which, by the way, is that of Shakspeare’s Twelfth-Night, another play of the season, for Twelfth-Night is included in Christmas. Indeed, if you would banish foreign matters from Christmas, you must banish Christmas itself. You must sweep away mince-pies, with their currants from Greece, their cloves and mace from the Spice Islands, and their peel of lemon from Sicily. You must abolish your plum-pudding, with its raisins from Malaga, your boar’s head from Germany, chestnuts from Spain and France, oranges from Portugal, wines every one of them, except British, all your hot pickles, all your teas and coffees, your very twelfth-cake with its sugar: nay, even the name of the season, to say nothing of things too reverend to be specified. You would not have a mahogany table to dine upon. Sixpence would not be left you to buy a cigar, nor a cigar to be bought; and if you wished to console yourself with singing a carol, ten to one but the tune would be taken out of your mouth, being found to belong to Pergolese or Palestrina, or some other Italian inventor of the phrases of melody.

Italian! Why, Italy will be talked about this Christmas at half the tables in England, with the Pope and Mr. Cobden at its head; and we think we see our little Blue Jar the more valued accordingly. Mr. Cobden has returned from Italy, brimful, as such a man ought to be, of its beauties and merits. He himself will talk plentifully about it; and others will talk, because he has talked already. The Duke of Devonshire has been in Italy. Lord John has an Envoy in Italy. Every reigning circle of private and public life has had its representative visitor in that country. Everybody, indeed, may be said to visit it every day in the newspapers, to see how the Pope and Reform are going on; poor Sicily has been in trouble with its “Captain Romeo” (strange link of times past and present); and Mr. Cobden has the magnanimity to express his regret that he had not made himself a master, when he was young, of the language of the beautiful peninsula.

Now, one of the great objects of the present writer, for many years past, has been to lure his readers into the love of other languages, particularly of this most beautiful of them all. It is for this reason he has scarcely ever quoted the most trivial expression from any one of them without giving a version of it; knowing well, how many intelligent men there are who would enjoy the original, if they knew it, far better than many an accidental scholar, and who are therefore willing to have the least glimpse of it afforded them. It has been well said, that “mankind will cease to quarrel with one another, when they understand one another.” Mr. Cobden, in his entertaining and instructive speech at the Manchester Athenæum, has told us how he was struck with this conviction during his tour. But he arrived at it before, by the intuition of a happy nature. Why, for his own delight, does he not make himself a master of the language he so admires? He is a reader by the fireside; and one hour’s reading, per diem, would render such a man more intimate with it in the course of a year than nine-tenths of its masters in England. But perhaps he is such. At all events, he may have become acquainted with it sufficiently for enjoyment; as much, for instance, as ourselves; more so, if he speaks it; for though we read, well enough, most of the languages that we translate, we can speak them no better than just to make our way through Italy and France. We mention this, partly that we may not seem to know more than we do, and partly to encourage others to learn. A little hearty love is better in this, as in all other cases, than a heap of indifferent knowledge. We are ashamed to say, that we know less of Greek, in one sense of the word, than we did when young, and are obliged to look out more words in the dictionary; for to a dictionary we are still forced to resort, though we love the language next to Italian, and hold it in higher admiration. But then we know our ignorance better than we did at that time; are more aware of beauties to be enjoyed, and nice meanings to be discovered; and the consequence is, that whenever we undertake to translate a passage from Greek, we take our love on one side of us, and our dictionary on the other, and before we set about it, make a point of sifting every possible meaning and root of meaning, not excepting those in words the most familiar to us, in order that not an atom of the writer’s intention may be missed. We do not say, of course, that we always succeed in detecting it; but it is not for want of painstaking.

The labour we delight in, physicks pain.

Now by a like respect for the good old maxim of “slow and sure,” and by dint of doing a little, or even a very little, every day, there is no lover of poetry and beauty who in the course of a few months might not be as deep as a bee in some of the sweetest flowers of other languages; and it is for readers of this sort that we have not only translated and commented on Greek and other passages in the book before us, but in some instances given intimations of the spirit in which we have studied them;—being anxious to allure to the study such as can find time for it, and to give some little taste of their exquisiteness to those who cannot. For all sorts of benefits lie in a knowledge of languages, both to men out of the world and men in it;—all additions to the stock of profit and pleasure,—to the certainty of knowing (as the phrase is) “what to be at” on occasions where profitable information is required; of not losing any advantage, either of relative or of positive gain; of growing superior to debasing fears and to ignorant and inhuman assumptions; and above all, of assisting the great cause of the advancement and mutual intercourse of all men, which shall put an end to narrow-minded ideas of profit and loss, and open up that moral, and intellectual, and cordial as well as commercial Free Trade, without which we should remain little better for ever than a parcel of ill-taught children, willing, if not able, to cheat one another in corners. But all this cannot be done, unless knowledge and taste go hand-in-hand; or, in other words, unless we learn to perceive the finally pleasurable, as well as the intermediately profitable; otherwise, when we come to the end of our gain, we shall be but at the beginning of a sense of our unfitness to enjoy it; and this, too, after missing a thousand graces by the way. Supposing health, for instance, and other favourable circumstances to have been on a par, which of any two men in the age of Shakspeare was the more capable of enjoying the whole round of his Christmas holidays,—he who had plenty of money to disburse for them, but no taste for their plays and pageants beyond what was shared by everybody who had eyes and ears; or he who understood all the beauties of their imagery and their allusions; who saw their colours with the eye of a painter, and heard their words with the apprehension of a poet; to whom the music was not a mere prettiness to patronise, or movement to beat time to, but an interweaving of shapes of grace and circles of harmony; to whom gods indeed descended from heaven, and nymphs brought back ages of gold; to whom terror itself was but a passing phase of the operation of good; and by, as well as for, whom, some justice, however small, was thus done to that magnificence of sight and suggestiveness with which heaven has adorned the universe, and that tendency to hope the best of all things which no seeming contradiction can do away? To feel thus is not only to be able to endure the perplexities presented to the mind by Christmas itself, its poor, and its polemics, but to pass the “flaming bounds” of telescope and microscope, and repose