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ELVES AND SQUIRRELS 147 SHEPHERD AND DOG 161 ENGLISH PASTORAL 162 CHAUCER 176 MOUNT ÆTNA 177 OF ANJOU, KING OF SICILY 197 SICILIAN BEE-HIVES 198 ENGLISH BEE-HIVES 210 SICILIAN VESPERS 211 MELI, FROM A MEDALLION 235

 

 

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CHRISTMAS AND ITALY;

OR

A PREFATORY ESSAY, SHOWING THE EXTREME FITNESS
OF THIS BOOK FOR THE SEASON.

 

In one of the volumes of that celebrated French publication, the Almanach des Gourmands, which sounds the depth of the merit of soups, and decides on the distracting claims of the most affinitive relishes, there is a frontispiece presenting to the respectful eyes of the reader a “Jury of Tasters.” They form a board of elderly gentlemen with the most thoughtful faces, and are in the act of chewing each his mouthful, and profoundly ruminating on its pretensions. Having seen but this single volume of the work, and that only for a short time (which we mention with becoming regret), we are not qualified to report its verdicts; but one of them made an impression on us not to be forgotten. It ran as follows:—“With this sauce a man might eat his father.”

Now, far are we, in the most ambitious moments of our honey-making, from aspiring at a judgment upon us like that;—sad evidence of the excesses of imagination into which the most serious intellects may be transported, in consequence of giving way to their appetites. One of the especial parts of our vocation is to draw sweet out of bitter; and the only association of ideas which these unfilial sages brought to our mind, was that of an equally searching, but far nobler set of judges, who, when this our Honey first made its appearance at the periodical table of Mr. Ainsworth, and was thence diffused over the country, exclaimed from all quarters, after the most benignant meditation, “With this sauce a man might swallow some of the bitterest morsels of life.” “This is the condiment to sweeten every man’s daily bread.” “There is the right Christian aroma in the sacrificial part of the offering of these dulcitudes.”

We blush, of course, with the requisite modesty in repeating these approvals; and, indeed, should blush a great deal more if we thought that the contents of our Jar (as far as they originate with ourselves) had any merit beyond such as might easily be competed with by thousands throughout the land, upon the strength of their own thoughts and good-will, assisted by a little reading and cheerfulness; but the truth is, that our friends in Cornhill, having purchased the stock in consequence of those approvals, and thinking it worth their while, after it had been clarified and augmented, to put it into elegant vehicles of their own, and so qualify it to be made into Christmas presents, we are desirous to show how fit it is for that purpose; nay, how emphatically it would have been so considered in the “good old Christmas times.”

It is true, that besides the good old Christmas times, there are such things as good new Christmas times; and in respect to the great object of both, we are heartily of opinion that the latter far surpass the former, and that no literary fare for the season ever came up to the substantial as well as exquisite food set forth for us in the pages of Chimes and Christmas Carols. They are nectar and ambrosia for the spirit in the humblest shapes of the flesh. They are the sermons of the morning rescued from the dead letter of mere assent and custom, reproduced with all the allurements of wit and pathos, and made contributory to the greatest practical workings of the time. And the time has no greater glory than the fact of the conversion of satire itself to a beneficent spirit, which (with a few occasional deviations, that must be pardoned for habit’s sake) it obviously and largely possesses, and which it will complete ere long, by an impartiality towards every rank and description of men.

These exceptions to our claims being admitted, we shall grow bold on the strength of our candour; and aver, that our Jar of Honey is eminently suited to almost all other old Christmas associations (of an unvulgar order), while at the same time it does not omit, if it does not prominently put forth, this modern one of the right Christian spirit; as indeed, by the favour of the critics, has already been noticed. Christmas amusements of old were a mixture of poetry, piety, revelry, superstition, story-telling, and masquing, particularly Pagan and Arcadian masquing; and here you have them all. But they were not confined to these. At no time does talk run freer on all subjects than at Christmas, because at no time are the animal spirits set more at liberty; and hence no topic is baulked if it come uppermost, any more than it is in these pages. And as to the foreign part of our title, when Shakspeare wrote his Winter’s Tale (and a Winter’s Tale was emphatically a Christmas Tale) he laid the scene of it in the same country as that of our little Jar. Shakspeare’s Christmas Tale is a Sicilian tale, and it presents the same mixture as we do, of old Sicilian story and English pastoral. To be exclusively English was never the contemplation of any Christmas talk. No later than the other day, Coleridge wrote a play in professed imitation of the Winter’s Tale. He calls it “Zapolya, a Christmas Tale,” and the scene is laid in Illyria;