when the servant announced supper.

That was the age of suppers! Happy age! Meal of ease and mirth; when
Wine and Night lit the lamp of Wit! Oh, what precious things were
said and looked at those banquets of the soul! There epicurism was in
the lip as well as the palate, and one had humour for a hors d'oeuvre
and repartee for an entremet. At dinner there is something too
pompous, too formal, for the true ease of Table Talk. One's
intellectual appetite, like the physical, is coarse but dull. At
dinner one is fit only for eating; after dinner only for politics.
But supper was a glorious relic of the ancients. The bustle of the
day had thoroughly wound up the spirit, and every stroke upon the
dial-plate of wit was true to the genius of the hour. The wallet of
diurnal anecdote was full, and craved unloading. The great meal--that
vulgar first love of the appetite--was over, and one now only
flattered it into coquetting with another. The mind, disengaged and
free, was no longer absorbed in a cutlet or burdened with a joint.
The gourmand carried the nicety of his physical perception to his
moral, and applauded a bon mot instead of a bonne bouche.

Then, too, one had no necessity to keep a reserve of thought for the
after evening; supper was the final consummation, the glorious funeral
pyre of day. One could be merry till bedtime without an interregnum.
Nay, if in the ardour of convivialism one did,--I merely hint at the
possibility of such an event,--if one did exceed the narrow limits of
strict ebriety, and open the heart with a ruby key, one had nothing to
dread from the cold, or, what is worse, the warm looks of ladies in
the drawing-room; no fear that an imprudent word, in the amatory
fondness of the fermented blood, might expose one to matrimony and
settlements. There was no tame, trite medium of propriety and