MEALS. 455 
it I only had a biscuit to comfort me; but there are babies to 
be fed, and the man of wrath, my husband: and how can a 
respectable wife and mother sail past any meridian shallows 
in which those dearest to her are sticking? So I stand by them, 
and am punished every day by that two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon 
feeling to which I so much object, and yet cannot avoid. It is 
mortifying after the sunshiny morning hours at my pond, when 
I feel as though I. were almost a poet, and very nearly a 
philosopher, and wholly a joyous animal in an ecstasy of love 
with life, to come back, and live through those dreary luncheon- 
ridden hours when the soul is crushed out of sight, and sense, 
to take up with cutlets, and asparagus, and revengeful sweet 
things.”” Cotton, who collaborated with Izaak Walton in The 
Compleat Angler, said: ‘‘ My diet is always one glass of ale so 
soon as I am dressed, and no more till dinner.’’ Viator, in the 
same noted book, exclaims, “I will light my pipe, for that is 
my breakfast too.”” The word lunch is literally (Welsh) a lump, 
and was at first simply a lump of bread and cheese taken between 
meals. At the Restoration period dinner never began with 
soup, and the fish was usually served together with the meats. 
Nearly every man dined wearing his hat, as the draughts in the 
dwellings were ghastly. Only one knife, and one fork, were 
placed before each diner, even at the Royal table, whilst at most 
dinners forks were an unknown quantity. “Dinner,” as a 
modern writer declares, ‘should never be eaten without a 
Seventeenth Century Poet, in an old yellow-leaved edition, being 
on the table, not to be read, of course, any more than the flowers 
are to be eaten, but just to make a music of association very 
softly to our thoughts! Dinner is a mystery! a mystery 
whereof the greatest chef knows but little!” ‘Even our 
digestion is governed by angels,” said Blake, “ and (if you will 
but resist the trivial inclination to substitute ‘ bad angels *) 
is there really any greater mystery than the process by which 
beef is turned into brains, and beer into beauty? Every 
handsome woman we see has been made out of beef-steaks, and 
the finest poem that was ever written came out of a grey, pulpy 
mass such as we make brain-sauce of.” 
Captain Gronow, formerly of the Grenadier Guards, wrote 
in his Reminiscences (1862) concerning ‘“ Diet, and Cookery in 
England,” as he remembered them, in the early part of the 
eighteenth century: ‘‘ Even in the best houses, when I was a 
