in serenities beyond the finite.

We have been led into an unexpected strain of enthusiasm and exaltation; but this is as natural to the season as a church-organ, or as the memory of the Sermon on the Mount. Christmas sees fair play to all reasonable moods of mind, the cheerful being predominant, as the height of reason. After church comes an interval, and after the interval dinner, which is a mixture of the serious and the lively; solid as to the beef and pudding, but light as regards the laughter and the whipped syllabub. Then ensue pastimes for a succession of days, including Twelfth-Day, with reading of books in the morning, and cards and conversation at night; the young chiefly being the players at the once courtly games of forfeits and “Bob,” and the old the performers at whist and the wine-bottle. Our modern Christmas entertainments will not bear comparison for vigour of enjoyment with those of our ancestors before Cromwell’s time, either out of doors or in. They have never recovered the blow given them by the invidious heaviness of the Puritans. But to make amends, we have refined on some of their pleasures; have multiplied others, as in the case of the theatres; and we possess an overflow of their own favourite reading, such as their poets might have envied us. Rare manuscripts have been set free in popular editions; we read the stories which our ancestors used to tell, with thousands of new novels to boot; Christmas alone brings with it a shower of gorgeous and sometimes admirable publications, as if flowers came pouring down with its snow; and in fine, beloved reader, here is our (and your) Jar of Honey, full of the sweet Paganism that was dear to the Shakspeares and Miltons, of the Pastoral which they loved also, of the right Christmas adventures of King Robert of Sicily, (which they perused under another title in the Gesta Romanorum,) of all sorts of good Italianate things, (then, as now, looked upon with wonderful curiosity and respect;) and finally, if loving wishes deceive us not, a sample and prelibation of that quintessential extract of the spirit of Christianity itself, the effect of which is to take away all doubt respecting the celestial balsam, and to make men wonder how they came to mistake for it anything containing the least taste of the fiery, the bitter, or the sour.

If the great and good Pope now reigning (for such he seems to be, in spite of some official drawbacks) has goodness enough to feel the wish, and could ever find greatness enough in him to dare to venture the act, of summoning a new Council of the Church, that should set on its altar this pure and unadulterated attraction of all hearts, instead of the unseemly manufactures of Councils of Trent and Priests of St. Januarius, he would give St. Peter’s its only final chance of continuing to be the throne of the Christian world, and of flourishing under the sweet and only desirable blossom, that shall have done some day for ever with its thorns.

But to return from these altitudes. The story of King Robert, we beg leave to say, is an especial delight of our soul, and gave us some exquisite moments in the writing. How came Shakspeare to let such a subject escape him? or Beaumont and Fletcher? or Decker? or any of the great and loving spirits that abounded in that romantic age? It was extant in manuscript; it abounded, under another name, in print; it presented the most striking dramatic points; extremes of passion were in the characters; pride and its punishment were in it; humility and its reward; a court, a chapel, an angel; pomp, music, satire, buffoonery, sublimity, tears. O Fate! give us a dozen years more life, and a lift in our faculties, immense; and let us try still if even our own verses cannot do something with it.

There is not, we will venture to say, a single portion of our Jar, which does not contain appropriate reading for Christmas.

The first chapter concerns the Arabian Nights; and every little boy knows that the Arabian Nights are reading for all seasons, particularly holidays.

The second chapter is full of the Fairy Tales of Antiquity; things which people used to relate round their fires during the ancient Saturnalia, just as our ancestors used to do at Christmas, and as boys read them still. And the Saturnalia were not only, to the ancients, what the Christmas holidays are to us, but the veritable parents and progenitors of those holidays, as every antiquary knows. It is doubtful whether Macrobius, who wrote a Saturnalia, or Christmas Holiday Book, of his time, was a Pagan or a Christian; but, at all events, his book is full of every kind of miscellaneous reading and gossiping, from Scipio’s Dream down to a scandalous anecdote and a disputed passage in Virgil. Such was the pastime, he tells us, at that season, of the best-informed circles at Rome.

Our third chapter contains, among other Saturnalian subjects, the story of the truly Christmas-like personage, Gellias, one of the wittiest and most hospitable of entertainers, a noble-hearted merchant-prince, who kept seven hundred gallons of wine in his house, and was famous for making his workmen happy.

Our fourth and fifth chapters, besides some Saturnalian stories, include an account of an ancient holiday, full of gossip, and show, and leafy boughs, together with a vast deal of Pastoral,—a summer recollection, to which Christmas has always been fond of reverting, at least in books and among the poets; probably on the principle of extremes meeting, and by a happy rule of contraries. It is observable how fond we are at Christmas of what our forefathers used to call “greens,” that is to say, boughs and flowers and everything which can force the summer, as it were, to remain with us by our firesides.

The sixth chapter is our beloved subject, the story of King Robert aforesaid.

The seventh brings us, through Italian Pastoral, to the Christmas poetical entertainments of our ancestors.

In the eighth and ninth we are in the Old English Poetical Works. In the tenth at Mount Ætna with its stories. In the eleventh with the Bees. In the twelfth with the musical services of the Church, with cheerful pieties of all sorts, and with the jovial Sicilian poet, Meli, one of the most universal of men.

Some persons have fancied that our book would be too learned! The most unlearned of such readers as we hope to possess will see what a notion this is, and to what plain English all our Greek and Latin has turned. We have the greatest contempt for learning, merely so called; together with the greatest respect for it when it sees through the dead letter of time and words into the spirit that concerns all ages and all descriptions of men. Every clever unlearned man in England, rich and poor, if we had the magic to do it, should be gifted to-morrow with all the learning that would adorn and endear his commerce to him, his agriculture, and the poorest flower-pot at his window. It would satisfy the longings that are born with such a man, and are natural to his powers; and would enable him, while he no longer envied such right parliamentary quoters of Virgil as the Minister, or Macaulay, or Sir Robert, or Brougham, or Lord Ellesmere, or Lord Morpeth, or Fox, to laugh at such educated ignoramuses as A, B, and C, who, though the classics were beaten into their heads at school, have no more real taste for what they quote, than the wall has for the pictures that are hung upon it with nail and hammer.

Spirit is everything, and letter is nothing; except inasmuch as it is a vehicle for spirit. “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” A learned quotation is as ridiculous in some people’s mouths as a flower would