3 02 ATTRACTIONS OF WINTER WEATHER 



cannot help being bright and cheery yourself, you feel 

 the more bound to consider your less fortunate fellow- 

 mortals. Christopher North put it very neatly and 

 truly in one of the " Noctes " for this month of 

 December. He had been eulogising winter, more suo, 

 over a blazing fire before the well-spread board in the 

 blue parlour at Ambrose's ; and the Shepherd had been 

 chiming in with the praises of cold and curling beef 

 and greens. Tickler, sitting in moody reserve, strikes 

 a dissonant note. " This outrageous merriment grates 

 my spirits. 'Twill be a severe winter, and I think of 

 the poor." North answers, " Are not wages good and 

 work plenty, and is not charity a British virtue ? " 

 Charity is still a British virtue ; while institutions that 

 were then unthought of have been founded, and the 

 organisation of dispassionate relief has been indefinitely 

 extended. We remember, for our comfort too, as a 

 fact incontestably established by statistics, that cold is 

 far less destructive than damp to life and consequently 

 to health ; and in the fitful climates of an English 

 winter, we can have but the choice between the one 

 and the other. So let our readers be free-handed with 

 their cheque-books and their purses, and they may give 

 themselves over with easy minds to the joys and the 

 buoyancy inspired by the season. 



Even in the metropolis, setting the chances of acci- 

 dents aside, a hard winter may not be altogether 

 unexciting. There is always something impressive in 

 gatherings in a great city under circumstances that are 

 at once picturesque and unfamiliar. Once we came 



