hat I had yielded to the summons of
the Christmas bells. I sat among a congregation of shadows, not in the
great cathedral, but in a little parish church far from here. When I
came forth, it astonished me to see the softly radiant sky, and to tread
on the moist earth; my dream expected a wind-swept canopy of cold grey,
and all beneath it the gleam of new-fallen snow. It is a piety to turn
awhile and live with the dead, and who can so well indulge it as he whose
Christmas is passed in no unhappy solitude? I would not now, if I might,
be one of a joyous company; it is better to hear the long-silent voices,
and to smile at happy things which I alone can remember. When I was
scarce old enough to understand, I heard read by the fireside the
Christmas stanzas of "In Memoriam." To-night I have taken down the
volume, and the voice of so long ago has read to me once again--read as
no other ever did, that voice which taught me to know poetry, the voice
which never spoke to me but of good and noble things. Would I have those
accents overborne by a living tongue, however welcome its sound at
another time? Jealously I guard my Christmas solitude.

XX.

Is it true that the English are deeply branded with the vice of
hypocrisy? The accusation, of course, dates from the time of the Round-
heads; before that, nothing in the national character could have
suggested it. The England of Chaucer, the England of Shakespeare,
assuredly was not hypocrite. The change wrought by Puritanism introduced
into the life of the people that new element which ever since, more or
less notably, has suggested to the observer a habit of double-dealing in
morality and religion. The scorn of the Cavalier is easily understood;
it created a traditional Cromwell, who, till Carlyle arose, figured
before the world as our arch-dissembler. With the decline of genuine
Puritanism came that peculiarly English manifestation of piety and virtue
which is represented by Mr. Pecksniff--a being so utterly different from
Tartufe, and perhaps impossible to be understood save by Englishmen
themselves. But it is in our own time that the familiar reproach has
been persistently levelled at us. It often sounds upon the lips of our
emancipated youth; it is stereotyped for daily impression in the offices
of Continental newspapers. And for the reason one has not far to look.
When Napoleon called us a "nation of shop-keepers," we were nothing of
the kind; since his