310 DECEMBER. 



the Society of Friends, who, though they like 

 old fashions, pay little regard to old customs, 

 but treat them as the "beggarly elements" of 

 worn-out superstitions. They are philosophi- 

 cally right, but poetically wrong. I see the 

 apprentice boys going along the streets, from 

 house to house, distributing those little annual 

 remembrances called Christmas-bills ; and my 

 imagination follows these tyroes in trade, who 

 now fill its lowest offices, and would think more 

 of a slide or a mince-pie than of all the "wealth 

 in Lunnun bank," through a few more years, and 

 beholds them metamorphosed into grave, im- 

 portant and well-to-do citizens ; or, as it ma)' 

 chance to them, shrunk into the thin, shrivel- 

 led, and grasshopper-like beings that care and 

 disappointment convert men into. And this 

 awakes in me the consciousness of how little we 

 have thought of man and his toils, and anxieties, 

 as from day to day, and month to month, we 

 have gone wandering over the glorious face of 

 the earth, drinking in its peaceful pleasures ; 

 and yet what a mighty sum of events has been 

 consummated ! — what a tide of passions and 

 affections has flowed — what lives and deaths 

 have alternately arrived — what destinies have 

 been fixed for ever, while we have loitered on a 

 violet-path, and watched the passing splendours 

 of the Seasons. Once more our planet has 



