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And you might as well have hunted in the woods of Ethiopia for Prester John, or fixed the parish of the everlasting Jew, as have attempted to say what "jentaculum" might be, or what "prandium." Only one thing was clear what they were not. Neither was or wished to be anything that people cared for.
Nay, so much stress did the Romans lay on maintaining this primitive state of the appetite undisturbed, that any prelusions with either jentaculum or prandium were said, by a very strong phrase indeed, polluere famem, to pollute the sanctity of the appetite.
"Peace, Gammer Sludge!" said the pedagogue; "PAUCA VERBA, Gammer Sludge; look to the furmity, Gammer Sludge; CURETUR JENTACULUM, Gammer Sludge; this gentleman is none of thy gossips." Then turning to Tressilian, he resumed his lofty tone, "And so, most worshipful, you would really think yourself FELIX BIS TERQUE should I point out to you the dwelling of this same smith?"
Between jentaculum and breakfast the differences are as wide as between a horse-chestnut and chestnut horse; differences in the time when, in the place where, in the manner how, but preeminently in the thing which.
In fact, it took as much time and research to arrive at that great discovery as at the Copernican system. True it is, reader, that you have heard of such a word as jentaculum; and your dictionary translates that old heathen word by the Christian word breakfast. But dictionaries, one and all, are dull deceivers.
For it happened that while some had jentaculum but no prandium, others had prandium but no jentaculum; a third party had both; a fourth party, by much the largest, had neither. But by thus merging the separate times of each, they abolished the sole real difference that had ever divided them. Losing that, they lost all.
In the very spirit of serious truth, we assure you, that the delusion about "jentaculum" is even exceeded by this other delusion about "prandium." Salmasius himself, for whom a natural prejudice of place and time partially obscured the truth, admits, however, that prandium was a meal which the ancients rarely took; his very words are "raro prandebant veteres."
It is a very Barmecide feast, we do assure you this same "jentaculum;" at which abstinence and patience are much more exercised than the teeth: faith and hope are the chief graces cultivated, together with that species of the magnificum which is founded on the ignotum.
And as your dictionary, good reader, translated breakfast by that vain word jentaculum, so, doubtless, it will translate dinner by that still vainer word prandium.
"We took a mouthful," says Sir William Waller, the Parliamentary general, "took a mouthful; paid our reckoning; mounted; and were off." Gustabat here meant that nondescript meal which arose at Rome when jentaculum and prandium were fused into one, and that only a taste or mouthful of biscuit, as we shall show farther on.
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