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 noblehearted merchant prince, who kept seven hundred gallons of wine in his house, and was famous for making his workmen happy.

Our third and fourth 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 Pas

toral, 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 Etna 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 Macauley, 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 peoples' mouths, as a flower would be, stuck in the mouth of a barber's block. What would the best claret be to one that could not perceive the odour of it? or the nicest of mince-pies, or college-puddings, to a mouth that had no taste? We are but dull ourselves in such matters (the more 's the pity), and would fain share, when at table, the nicest discernments of sharp and sweet, possessed by the luckier palates around us; but we should only laugh at the poor devil of a pretender, who, with nothing but a palate of silver, and no taste at all,

should affect to emulate the Almanach des Gourmands, and give his opinion of the contending sauces.

May we take, by the way, a Saturnalian liberty, and ask Members of Parliament why they quote no language but Latin, and in Latin no writers but Virgil and Horace? We believe there is an occasional venture on Lucretius, and perhaps on Juvenal. Also, two passages from Ovid, one in praise of the Fine Arts, and another about preferring wrong pursuits to right perceptions. But French has lately been thought worthy of cultivation, even at public schools; almost every man of rank speaks it; and Italian is an ordinary accomplishment. Ariosto, Berni, and others, would supply an admirable crop of new parliamentary quotations; or if there was a fear of the delicacy of the pronunciation, what hinders us from being refreshed with something from Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, or a hundred other wits and thinkers among our gallant neighbours? New paths of quotation are due to rail-roads and Free Trade. There would be a sort of extension of Parliament itself into Paris and Rome, if we occasionally spoke the languages of those illustrious cities. France and Italy would be pleased; books benefited; politics smoothed; intercourse gladdened and enlarged. Even a bit of Greek might be ventured upon, if short and sweet; and Mr. Hume feel relieved in hearing (on the authority of the philosophic Hesiod) that “half” was "better than the whole" (λεOV μσ пavтOS).

The reverend maxim we have quoted respecting spirit and letter reminds us of a little Christmas story which has never been in print, and which, in accordance with the season, we shall take this opportunity of relating. It was brought to our recollection by meeting with the following exquisite passage from Bacon::

"As those wines which flow from the first treading of the grape are sweeter and better than those forced out by the press, which gives them the roughness of the husk and the stone, so are those doctrines best and sweetest which flow from a gentle crush of the Scriptures, and are not wrung into controversies and common-places."

That metaphor of the "husk" is one that has haunted us (so to speak), in connexion with the subject here alluded to, for half our lives; not suggested, we beg leave to say, by the great philosopher-(qualified though he be to suggest hundreds of things to us beyond our powers of origination)—but by the greater force of the necessity of admitting evil and reconciling it to good. And in that point of view the husk we allude to is nobler than Bacon's, or, at least, than what seems to have been in his construction of the word; for we took it in the light of a necessary enclosure and safeguard of a future bud. But to drop this collateral reminiscence, and come to our story. It is entitled

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