Milverton. I do not incline to go into detail about the matter.
The object was to say something for the respectability of
recreation, not to write a chapter of a book of sports. People must
find out their own ways of amusing themselves.

Ellesmere. I will tell you what is the paramount thing to be
attended to in all amusements--that they should be short. Moralists
are always talking about "short-lived" pleasures: would that they
were!

Dunsford. Hesiod told the world, some two thousand years ago, how
much greater the half is than the whole.

Ellesmere. Dinner-givers and managers of theatres should forthwith
be made aware of that fact. What a sacrifice of good things, and of
the patience and comfort of human beings, a cumbrous modern dinner
is! I always long to get up and walk about.

Dunsford. Do not talk of modern dinners. Think what a Roman dinner
must have been.

Milverton. Very true. It has always struck me that there is
something quite military in the sensualism of the Romans--an
"arbiter bibendi" chosen, and the whole feast moving on with fearful
precision and apparatus of all kinds. Come, come! the world's
improving, Ellesmere.

Ellesmere. Had the Romans public dinners? Answer me that. Imagine
a Roman, whose theory, at least, of a dinner was that it was a thing