It was Christmas eve in the year of our Lord 1653. The snow, which had fallen fitfully throughout the day, shrouded in white the sloping roofs and narrow London streets, and lay in little, sparkling heaps on every jutting cornice or narrow window-ledge where it could find a resting-place. But in the west the setting […]

It was a Christmas eve in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and through the streets of Nuremberg came drifting a feathery snow that heaped itself in fantastic patterns on the projecting windows and fretted stone balconies of the quaint and crowded houses. It was not an honest and single-minded snow-storm, such as would seek […]

Foot-sore and weary, Mary tried Some rest to seek, but was denied. “There is no room,” the blind ones cried. Meekly the Virgin turned away, No voice entreating her to stay; There was no room for God that day. No room for her, round whose tired feet Angels are bowed in transport sweet The mother […]

“La politesse de l’esprit consiste a penser des choses honnetes et delicates.” A great deal has been said and written during the past few years on the subject of American manners, and the consensus of opinion is, on the whole, unfavourable. We have been told, more in sorrow than in anger, that we are not […]

“Which fiddle-strings is weakness to expredge my nerves this night.”–MRS. GAMP. Anna Robeson Burr, in her scholarly analysis of the world’s great autobiographies, has found occasion to compare the sufferings of the American woman under the average conditions of life with the endurance of the woman who, three hundred years ago, confronted dire vicissitudes with […]

“Can surly Virtue hope to find a friend?”–DR. JOHNSON. Sir Leslie Stephen has recorded his conviction that a sense of humour, being irreconcilable with some of the cardinal virtues, is lacking in most good men. Father Faber asserted, on the contrary, that a sense of humour is a great help in the religious life, and […]

“Laughter is my object: ’tis a property In man, essential to his reason.” THOMAS RANDOLPH, The Muses’ Looking-Glass. American humour is the pride of American hearts. It is held to be our splendid national characteristic, which we flaunt in the faces of other nations, conceiving them to have been less favoured by Providence. Just as […]

“God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off, And keeps our Britain whole within itself.” So speaks “the Tory member’s elder son,” in “The Princess”:– “… God bless the narrow seas! I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad”; and the transatlantic reader, pausing to digest this conservative sentiment, wonders what difference a thousand […]

“When I find learning and wisdom united in one person, I do not wait to consider the sex; I bend in admiration.”–LA BRUYERE. We shall never know, though we shall always wonder, why certain phrases, carelessly flung to us by poet or by orator, should be endowed with regrettable vitality. When Tennnyson wrote that mocking […]

“Surtout, pas de zele.”–TALLEYRAND. There is no aloofness so forlorn as our aloofness from an uncontagious enthusiasm, and there is no hostility so sharp as that aroused by a fervour which fails of response. Charles Lamb’s “D–n him at a hazard,” was the expression of a natural and reasonable frame of mind with which we […]

“Wenten forth in heore wey with mony wyse tales, And hedden leve to lyen al heore lyf aftir.” Piers Plowman. I don’t know about travellers’ “hedden leve” to lie, but that they “taken leve” no one can doubt who has ever followed their wandering footsteps. They say the most charming and audacious things, in blessed […]

“Letters warmly sealed and coldly opened.”–RICHTER. Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment,–Mr. Lucas adds the lack of stamps,–which chill the […]

Mrs. James Gordon Harrington Balderston to Mrs. Lapham Shepherd MY DEAR MRS. SHEPHERD, Will you pardon me for this base encroachment on your time? Busy women are the only ones who ever have any time, so the rest of the world is forced to steal from them. And then all that you organize is so […]

“My Love in her attire doth shew her wit.” It is an old and honoured jest that Eve–type of eternal womanhood–sacrificed the peace of Eden for the pleasures of dress. We see this jest reflected in the satire of the Middle Ages, in the bitter gibes of mummer and buffoon. We can hear its echoes […]

“He is a good man who can receive a gift well.”–EMERSON. There is a sacredness of humility in such an admission which wins pardon for all the unlovely things which Emerson has crowded into a few pages upon “Gifts.” Recognizing that his own goodness stopped short of this exalted point, he pauses for a moment […]

“Il n’est si riche qui quelquefois ne doibve. Il n’est si pauvre de qui quelquefois on ne puisse emprunter.”–Pantagruel. “I lent my umbrella,” said my friend, “to my cousin, Maria. I was compelled to lend it to her because she could not, or would not, leave my house in the rain without it. I had […]

“Of all animals, the cat alone attains to the Contemplative Life.”–ANDREW LANG. The grocer’s window is not one of those gay and glittering enclosures which display only the luxuries of the table, and which give us the impression that there are favoured classes subsisting exclusively upon Malaga raisins, Russian chocolates, and Nuremberg gingerbread. It is […]

More than half a dozen years have passed since Mr. Andrew Lang, startled for once out of his customary light-heartedness, asked himself, and his readers, and the ghost of Charles Dickens–all three powerless to answer–whether the dismal seriousness of the present day was going to last forever; or whether, when the great wave of earnestness […]