The Book of History is the Bible of Irony. - George Saintsbury

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.

But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat — it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older — as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.