters in Chancery, who are renowned judges of port-wine, dine at six. Six, for half-past, is the dinner-hour for East India Directors. Let us hope that their dinners will continue to be as good as of yore, though the new India Bill leaves them nothing to direct. Members of Parliament, during the session, dine whenever they can, and sometimes not at all; but on “no House” days, six o’clock—always taken with a reservation for the half-past, for “six o’clock sharp” is entirely gone out of fashion, save with Muswell Hill stock-brokers, Manchester Square proctors, Bedford Row solicitors, and people who live in Bloomsburia—is the great time for them to drop into their clubs, sneer over the evening papers, gnash their teeth because there may happen to be no leading articles eulogistic or abusive of them therein, and _prendre des informations_, as the French say (though why I could not just as well say it in English, save that the cook at the club is a Frenchman, puzzles me), about what there may be good for dinner. But I must not forget that I am on the top of an omnibus, looking down on the people in the broughams and the cabs. Admire that youthful exquisite, curled, and oiled, and scented into a sufficient semblance of the “Nineveh Bull,” with whom Mr. Tennyson was so angry in “Maud.” His glossy hair is faultlessly parted down the occiput and down the cranium behind. White as the fleece of Clarimunda’s sheep is his body linen. Stiff as the necks of the present generation is his collar. Black as Erebus is his evening suit. Shining like mirrors are the little varnished tips of his jean-boots. Severe as the late General Picton is the tie of his cravat. This _gracilis puer_ is going to dine in Thurlow Square, Brompton. That gold-rimmed lorgnon you see screwed into his face, to the damaging distortion of his muscles, will not be removed therefrom—nor during dinner, nor during wine-taking, nor during the evening party which will follow the dinner, nor during the “little music,” the dancing, the supper, the shawling, the departure, and the drive home to his chambers. He will eat in his eyeglass, and drink in his eyeglass, and flirt and polk in his eyeglass. I am almost persuaded that he will sleep in his eyeglass (I knew a married lady who used to sleep in her spectacles, which led to a divorce: _she_ alleged the cause to be systematic cruelty, but what will not an enraged woman say?); and I should not be in the least surprised if he were to die in his eyeglass, and be buried in his eyeglass, and if the epitaph on his gravestone were to be “_veluti in speculum_.”