Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 December 1883 — The English Christmas. [ARTICLE]

The English Christmas.

The English -Christmas tradition makes good cheer the glory of the day. Forty years ago, when'Leeehwas beginning his_ career,. Kenny Meadows was the “character artist” of the Illustrated Lqj&lon News, and its chief holiday pictures were drawn by him. They were all scenes of eating and drinking, of games and jolity. They were full of. bottles and smoking bowls, of roast beef and plum-pudding and mince-pie,~of burning brandy and kissing under the mistletoe. “Old Christmas” was represented as a flowingbearded satyr crowned with ivy and pouring huge flagons of wine, or as a rollick ng boon companion stretching out one hand to the spectator over decanters and jugs and glasses, while the other holds an open tankard. The typical faces of the Christmas figures were those of the rubicund middle-class John Bull, and his healthy daughter gayly resisting the efforts of the young soldier—lrving’s Julia and the Captain —to draw her under the permissive bough; or of the buxom chambermaid and greedy children in a frenzy of delight over the smoking plum-pudding. Christmas, according to those delectable pictures, was all guzzling and gobbling, love-making and other blind-man’s-buff; and as the reader of to-day looks with amused curiosity at those holiday sketches of yesterday, he, too, like the stranger by the fire in Bracebridge Hall, through all the fun and the feasting, hears the music of the old Christmas song: “Twas Christmas broached the mightiest ale, , 'Twas Christmas' hold thg-qierrt est dale ; , A Christmas gambol oft would cheer The poor min's heart through halt the year." This is the spirit of Dickens’ Christmas,; and of Thackeray’s, and, in a great degree, of Irving’s, touched in all of them by the modern humanitarian sen■timent.. ■ Jt“ It titer ffttdiironal English Christinas, when no man should go hungry. For there is no joy upon an empty stomach —except, indeed, the thin ecstasy of the starving saints in old pictures, and they were already dehumanized. This is a Christian truth which asceticism has forgotten. To identify squalor, emaciation, and denial of all human delights with especial sanctity was to degrade the rich and generous religious spirit which taught ,lhat all the world is for man's benefit and pleasure. It was George Herbert of whom Richard Baxter said that he sang as one . whose business in this World was most with God, and whose beautiful lines, “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal Of the earth an.l sky." are as fresh as when they were writtea; who also said. ' ■ : ’ “ko? Us the win is do b!dwv~ ~ The cartllh9.yj.rest, heavens ma i e and foi’.ntitins flow; Nothing we see but means our good. As cur delight or a - our treasure; z The Whole is either our cupboard of food, ' Or cabinet of. pleasure. ** Christianity does n*ot decline any wholesome use or beauty of the world, and it would be a sorry preacher in the chiirch embowered and scenfted with Christmas greens who did not hold that Christmas good.cheer contemplates body as well as soul. — Geo.'. b'm. Curtls, in Harpers Magqzine,