scout and despise the miserable notion of one
fixed exalted form of conventional dinner-party,
to which all must yield themselves, or resign
hope that they may ever dare to divide mutton
with a friend.  It is a deadly heresy that has
been on the increase of late, and has been setting
up the conventional for the real standard of
hospitality in house after house.  The result is,
that at this day many a genial man of moderate
income, who is at once sensible and sensitive,
will not attempt to do what he cannot do well;
and because he dares not defy the conventional
heresies, does violence to his inclinations, and
asks to his house no dinner-guests but those who
are content to share his customary meal.  Other
men, equally genial but less sensitive, do not
flinch from the dinner of compromises with
which English society is too familiar.  They ask
their friends to swallow the greengrocer-butler,
the cheap wines of an expensive sort, the ill-
made sauces, and the lukewarm entremets
with ambitious names: lumps of spoilt food
horribly unlike anything that a sane man with a
healthy stomach would, of his own free choice,
on any day of the year, sit down to eat.  Enough
of this.  Let us be sociable, let us be liberally
festive, but let us be honest withal, and let each
man give in his own way, and according to his
taste and means, his own best welcome to his
friend.

Dr. Johnson was sound in his distinction when
he said of a dinner he had eaten that it was "a
good dinner enough, but not a dinner to ask a
man to," but the vulgarly polite interpretation
of "a dinner to ask a man to" is not at all
sound.  Let us see how this is.  Aristology, or
the science of Dinner-fellowship, sets out, as we
have said, with the three postulates, that it calls
on a man to make the best of himself, and of
his friends, and of his victuals. In a conventional
dinner, even where the victuals are of the
best, the third of these conditions has not been
fulfilled.  The mind of the host is not in the
feast he has spread.  If the courtesy also be
formal, or if the show of cordiality towards
only one guest be insincere, if there be one man
with his legs under the mahogany whose
presence is not really wanted, but who has been
asked to dinner by reason of some conventional
sense of necessity, then we say of such a
banquet, let the cooks who made it, eat it.  There
is a fly in the pot.  The dinner stinks, and we
will none of it.  It is true that there are some
of us so unhappily situated that we think ourselves
obliged, and perhaps are obliged, to ask
people whom we do not care for to formal
dinners.  For such conventional guests the
conventional is the fit form of dinner. The victualling
of these discordant guests is like buying or
selling on 'Change—a pure matter of business;
and as stockbrokers, merchants, and tradesmen
formularise all methods of business transaction
because they find it convenient in commerce to
hide their individualities behind phrases
appointed to express all customary wants and
relations of their business life, so may we
formularise our dinners whenever they are mere
matters of debtor and creditor account, as now
and then they must be.  But as the merchant
when he converses with his private friends drops
the style of his business intercourse, so should
the host, when he is at home with his true friends
about him, abjure the vain repetitions of the
heathen, and delight to give a dinner like himself.
For, we may reckon it the first great law in
Synaristology that the dinner itself should be
honestly individual.  The perfect host is bound
to put his mind into it, and make it accord in the
best manner with his means, his taste, or any
special opportunity he may have of setting
forth in the most pleasant manner, one, or a few,
or many, of the meats and drinks that are best
after their kind.  Let us give to the right form
of English social dinner a right English name,
and call it a Home Dinner. By asking a man to
a family dinner, it is understood already that we
ask him to share the ordinary dinner of the
household.  The conventional dinner-party that
we know too well, let us leave henceforth to the
uses it will always have in the mere commerce
of society.  But let us mean by a Home Dinner,
a domestic festival for those whom the host
knows, or desires to know, as his real friends or
well-liked acquaintances, and in whose company
he means to make the best of himself, of them,
and of his victuals.

He will not make the best of himself if his
dinner be in any way a sham.  He must fairly
and fearlessly proportion its cost to his means.
This he must not do as one who pinches himself
and his household in private that once a year, or
oftener, by a strained effort that gives pleasure
to nobody, he may afford to make his dinner-
table a coarse imitation of the table of a duke;
his board must be spread as that of one who
likes often to see his best friends about him, and
who, without discomfort to himself, knows how,
whenever they come, to entertain them well.  The
scale of the Home Dinner being, then, in the first
place, honestly proportioned to the income of
the host and his resources, the indispensable
condition of its plan is that everything of which
it consists shall be of its kind the best.  If the
best quality of costly wines be too expensive,
then those wines must not have their names
taken in vain at the Home Dinner.  There are
wholesome and excellent wines of less cost, and
of one or two of these the best quality should
very carefully be chosen.  If possible, let there
be no mutton but four year old, no beef but
Highland bred.  In short, the Home Dinner is to
mean, whatever its degree of costliness, a sincere
welcome, hearty intercourse, and meats and
drinks, however modest their character and
small their variety, pleasantly set forth, each
the best after its kind.  Let all assent to this,
and there is an end to a legion of social
nuisances.

As the world now runs, friendship, based upon
like-mindedness rather than upon like-moneyedness,
is constantly arising between men of very
different degrees of income. Tomkins has two,
three, four, five, six, seven, or eight hundred a
year and a family; Wilkins has fifteen hundred