either the Christian name or the nickname of the day. Thus, the 29th of December might be quoted as Dum medium silentium,' or the Martyrdom of St. Thomas à Becket, or the Feast of St. Marcellus or St. Evroul. The 30th of December might be equally the Feast of St. Sabinus, or of St. Anysia, or St. Maximus. The 12th of April may be quoted as Broncheria, or the Feast of St. Saba, or St. Zeno, or St. Julius, or St. Victor, and so on; and what may be termed the governing name-that is to say, the one in most repute-varies in each country, and often in each diocese. The first of the before mentioned classes of denominations arose from the designation given to the day from the initial words of some one of the Introits, Lessons, Collects, or other portions of the church service, which emphatically impressed themselves in the memory of the hearers. Such phrases as Da pacem,' a common denomination of the eighteenth Sunday after Whitsuntide; Commovisti terram et conturbasti eam,' for Sexagesima Sunday; and Dum medium silentium,' for Sunday in Christmasweek (being the instance above quoted), are all portions of the Introits or other services appertaining to the respective festivals. Something like this prevails at the present day amongst schoolboys, or at least did prevail in our time. Hurrah! to-morrow is Stir up Sunday'-the Sunday before Advent, whose Collect announces the glad approach of the Christmas holidays. A second class of denominations arose from usages and games annexed to peculiar days or feasts. Carniprivium' announced the sorrowful news that flesh-meat was to be banished from the table, and Carnivora' that beef might appear again. • Broncheria,' or Palm-Sunday, told of the strewing of the branches; Bohordicum,' of the mock fight (or rather not mock, for many a head was broken in right earnest) on the first and second Sundays in Lent. Der blaue Montag,' and Der schwarze Sontag,' are so called in Germany from the colours of the church-hangings on Septuagesima Monday and Passion Sunday. But the great source of these denominations arose from the practice of appropriating each day to the commemoration of the Saints of Holy Church-their birth, their sufferings, their death. Thus did the temporal history of the Church militant become incorporated, so to speak, in the chronicle of life; at first, by popular veneration or ecclesiastical usage, not having any positive sanction, but in later periods by the direct authority of the papal see. We have inserted three red-letter days in our kalendar by Act of Parliament, which ought long since to have been expungedthe 5th of November, the 30th of January, and the 29th of May. The The services appointed for those anniversaries nourish any feelings rather than those of Christian devotion, love, or charity. It is a pain to hear them. Whatever may be said for those who framed them, in these days they are merely angry memorials of political sentiments travestied into devotional language. The heathen Roman raised his trophies of perishable materials, in order that the memory of the triumph over the enemy might decay and wear away: we engrave the chronicle of our unhappy dissensions upon the very altar of holiness. Repeal the statutes passed when men's minds were troubled by fear, or excited by hatred or revenge. Let the Church appoint one annual solemn day of thanksgiving for national mercies, and one other annual day of humiliation for national sins, and relieve herself from the odious necessity of casting three annual gauntlets of defiance against those whom she seeks to reclaim into her fold. Without doubt, many a name was inserted in the mediæval kalendar upon doubtful traditions; yet these have been somewhat exaggerated; and when it has been triumphantly pointed out (if we recollect rightly, by Geddes) as a proof of the ignorance of the middle ages, that they converted the Almanac itself into a saint, under the title of Sanctus Almachius, the critics quite forget the fact that Saint Almachius, a primitive martyr, being appropriated to the 1st of January by Venerable Bede, it is possible that his name, altered and corrupted, became that of the calendar. At least, this etymology is about as satisfactory as any which we find in the dictionaries. Such immethodical modes of marking time by names and quotations, appear strange enough to us; but the system will become perfectly intelligible if we advert to the fact, that mere numbers obtain hardly any hold upon the memory. In those ages, when little was written and less could be read, when you had neither an almanac bound in your pocket-book nor hanging on your wall, the old fashion was the best process by which to fix a day, in the common run of life, permanently in the recollection. The mind yearns for distinct identity. We have often thought it must be the last stage of human annihilation when John Thompson, upon entering the police service, is sunk for ever thereafter in G 26; and such a topography as that presented by the city of Washington, where A 3 and B 7 are the only denominations of streets and squares, will for ever destroy any pleasant or historical associations to any given locality. We can read with interest of Queen Philippa witnessing a tournament in Cheapside; but who would care about it if he were told that the scaffold upon which she sat to view the sports was erected in Z 16? Thus, the mediaval denominations of the days days constantly raised up pictures in the minds of the people, which supplied the want of written information; and, even in our own age, we may find how much more vivid are any recollections annexed to analogous instances, than those which you must designate by mere numbers. Try, if you can, to remember any given event which happened to you last year, and you will find how much more naturally you can fix yourself by any of the few festivals which are left us-yea, even by the Lord Mayor's daythan by any figure in the kalendar. It is a matter of considerable interest at the present era, when the principles of the Church are so anxiously scrutinised by friends and foes, to recollect how and in what manner our present kalendar of Festivals and Saints' days was formed. Our Reformers truly and reverently proceeded upon the principle of honouring antiquity. They found a number of dead men's names, not over-eminent in their lives either for sense or morals, crowding the kalendar, and jostling out the festivals of the first saints and martyrs.' The medieval Church, as the Romanists still do, distinguished between days of Obligation and days of Devotion. Now, under the Reformation only some of the former class, the Feasts of Obligation, were and are retained, being such as were dedicated to the memory of our Lord, or to those whose names are pre-eminent in the Gospels:-the Blessed Virgin, the Apostles, the Baptist as the Precursor, and St. Stephen as the Proto-martyr; St. Mark and St. Luke as Evangelists; the Holy Innocents, as the earliest who suffered on Christ's account; the Feast of St. Michael and all Angels, to remind us of the benefits received by the ministry of angels; and All Saints as the memorial of all those who have died in the faith. Surely no method could have been better devised than such a course for making time, as it passes, a perpetual memorial of the Head of the Church. The principle upon which certain festivals of Devotion still retained in the kalendar prefixed to the Common Prayer, and usually printed in italics, were selected from among the rest, is more obscure. Many of them evidently indicate names which had been peculiarly honoured of old in the Church of England:-St. Alban, the protomartyr of Britain; Augustin, the apostle of the English race; Venerable Bede; and King Edward the Confessor, the real patron of England, supplanted in the age of pseudo-chivalry by the legendary St. George. Others must have been chosen for their high station in the earlier ages of the Church-St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Martin, and St. Cyprian; others from their local celebrity. A third class are, Saints who are simply commemorated; and it is a very curious fact, and, as we believe, hitherto quite unno ticed, that these Saints'-days, now considered as the distinctive badges of Romanism, continued to retain their stations in our popular Protestant English almanacs until the alteration of the style in 1752, when they were discontinued. By what authority this change took place we know not, but perhaps the books of the Stationers' Company might solve this mystery. We take the first which lies before us, the almanac of the venerable Philomath Gadbury: 1 Circumcision. 2 Abel. 3 Enoch. 4 Chromach. 5 Edward, Confessor. 6 Epiphany. 71 p. Epiphany. 9 Lucian. 10 Agatha. 13 Hilary b. 14 2 pp. Epiphany. 15 Maurus. 16 Kentigern. JANUARY, 1733. 17 Anthony. 18 Cathed. Petri. 19 Woolstan. 20 Pr. W. born. 21 Septuages. 22 Theodore. 24 Wilfrede. 25 Conv. St. Paul. 26 Cletus. 27 Christopher. 28 Sexagesima. 29 Samuel. 30 K. Charles I. mart. 31 Cyriacus. More amusing, however, is one of Gadbury's rivals, whom we find included in the same volume: 'Poor Robin, 1733, a new Almanack after the old fashion, wherein you have an account of the eclipses, the new moons, full moons and half moons, commonly called quarters; also the sign governing, telling you when to cut your corns, pare your nails, and many useful things not to be had anywhere else, with a discovery of an infallible method to tell fortunes by the Twelve Houses, being the first after Bissextile or Leapyear, containing a two-fold Kalendar, viz.: the honest, true-hearted PROTESTANT OLD ACCOUNT, WITH THE MARTYRS FOR PURE RELIGION ON THE ONE SIDE, and those who were justly executed for plotting treason and rebellion on the other.' We select the month that is the richest, namely: OCTOBER, 1733. : 14 21 aft. Trin. 16 Gallus. 17 Audrey. 18 St. Luke Evan. 19 Ptolemy 27 Florence. 28 23 aft. Trin. 29 Narcissus. 30 K. George II. born. ་ 14 back to lay, 15 That summer labour 17 Harrison, the Butcher. 22 John Jones. 23 Adrian Scroop. 25 Crispin. 26 Who loves the law 27 the term is come, 28 But my advice is 6 We wish our diligent and erudite friend Sir Henry Ellis would take' Poor Robin in hand. He beats us; alas! how the keenest wit evaporates in the course of a century. We are utterly unable to explain the joke of introducing Jack Adams' and Phalaris' amongst the 'roundheads.' 'Poor Robin,' in his day, was the delight, the counsel, the guide of the English country-folk. They made love and beer by his directions; wooed the sweetheart and tapped the barrel, in the assigned planetary hour. His kalendar is the great treasure-house for allusions to local customs and popular sports. Quaint rhymes and ludicrous prose fill his pages, not always the most delicate or refined, yet perhaps as innocuous as the 'useful information now presented to the intelligence of the masses,' by his untaxed successors- B. Franklin born,' Voltaire died,' Day when Oxford Dons get drunk,' and so on, as may be seen in the Temperance Almanac, to the great edification, without doubt, of the numerous respectable clergy and pious ladies by whom the said Society is patronized. Poor Robin' affords much matter for consideration. He shows that the tradition respecting the appropriation of the days to particular saints was considered by the common people as eminently Protestant, that is to say, as a part and parcel of the Church of England; and that an almanac without Saints for every day was nought. We have neither space nor leisure to pursue this inquiry: but we do earnestly wish that some one well versed in ecclesiastical history, for instance Mr. Palmer, would investigate the Kalendar;' not with the view of ministering to antiquarian curiosity or idle amusement, but as involving principles of the highest importance. The secular power came to the aid of the Church by the statute 5 and 6 Edw. VI. c. 3. This Act commands all our present liturgical festivals to be observed; and their nonobservation is by no means an act of discretion, but a breach of the law of the land. Of the peculiar sports and observances |