People Laughing at a Dinner, ca. 1969
![People Laughing at Dinner](https://thenewinquiry.com/app/uploads/2013/07/People-Laughing-at-Dinner-383x308.jpg)
"To dine in company with more than two is a Gaulish and a German thing. I can hardly bring myself to believe that I have eaten in concert with twenty; so barbarous and herdlike a practice does it now appear to me: such an incentive to drink much and talk loosely; not to add, such a necessity to speak loud, which is clownish and odious in the extreme." --Walter Savage Landor, "Lucellus and Caesar" (1829)