Wane, as in duty bound, we wish our readers "A Happy Christmas and a prosperous Now Year," we feel that these annual salutations are gradually losing much of their old meaning. They are sinking into the category of courteous forms, for no better reason than that we are Iearning to live so terribly in earnest that merriment has become as it were an unclean thing, and prosperity has acquired the meaning of victory in the struggle for precedence. Worse than this, children themselves are beginning to take " serious view of ex. istence, such as ought to be postponed for many a year to come. They arg old men and women before their time and a Christmas article cannot) better expended than in protesting against such unnatural precocity, is true that now, as heretofore, the close. of the year brings with it charity ang hospitality, gatherings together of old friends, and thoughtful provision for the wants of those whose lines have fallen in difficult places. Bat we miss the mirth and gaiety of early times when the approach of Christmas.tide turned old people young, and drove young people into ecstasies of delighted anticipation. We have the outing and drinking, the songs and toasts, the evergreen wreaths and the sacred tletoe, but the fan and frolic extinct as the mastodon or the mail. coach. We doubt that even in Eng. lish country houses the traditional cere. monies of the Lord of Misrule are still observed; we know that in great cities they are replaced by sedate and almost sombre entertainments, far removed from the boisterous revelry over which Father Christmas used to preside, The Christmas spirit has gone out of people. Woe carry our cares and anxieties to bed and board, and are incapable of dropping them even in presence of the plum pudding and the punch bowl. Perhaps, it is in part that we have lost. the knack of brewing punch, the beverage which Dickens and Lever immortalized in prose, and Father Prout and the "Trish Whiskey Drinker" in polyglot verse, The delusive beverage that still bears the honoured name, has lost good qualities or gained bad, since the days when Mr. Wardle's guests assembled round Mr, Pickwick's bed to assist him in drowning his rheumatism, No headaches, or after reminders more serious still, used to attend these prolonged potations, which left the por-formers ready to recommence on the morrow the pleasant transgressions of the dey before. The race of ten tumbler men has quite or almost disappeared, and though we need not sigh over their vanished powers of absorption, we cannot but regret the causes of our inability to emulate their conquests. The liquor may have degenerated, but the greatest part of the change is in ourselves. And then, among the young in years we look almost in vain for children. Since perverse ingenuity suggested the contrivance of mechanical dolls and complicated machines to take the place of simple toys, the abundant enjoyment that these used to afford has departed for ever. The scientific elaboration of toys, involving great increnso in their cost, makes it nowadays impossible for a man with a slender purse to fit out two or three children with what they consider their fair share of the contents of a toy shop. He might as well think of fitting out two or three brides with jewellery. Indirectly, the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.