hand, and Jesus lies in jewelled robes on straw within the manger. To right and left bow the shepherds worshipping in dumb show, while voices. from behind chant a solemn hymn. In the midst of the melody is heard a flourish of trumpets, and heralds step upon the stage, followed by the three crowned kings. They have come from the far East, led by the star. The song ceases, while drums and fifes and trumpets play a stately march. The kings pass by, and do obeisance one by one. Each gives some costly gift; each doffs his crown and leaves it at the Saviour's feet. Then they retire to a distance and worship in silence like the shepherds. Again the angel's song is heard, and while it dies away, the curtain closes, and the lights are put out.

The play is over, and evening has come. The people must go from the warm church into the frozen snow, and crunch their homeward way beneath the moon. But in their minds they carry a sense of light and music and unearthly loveliness. Not a scene of this day's pageant will be lost. It grows within them and creates the poetry of Christmas. Nor must we forget the sculptors who listen to the play. We spoke of them minutely, because these mysteries sank deep into their souls and found a way into their carvings on the cathedral walls. The monk who made Madonna by the southern porch will remember Gabriel, and place him bending low in lordly salutation by her side. The painted glass of the chapter house will glow with fiery choirs of angels learned by heart that night. And who does not know the mocking devils and quaint satyrs that the humorous sculptor will carve among his fruits and flowers? Some of the misereres of the stalls still bear portraits of the shepherd thief, and of the ox and ass who blinked so blindly when the kings by torchlight brought their dazzling gifts. Truly these old miracle-plays and the carved work of cunning hands that they inspired are worth to us more than all the delicate creations of Italian pencils. Our homely Northern churches still retain for the child who reads their bosses and their sculptured fronts more Christmas poetry than we can find in Fra Angelico's devoutness, or the liveliness of Giotto. Not that Southern artists have done nothing for our Christmas. Cimabue's gigantic angels at Assisi, and the radiant seraphs of Raphael or of Signorelli, were seen by Milton in his Italian journey. He gazed in Romish churches on graceful nativities, into which Angelico and Credi threw their simple souls. How much they tinged his fancy we cannot say. But what we know of heavenly hierarchies we later men have learned from Milton; and what he saw he spoke, and what he spoke in sounding verse lives for us now and sways our reason, and controls our fancy, and makes an art of high theology.

mas.

Thus have we attempted rudely to recall a scene of medieval ChristTo understand the domestic habits of that age is not so easy, though one can fancy how the barons in their halls held Christmas with the boar's head and the jester and the great yule-log. On the daïs sat lord and lady, waited on by knight and squire and page; but down the

long hall feasted yeomen and hinds and men-at-arms. Little remains to us of those days, and we have outworn their jollity. It is really from the Elizabethan poets that our sense of old-fashioned festivity arises. They lived at the end of one age and the beginning of another. Though born to inaugurate the new era, they belonged by right of association and sympathy to the period that was fleeting fast away. This enabled them to represent the poetry of past and present. Old customs and old states of feeling, when they are about to perish, pass into the realm of art. For art is like a flower, which consummates the plant and ends its growth, while it translates its nature into loveliness. Thus Dante and Orcagna enshrined medieval theology in works of imperishable beauty, and Shakspeare and his fellows made immortal the life and manners that were decaying in their own time. Men do not reflect upon their mode of living till they are passing from one state to another, and the consciousness of art implies a beginning of new things. Let one who wishes to appreciate the ideal of an English Christmas read Shakspeare's song, "Where icicles hang by the wall;" and if he knows some old grey grange, far from the high road, among pastures, with a river flowing near, and cawing rooks in elm trees by the garden-wall, let him place Dick and Joan and Marian there. We have heard so much of pensioners, and barons of beef, and yule-logs, and bay, and rosemary, and holly-boughs cut upon the hill-side, and crab-apples bobbing in the wassail bowl, and masques and mummers, and dancers on the rushes, that we need not here describe a Christmas-eve in olden times. But one characteristic of the age of Elizabeth may be mentioned: that is, its love of music. Fugued melodies sung by voices without instruments were much in vogue. We call them madrigals, and their half-merry, half-melancholy music, yet recalls the time when England had her gift of art, when she needed not to borrow of Marenzio and Palestrina, when her Wilbyes and her Morlands and her Dowlands won the praise of Shakspeare and the court. We hear the echo of those songs, and in some towns at Christmas or the New Year old madrigals still sound in praise of Oriana and of Phyllis and the country life. What are called waits are but a poor travesty of those well-sung Elizabethan carols. We turn in our beds half-pitying, halfangered, by harsh voices that quaver senseless ditties in the fog, or tuneless fiddles playing popular airs without propriety or interest. It is a strange mixture of incongruous elements which the Elizabethan age presents. We see it afar off, like the meeting of a hundred streams that grow into a river. We are sailing on the flood long after it has shrunk into a single tide, and the banks are dull and tame, and the all-absorbing ocean is before us. Yet sometimes we hear a murmur of the distant fountains, and Christmas is a day on which the many waters of the age of great Elizabeth sound clearest.

The age which followed was not poetical. The Puritans restrained festivity and art, and hated music. Yet from this period stands out the hymn of Milton, written when he was a youth, but bearing promise of his

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later muse. At one time, as we read it, we seem to be looking on a picture by some old Italian artist. But no picture can give Milton's music or make the "base of heaven's deep organ blow." Here he touches new associations, and reveals the realm of poetry which it remained for later times to traverse. Milton felt the true sentiment of Northern Christmas when he opened his poem with the "winter wild," in defiance of historical probability, and what the French call "local colouring." Nothing shows how wholly we people of the North have appropriated Christmas, and made it a creature of our own imagination, more than this dwelling on winds and snows, and bitter frosts, so alien from the fragrant nights of Palestine. But Milton's hymn is like a symphony, embracing many thoughts and periods of varying melody. The music of the seraphim brings to his mind the age of gold, and that suggests the judgment and the redemption of the world. Satan's kingdom fails, the false gods go forth, Apollo leaves his rocky throne, and all the dim Phoenician and Egyptian deities, with those that classic fancy fabled, troop away like ghosts into the darkness. What a swell of stormy sound is in those lines! It reminds us of the voice of Pan, which went abroad upon the waters when Christ died, and all the utterances of God on earth, feigned in Delphian shrines, or truly spoken on the sacred hills, were mute for ever.

After Milton came the age which, of all others, is the prosiest in our history. We cannot find much novelty of interest added to Christmas at this time. But there is one piece of poetry that somehow or another seems to belong to the reign of Anne and of the Georges, -the poetry of bells. Great civic corporations reigned in those days, churchwardens tyrannized and were rich, and many a goodly chime of bells they hung in old church-steeples. Let us go into the square room of the belfry, where the clock ticks all day, and the long ropes hang dangling down with fur upon their hemp for ringer's hands, above the socket set for ringers' feet. There we may read long lists of gilded names, recording mountainous bob-majors, rung a century ago, with special praise to him who pulled the tenor-bell, year after year, until he died, and left it to his son. The art of bell-ringing is profound, and requires a long apprenticeship. Even now, in some old cities, the ringers form a guild and mystery. Suppose it to be Christmas-eve, in the year 1772. It is now a quarter before twelve, and the sexton has unlocked the churchgates, and set the belfry door ajar. Candles are lighted in the room above, and jugs of beer stand ready for the ringers. Up they bustle one by one, and listen to the tickings of the clock that tell the passing minutes. At last it gives a click; and now they throw off coat and waistcoat, strap their girdles tighter round the waist, and each holds his rope in readiness. Twelve o'clock strikes, and forth across the silent city go the clamorous chimes. The steeple rocks and reels, and far away the night is startled. Damp turbulent West winds, rushing from the distant sea, and swirling up the inland valleys, catch the sound, and toss it to and fro, and bear it by gusts and snatches to watchers far away, upon bleak moorlands and the

brows of woody hills. Is there not something dim and strange in the thought of these eight men meeting in the heart of a great city in the narrow belfry-room, to stir a mighty sound that shall announce to listening ears miles, miles away, the birth of a new day, and tell to dancers, mourners, students, sleepers, and perhaps to dying men, that Christ is born?

Let this association suffice for the time. And of our own Christmas so much has been said and sung by better voices, that we may leave it to the feelings and the memories of those who read the fireside tales of Dickens, and are happy in their homes. The many elements which we have endeavoured to recall, mix all of them in the Christmas of the present, partly, no doubt, under the form of vague and obscure sentiment, partly as timehonoured reminiscences, partly as a portion of our own life. But there is one view of poetry which we enjoy more fully than any previous age. That is music. Music is of all the arts the youngest, and of all can free herself most readily from symbols. A fine piece of music moves before us like a living passion, which needs no form or colour, no interpreting associations, to convey its strong but indistinct significance. Each man there finds his soul revealed to him, and enabled to assume a cast of feeling in obedience to the changeful sound. In this manner all our Christmas thoughts and emotions have been gathered up for us by Handel in his drama of the Messiah. To Englishmen it is almost as well known and necessary as the Bible. But only one who has heard its pastoral episode performed year after year from childhood in the hushed cathedral, where pendant lamps or sconces make the gloom of aisle and choir and airy column half intelligible, can invest this music with long associations of accumulated awe. To his mind it brings a scene at midnight of hills, clear in the starlight of the East, with white flocks scattered on the down. The breath of winds that come and go, the bleating of the sheep, with now and then a tinkling bell, and now and then the voice of an awakened shepherd, is all that breaks the deep repose. Overhead shimmer the bright stars, and low to West lies the moon, not pale and sickly (he dreams) as in our North, but golden, full, and bathing distant towers and tall aërial palms with floods of light. Such is a child's vision, begotten by the music of the symphony, and when he wakes from trance at its low silver close, the dark cathedral seems glowing with a thousand angel faces, and all the air is tremulous with angel wings. Then follow the solitary treble voice and the swift chorus.

Here let me close my Christmas reveries. I have tried to set down some of the various elements which age after age has added to make up our Northern festival. An Italian or a Spaniard, looking backward up the river of Time, would see other landmarks; but all who call themselves by the great Christian name would find the fountain of their feeling in the event which binds Christendom into unity, and makes the world one brotherhood.

American Humour,

THE close blood-relationship which exists between ourselves and the American people has produced a curious play of inconsistent sentiment. Before the late war there was a tendency amongst many, and especially amongst the most educated Americans, to take such pride in their connection with the mother-country as was consistent with a strong sense of their own superior merits. Still when a man has never had a chance of quarrelling except with his brother, the resulting family feud is apt to be bitter; and when his only foundation for boasting has been derived from thrashing the same brother, the feud is likely to be long remembered. We need not inquire how far the feelings entertained towards us have been modified by certain late disputes. For the present there is undoubtedly a soreness which gives the repulsive forces at least a momentary superiority to the attractive. Americans are more apt to boast of their having developed a distinct national character than of forming a branch of the "Anglo-Saxon" race. And putting aside the animosity which such a sentiment may cover, we cannot doubt that it expresses on the whole a wiser and manlier view. When a nation is passing out of the hobbledehoy stage, it should become independent in thought as well as in political arrangements. Moreover, although the nucleus upon which the American nation was formed was of genuine English stuff, an immense quantity of foreign material has gathered round it, which will materially modify its ultimate composition. Germans and Irish have poured in by the hundred thousand. New York is said to include the third German city population in the world; and must contain more Irishmen than any place after Dublin. In the far West there are villages where, to judge from the language, the traveller might fancy himself on the banks of the Rhine or the Danube; and there are many towns where the German element seems to dispute the predominance of the American. The curious thing is, indeed, not that the population should have so heterogeneous an appearance, but that it should tend so rapidly to conform to the wellknown American type. A generation or two, at most, seems to suffice to stretch the fat placid German and to sober the excitable Irishman into the lean, eager, and self-restrained. Yankee; and to initiate the new comers into all the mysteries of caucuses, platforms, newspapers, freeschools, and the whole machinery of American social life. Distinct, however, as the American breed has become, the country is still in some respects a province of England. We cannot speak here of similarity in laws, religion, politics, and a few other trifles. But the identity of language is itself one great bond of union. England and America are