296 ATTRACTIONS OF WINTER WEATHER 



freshing as an oasis in the desert. But comparatively 

 very little heat goes a long way with most Englishmen ; 

 and in a really tropical climate they generally feel at 

 their worst. Even an unusually warm summer in Eng- 

 land makes the life of too many of our fellow-creatures 

 a melancholy spectacle, till they begin to pick up again 

 with the shortening days. 



Very different it is in the beginnings of " our old- 

 fashioned English winter " with men who have wealth, 

 health, and strength in moderation ! We believe it is 

 the lightness of feeling, following on the first steady 

 fall of the temperature below the freezing-point, that 

 explains those effusive rhapsodies on " seasonable " 

 jollity which characterise our popular Christmas litera- 

 ture. We are really in excellent spirits, and perhaps 

 the bracing air has gone to our heads. We see every- 

 thing not precisely in couleur de rose, but in the dazzling 

 radiancy of sparkling frost, and are in the humour to 

 listen to absurdities and sentimentalities as sound 

 enough sense to be fitting to the season of the year. 

 But it is the modern school of Christmas writers who 

 are become sickly, stilted, and sentimental ; and for 

 that Dickens is chiefly responsible. He began so ad- 

 mirably in a flow of natural humour and pathos, that 

 he was encouraged to parody himself, and so -the pictu- 

 resqueness of " Pickwick " and the city idyl of the 

 "Christmas Carol" came down to the level of the latest 

 of his Christmas annuals. But the early Christmas 

 pictures by masters of genius must touch sympathetic 

 chords in every bosom, and make misery itself often 



