30 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



genius, and not only English, but European literature is 

 largely in his debt. He was the inventor of cheap 

 amusement for the million, to be had of All-out-doors for 

 the asking. It was his impulse which unconsciously 

 gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school of Jean 

 Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateaubriand, 

 Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Ruskin, — 

 the gi-eat painters of ideal landscape. 



So long as men had slender means, whether of keep- 

 ing out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, 

 Winter was an unwelcome guest, especially in the coun- 

 try. There he was the bearer of a lettre de cachet, 

 which shut its victims in solitary confinement with few 

 resources but to boose round the fire and repeat ghost- 

 stories, w^hich had lost all their freshness and none of 

 their terror. To go to bed was to lie awake of cold, 

 with an added shudder of fright whenever a loose case- 

 ment or a waving curtain chose to give you the goose- 

 flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his letters, gives us a 

 notion how uncomfortable it was in the country, with 

 green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and windows 

 that thought it was their duty to make the wind whistle, 

 not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not have 

 been much better in the city, to judge by Menage's 

 warning against the danger of our dressing-gowns taking 

 fire, while we cuddle too closely over the sparing blaze. 

 The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in 

 bed, with his hand through a hole in the blanket ; and 

 we may suspect that it was the warmth quite as much 

 as the company that first drew men together at the 

 coffee-house. Coleridge, in January, 1800, writes to 

 Wedgewood : "I am sitting by a fire in a rug gi^eat- 



coat It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, 



can shield yourself from it only by perpetual imprison- 

 ment." This thermometrical view of winter is, I grant, a 



