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quary who loves to recal to his mind more vividly the pleasures of the olden time. The burning the first great log of wood (the Yule clog) with vocal and instrumental music; the Christmas carrols, faint vestiges of which alone remain! the telling stories round the fire-side, before going to bed; the wassel-bowl, and the new year's gifts among friends, or to patrons, are, alas! all sunk into oblivion and unmerited neglect. The wassel-bowl could be easily realized; it differs in no very material respects from the spiced cups prevalent in the winter time, amongst the wealthy yeomen in the northern and western counties of England. It was anciently a bowl of wine, or ale, or bigg, or mead, or metheglin, mixed with spices, sugar, toast, and eggs, and crowned with a crab or other apple, roasted, and tossed into it, hissing hot,' like the toasted lemon, or Seville orange, bristling with cloves, which floats majestic in the bowls of Bishop, so celebrated in our University. The "roasted crab" and "spicy nutbrown ale," so frequently alluded to in the popular poetry of this country, will immediately occur to the minds of our readers. This venerable piece of jollity which was introduced in to our country by the Saxons, when the fair Rowena knelt before king Vortigern with a cup of wine, and said, Was heil,' or health be to you, has been long superseded, by far less interesting cups, especially by the bowl of raisins, fired with spirits, called snap dragons (well known a short time since to every school-boy as the finale of his evening festivities.) This is of a much less pleasing description, having no ancient tradition allied to it, which may teach the heart to revert with a feeling of reverence to the days of "Auld lang syne." But even this last innocent amusement, has, we believe, scarcely made its appearance for some years past. The composition of the wassel-bowl was varied according to the abilities and taste of the compounder, always provided there were spices in it, and a toast or roasted apple. Wassel, (as it is now generally written) is the first Saxon and English word known to have been spoken, the custom is the old custom, and whilst dwelling on the subject, we are unwillingly carried back to the days of chivalry, and almost regret that we have not before existed. Brand, a writer, glowing with pleasure, when contemplating a spirited engraving of one of these "harbingers of joy," rapturously exclaims, ""Tis the figure of the old wassel-bowl, so much the delight of our ancestors, who, on the vigil of the new year, never failed to assemble round the glowing hearth with their cheerful neighbours, and there in the spicy wassel-bowl (which testified the goodness of their hearts) drowned every former animosity; an example worthy of modern imitation. Wassel was the word, wassel every guest returned, as he took the circling goblet from his friend, whilst song and civil mirth brought in the infant year."

J. S.

WHEN, &c.

DESCRIPTIVE OF A WINTER-DAY IN LONDON.

"WHEN icicles hang by the wall," and Englishmen, according to French writers, hang by the neck in all parks and places of amusement ;-"When Dick, the shepherd, blows his nails" and Richard, the lamplighter," blows that torch in again, which Boreas mischievously blew out; and some Attic wit, or wit in the attic, who has been "riding the whirlwind," and "directing the storm" through the day, or wandering with his Philadel, by "tinkling rills," through bowers of Arcady, or picking the devilled leg of a bee with the dainty-appetited Titania, descends from the hackney-chariot of his imagination, like a lesser Phaeton, "swift as the sparkle of a glancing star," and condescends to blow a very Stonehenge of slates, which he calls a fire, with a pair of asthmatical bellows, whose breath might not disturb" the thistle-down from where it sometime fell;"—" When milk comes frozen home in pail," and kittens, who are neither so wise as cats, nor so analyzing as chemists, look green-sickly at the "white wonder," and dip their inadequate and very unlikely paws into the usual milk pots, and bob their cold noses against the unusual ice-cream at the bottom, and wonder that their unbarbered whiskers are not tipped with their wonted whiteness;" When coughing drowns the parson's saw," and sneezing fills up the intervals of all polite conversations, or makes them;"When Marian's nose looks red and raw," and her lover's as crooked and blue as the claw of a lobster, who has never yet fallen into troubled or (as it is vulgarly called) hot water;-When a choleric man prefers pocketting an affront and his fingers, to pulling a puppy's nose, and chilblaining them with the sudden coldness of it, and pug noses, presuming on this, assume a proportionate degree of pugnacity;-When even the hand of friendship is cold as the hand of chastity, and the feel of his fingers and thumbs, when one grasps them for a friendly shake, is, like a shake out of time, very disagreeable to one's sensations, and as chilling as if one had ignorantly clutched four full-grown radishes, and one stumpy abortion; and a squeeze in reply, is as if old crabbed Cancer, cold and wet from a visit to Aquarius, had clawed hold of one's hand in his particular grasping manner;When the rain-clouds convince you of a suspicion you have for some time entertained, that they have contracted to supply the Grand Junction Company with water at per cloudfull; and hypochondriacs of the true Tate Wilkinson water, turn up their eyes, and look through the spungy air at the sky, in the manner a duck does, ere he thinks it worth while to waddle

abroad,) and have the miserable conceit to imagine themselves at the bottom of a vast river, and irriguously wriggle their way through mud and mire, like eels, in a miserable ecstasy;-When lobby loungers seem to call a coach, and the instant they are suspected of wanting, and are likely to get one, walk home, on sloppy nights, in pumps, whose soles may very properly be termed suckers; and some persons who would blow hot as Tartarus, if you did not call them gentlemen, (though their gentlemanity is certainly very apocryphal,) while a coach is to be hired on this side heaven, for the salvation of a pair of paltry shillings, suffer delicate women, thinly and beautifully clad, (with no other covering from the wind and the rain, than a handkerchief for their heads, a veil," thin as the lawn of Cos," for their shoulders, and kid slippers for feet that fall unheard as the steps of Time,) to walk westward and eastward, "through the wind and the rain; "—When hackney-coachmen are most over-bearing, and over-charging; and link-boys are most civil, graciously creating all and every the Tomkinses and Jenkinses who cross their way "lords" and "dukes," more especially if they promptly pay into his majesty, the sweeper, 's treasury, the usual pennies for their patents, and Mrs. Tomkins, that may be, perks up her head so high at the dignity conferred on her lord elect, Mr. Tomkins, that is, that at the moment she is dreaming of making what is termed "a splash in the world," she makes only an unfortunate splash in the kennel;-When teeth that were made by Nature*, and not by my dentrificial Sparkall, are very apt to chatter, though they have nothing to talk about; and old demireps of fashion, who are indebted to Israel Chapmant for all the teeth they have inserted in their gums, affect a tooth-ache, "though they have it not;"-When gentlemen who wear wigs under their hats go over bridges of low parapets with lively and cold-shuddering anticipations of "scudding before the wind under bare poles, " and younger gentlemen, who wear Dando hats on one side their heads, very often wonder on which side the water the said hats will be picked up, and cannot console themselves with the certainty that they are warranted water-proof;-When Eurus seems to pique himself on his skill in cutting your cheeks with an air, like one of those barber-surgeons who shave and bleed you for a penny, and charge you nothing for the beaver which they scrape off your hat to staunch the wound withal; and bullying Boreas

* A very pretty dentist in her day; indeed, if my authority is correct, she was the original inventress of teeth; but she could not warrant them free from aches, &c. which my friend Sparkall does; and she is now obliged to make them for nothing, to get any one to wear them.

† A justly celebrated tugger of teeth from mouths that have no business for them, now out on some researches in Botany, somewhere beyond Cape Horn. It is expected that he will prove, in a promised work, that the bay of South Wales is not the bay so much loved of Virgil and others.

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"whistles without," (perhaps, "for want of thought,") and the parlour solitary within, seated by winter's fire, doubts awhile whether it is not Timotheus Tomkins, her neighbour's anacreontic footman, whistling through the area-railings at Jeannetta Jenkins, her own maid, of "all work," and a considerable deal of idleness; and antique spinsters start at hearing the shutters rattle, and doubt whether it is the burglarious wind that tries whether they are fast, or the anti-burglarious and-never-so-careful-as-about-Christmas watchman, and recollect the last murder they read of in the pocket " Newgate Calendar, or Post-Chaise Companion," with one or two added or improved circumstances of horror which its polite Editor never narrated;" When the sear and yellow" leaves dance one and all the "dance of death,” or in select parties waltz to the whistling of Eurus, or swing corners in a country dance to the piping of Auster, or eddy in a whirling reel to the chaunter of "Dainty Davie" Boreas;When Dan November cannot grope his way through the blind alleys and dark lanes of our enlightened city, for the fog of his own breath; and Dan December, like Dan Apollo, has a cold partiality for rime in the morning;-When gentlemen, who are near-sighted, give away their old stockings in charity to beggars who wear wooden legs; and my promontory-nosed friend, the modern Naso, more charitable still, sends round his annual circular to his private friends, informing them, that if they have any suicidal propensities to indulge, they will be welcome to throw themselves off the bridge of his nose gratis-When the coroner's place for the bills of mortality is least a sinecure, and melancholics, tired of hanging up their hats as usual on the usual pegs, hang up their heads; "When 'tis night, and the mid watch is come, " and some dog who has neither " 66 local habitation," nor a a name," follows "the late Mr. Jones to his home," and enters there, sans invitation, and is sans ceremonie, kicked out again quite extempore, and partly in spite, partly in chagrin, howls under the windows" from night till morn ;" and Mrs. Patience Perkins, Mr. Jones's fat-fair-andfortyish housekeeper, "overlays herself" exactly three minutes and ten seconds beyond her usual matin-hour of six, descends out of humour, and discovers proof impressions of four feet from nature, and vows every possible vengeance of mops, brooms, and fire-irons upon all dogs, who shall in like manner trespass a high state of exasperation, that discharges itself in the collected force of a dishclout hurled at the astonished head of harmless Tray, the butcher's cur, (more to the hurt of his feelings than the aforesaid head,) before he hath taken any steps to incur this mitigated penalty, not of the offended law, but the offended Patience Perkins ;-When cats, in a select circle, squat on the warm stones over the baker's oven, holding midnight conversaziones somewhat after the manner of the Italian recitativo;

and Mr. Singlebed, the bachelor, winks in vain at coquettish Sleep, who stares at him in astonishment at his old-beauish vanity, that she who hath refused but yesterday to bed with a king, should be expected to condescend to lie with "sour austerity," coy "sleep, who will lie with love," but not with Messieurs Gout, Stone, Catarrh, Rheumatism, Asthma, Restlessness, Bad-conscience, Care, or any one of their amiable cousins and cousins-german;-When

The watchman's loud snore breaks the peace that he keeps ; And the lord- (like the night) -mayor on a full belly sleeps ;When hearts which are not wholly selfish, lie awake in their warm beds, and hear the midnight war of the elements, and compassionate those who " go down to the deep, and do business on the great waters ;" and think of the houseless and bedless wretches who rot at rich men's doors, and resolve on some act of charity for the morning ;-When even cherry-hearted worldlings have intermittent indications of humanity, though they go off with "the coming light;" and overseers (properly so called, for they are generally overlookers,) of the poor, have one qualm of conscience which deters them till daylight from indulging in the sleepless expectations of the "Dinner which is to be on table at four to-morrow," at the expense of charity and four hundred paupers they but yesterday refused a paltry shilling to;-When certain unfortunates, who have the organ of amativeness very much at their tongue's ends, silently but touchingly convince the hearts which pity them that they are not quite so happy in clogs and satins at midnight, as they once were in stuffs and pattens at midday; and my Lapland-hearted friend, the philanthropic Sir Cautious Precipitate, (who is always "going about doing good," but never does it,) issues his long-proposed proposals for instituting a charitable fund for supplying the poor with toothpicks gratis, during the winter months;-When all these several things come to pass, of life's most genial enjoyments, give me to bask before a sunny fire, in a room too small for little minds, but quite large enough for great ones, with at least two feet in one pair of red morocco slippers, (I prefer red, because it is a warm colour,) cocked on a fender of a fair altitude, the soles browning with the burning heat, like twin slices of one French roll, till they are so hot and baked, that one is glad to slip the usual number of toes out of them, after duly convincing them that they were neither formed for the old fiery ordeal of footing it over causeways of red hot iron, nor for competing with Signora Giraldelli, the gulper of molten lead, and other" hellish broths," which Mrs. Glasse hath left us no recipe for. It is then, I opine, ❝ daintye pleasaunte," tossed back in a chair of four legs, tilted to an equilibrium on its posterior two, your feet once more on the fender, to loll, motionless and almost conscious of unconsciousness; now