him, had he lost either his good humour or his excellent appetite. His philosophy was nil admirari; so that he would not have "wondered" with Byron, whether a certain wholesale slave-merchant could eat a good dinner after effecting a large sale of his fellow-creatures :

And then the merchant, giving change, and signing
Receipts in full, began to think of dining.

I wonder if his appetite was good?
Or, if it were, if also his digestion?

POSTPRANDIAL PLACABILITY.

A Cue from Shakespeare.

WHEN that genial old soul, Menenius Agrippa, is trying to account for the rebuff that good Cominius has had to endure from Coriolanus, on application being made to that embittered exile in behalf of humiliated Rome, he hits upon, and favours, the conceit that the secret of Cominius's failure lay in addressing Coriolanus before dinner, instead of after. That solves the problem. That disposes of the difficulty. That explains and almost excuses the disgrace of defeat, the degradation of repulse. Cominius should have timed the deputation better. He should have approached the hero paulo post prandium. Caius Marcius must have been speaking from an empty stomach when he thus implacably dismissed his old commander.

He was not taken well; HE HAD NOT DINED:
The veins unfill'd, the blood is cold, and then
We pout upon the morning, are unapt
To give or to forgive; but when we have stuff'd
These pipes and these conveyances of our blood
With wine and feeding, we have suppler souls
Than in our priest-like fasts; therefore,

adds the fine old Roman, who has consented himself to undertake Coriolanus, in spite of this recent failure, of which he thinks he knows the reason why,

-therefore, I'll watch him

Till he be dieted to my request,
And then I'll set upon him.

A resolve which elicits from one of the troublous tribunes the approving assent,

You know the very road into his kindness,

And cannot lose your way.

In the next scene we find Menenius, sanguine of success in his after-dinner scheme, roughly bidden to go back by one of the advanced guard of the Volscian Camp before Rome. The old patrician cannot refrain from asking even this ill-conditioned sentry whether the General has dined yet. "Has he dined, canst thou tell? for I would not speak with him till after dinner.”

Among the medieval directions for the regulation of conduct according to the moon's age, occurs this bit of good counsel: "When the moon is one night old, go thou to the king, ask of him what thou wilt, and he will give it thee: go to him on the third hour of the day, or when thon weenest that he is full," that is to say, after dinner.

We read in Plutarch that when Vitellius, in troublous times of the empire, was nominated Imperator by the army, he, for some days, seemed to dread the weight of sovran power, and indeed, absolutely to decline it; but on the day of his giving

an entertainment to his officers, "being now fortified by the indulgences of the table," he looked at the matter in quite another light, and signified his acceptance of the obliging offer.

Proverbial is Horace's mollia tempora fandi, though not always identified with the paulo-postprandial tense as the really preterpluperfect one for an optative mood. There is a time for all things; and the time for asking a favour is just after dinner.

Every man has his mollia tempora, Lord Chesterfield advises his son; "but that is very far from being all day long; and you would choose your time very ill, if you applied to a man when" impransus.

My lord does not write impransus, or its equivalent, in his enumeration of unfavourable times of asking. But no doubt he would have cheerfully acquiesced in the suggested reading. For his lordship was quite alive to dinner-time tactics in the diplomacy of both public and private life. Indeed, in another epistle of his to Young Hopeful aforesaid, some ten months later, he thus counsels him, during his sojourn at Rome: "Whenever you meet with a man eminent in any way, feed him, and feed upon him at the same time."* The pump works so much more easily when you have used a little oil.

Uncle and nephew in one of Mr. Charles Reade's

* "For instance, those eminent Jesuits-do you know any ?— are so very instructive. You would do well to take one or two such sort of people home with you to dinner every day."-Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, March 8, O.S., 1750.

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fictions, after quarrelling about a loan, meet again at dinner. "After dinner, which Martha took care should be much to his taste, the old man leaned back in his chair, and said with a good humour large as the ocean, 'Now, nephew, about this little affair of yours? Now is the time to come to a man for money; after dinner I feel like doing anything, however foolish, to make all the world happy before I die.""

Mais quand on a diné, n'a-t-on pas de clémence? asks Voltaire. But, indeed, what good quality has one not, after a good dinner? If, according to Burns, ilka man that's drunk's a lord, and wi' tippenny the veriest coward fears no evil,-even so a substantial meal will nerve a Sancho Panza to meet disaster, and inspirit a Gros-René to moral heroism. Frankly the latter confesses, speaking for himself, and judging from himself,

J'en juge par moi-même, et la moindre disgrace,
Lorsque je suis à jeun, me saisit, me terrasse;

Mais quand j'ai bien mangé, mon âme est ferme à tout,

Et les plus grands revers n'en viendraient pas à bout.

Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody," muses Mr. Samuel Pepys, fresh from assisting at a festive ré-union with that felicitous result. The travelled Englishman in Washington Irving's "Inn at Terracina," arrives there with "an unhappy expression about the corners of his mouth; partly from not having yet made his dinner." There is nothing, however, that conquers a traveller's spleen sooner than eating,