great respect which our warlike predecessors have paid to
this excellent food. The tables of the ancient entry of this nation were
covered thrice a day with hot roast-beef; and I am credibly informed by
an antiquary, who has searched the registers in which the bills of fare
of the court are recorded, that instead of tea and bread and butter
which have prevailed of late years, the maids of honour in queen
Elizabeth's time were allowed three rumps of beef for their breakfast!"

Now this is manly, and so is the diet it advises; I recommend both to my
readers. Let each determine to make one convert, himself that one. On
Christmas day, let each dine off, or at least have on his table, the
good old English fare, roast beef and plum-pudding! and does such beef
as our island produces need recommendation? What more nutritive and
delicious? and, for a genuine healthy Englishman, what more proper than
this good old national English dish? Let him whose stomach will not bear
it, look about and insure his life--I would not give much for it. It
ought, above all other places, to be duly honoured in our officers'
mess-rooms. As Prior says,

"If I take Dan Congreve right,
Pudding and beef make Britons fight."

So, then, if beef be indeed so excellent,
we shall not much wonder that Shakspeare
should say,

--"A pound of man's flesh
Is not so estimable or profitable.
As flesh of mutton, beeves, or goats!"

The French have christened us (and I think it no disreputable
_sobriquet_) Jack Roastbeef, from a notion we cannot live without
roast-beef, any more than without plum-pudding, porter, and punch;
however, the notion is palpably erroneous. We are proving more and more
every day--to our shame be it spoken!--that we can live without it. At
least do not let it be said we can pass a Christmas without it, merely
to make way for turkeys, fricassees, and ragouts! "Oh, reform it
altogether!"

* * * * *

England was always famous among foreigners for the celebration of
Christmas, at which time our ancestors introduced many sports and
pastimes unknown in other countries, or now even among ourselves. "At
the feast of Christmas," says Stowe, "in the king's court, wherever he
chanced to reside, there was appointed a lord of misrule, or master of
merry disports; the same merry fellow made his appearance at the house
of every nobleman and gentleman of distinction; and, among the rest, the
lord mayor of Lon