DECEMBER. 395 



country houses, and congregated in the great 

 Babylon of pleasure and dissipation; families 

 are collected round the social hearth, where 

 Christmas brings his annual store of frolic and 

 festivities ; and the author, like the bee, with- 

 drawn to his hive, revels amid the sweets of his 

 summer gathering. It is amusing to imagine 

 what a host of pens are at this moment in mo- 

 tion, in sundry places of this little island ! In 

 splendid libraries, furnished with every, bodily 

 comfort, and every literary and scientific re- 

 source, when the noble or popular author fills 

 the sheet which the smile of the bibliopole and 

 reader awaits, and almost anticipates ; in naked 

 and ghastly garrets when the "poor-devil-au- 

 thor" scrawls with numbed fingers and a shiver- 

 ing frame, what will be coldly received, and as 

 quickly forgotten as himself; in pleasant bou- 

 doirs, at rose-wood desks, where lady-fingers 

 pen lady-lays ; in ten thousand nooks and re- 

 cesses the pile of books is growing, under 

 which, shelves, booksellers and readers, shall 

 groan, ere many months elapse. Another sea- 

 son shall come round, and all these leaves, like 

 those of the forest, shall be sw r ept away, leaving 

 only those of a few hardy laurels untouched. 

 But let no one lament them, or think that all 



