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 suppressed confidence, no bridge from board to bed, over which a false step (and your wine-cup is a marvellous corrupter of ambulatory rectitude) might precipitate into an irrecoverable abyss of perilous communication or unwholesome truth.

One's pillow became at once the legitimate and natural bourne to "the overheated brain;" and the generous rashness of the coenatorial reveller was not damped by untimeous caution or ignoble calculation.
But "we have changed all that now." Sobriety has become the successor of suppers; the great ocean of moral encroachment has not left us one little island of refuge.