rest cottage welcomed the festive season with green
decorations of bay and holly--the cheerful fire glanced its rays through
the lattice, inviting the passenger to raise the latch, and join the
gossip knot huddled round the hearth beguiling the long evening with
legendary jokes, and oft-told Christmas tales.

One of the least pleasing effects of modern refinement is the havoc it
has made among the hearty old holiday customs. It has completely taken
off the sharp touchings and spirited reliefs of these embellishments of
life, and has worn down society into a more smooth and polished, but
certainly a less characteristic surface. Many of the games and
ceremonials of Christmas have entirely disappeared, and, like the
sherris sack of old Falstaff, are become matters of speculation and
dispute among commentators. They flourished in times full of spirit and
lustihood, when men enjoyed life roughly, but heartily and vigorously:
times wild and picturesque, which have furnished poetry with its richest
materials, and the drama with its most attractive variety of characters
and manners. The world has become more worldly. There is more of
dissipation and less enjoyment. Pleasure has expanded into a broader,
but a shallower stream, and has forsaken many of those deep and quiet
channels, where it flowed sweetly through the calm bosom of domestic
life. Society has acquired a more enlightened and elegant tone; but it
has lost many of its strong local peculiarities, its homebred feelings,
its honest fireside delights. The traditionary customs of golden-hearted
antiquity, its feudal hospitalities, and lordly wassailings, have passed
away with the baronial castles and stately manor-houses in which they
were celebrated. They comported with the shadowy hall, the great oaken
gallery, and the tapestried parlor, but are unfitted for the light showy
saloons and gay drawing-rooms of the modern villa.

Shorn, however, as it is, of its ancient and festive honors, Christmas
is still a period of delightful excitement in England. It is gratifying
to see that home feeling completely aroused which holds so powerful a
place in every English bosom. The preparations making on every side for
the social board that is again to unite friends and kindred--the
presents of good cheer passing and repassing, those tokens of regard and
quickeners of kind feelings--the evergreens distributed about houses and
churches, emblems of peace and gladness--all these have the