The old phrase that "John Bull could do nothing without a dinner," represented a national weakness of our public life, which was happily to come to an end with the busier and better life he entered upon in the twentieth century. Our gross and costly, time-wasting, and health-injuring habit of incessant and universal public dinner-stuffing was no longer either consistent or possible after the nineteenth century. We had then too many other and higher objects in hand. Accordingly, this habit expired in favour of one much less costly and more edifying, that, namely, of social and intellectual evening gatherings, where the "refreshments" were of the simplest, and in no way or degree of obstructive effect as regarded the other and chief objects of the assemblage.
This change of the taste and fashion of the time was remarkable chiefly for introducing a practically open door system of evening receptions, on the part of the leading persons, official, scientific, or others of the day; a system which developed into a great national institution and political and social resource of the twentieth and succeeding centuries. In explanation further of this decided change in our old social and somewhat exclusive ways, we must bear in mind that society had become, by this time, much broader and more inclusive, by the universal diffusion of education, as well as of a fairly well-off condition, and of those good manners and that sense of proprieties, which made such open sociability enjoyable, and indeed possible. We had also the benefit of a much freer and more frequent intermixture with foreign
