always succeed in detecting it; but it is not for want of

painstaking.

"The labour we delight in, physics 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 patronize, 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

d

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 in serenities beyond the finite.

66

After

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. 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.