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But for a Frenchman with a seen, England is the most moral. Still, in his theory, he is a miracle of impartiality, opinion, the national evil is "the absence of acuteness, and good sense; and we may morality." In consequence he julges France say of the English life depicted in his after the English fashion. "The women are pages what the Merryman in the Prologue badly brought up there, do not read the Bible, to Faust" says of human life: "Every with dress. The men frequent cafés and keep are too fond of balls, occupy themselves wholly one lives it; to not many is it known; mistresses, hence so many unfortunate houseand seize it where you will, it is interest-holds. This is the result not of race, but of ing." We may take up M. Taine at any education. French women in England, seriousstage of his progress, or we may begin ly brought up in English fashion, make very with him at the beginning; steam with good wives here." him up the Thames, and arrive with him your country?" "Is everything good in on a cold foggy morning at London Bridge. rible vice is drunkenness. "No; the national and horSir Walter Scott states incidentally, in 20s. a week drinks ten of them. Add to this A man who earns one of his novels, that much of the knowl-improvidence, stoppage of work, and edge of life and character displayed in poverty." them is owing to his habit of talking free- is a talkative fellow, devoid of affected seM. Taine says of this interlocutor, "He ly with fellow travellers, whether he had riousness. Two other Englishmen with any previous acquaintance with them or whom I conversed in the boat are like not. M. Taine has the same habit. The first conversation he notes down is with who talked loosely and carelessly. What unto him." He was a talkative fellow, an Englishman of the middle class, "son could he, not knowing French, know of a merchant I should suppose; he does about French women? or what weight not know French, German, or Italian; he is to be attached to the sweeping stateis not altogether a gentleman - twenty-ment that a man who earns twenty shilfive years of age; sneering, decided, inci-lings a week drinks ten of them? sive face; he has made for his amusement and instruction a trip lasting twelve "Other figures in the boat. Two young coumonths, and is returning from India and ples who remain on deck covered with wrapfrom Australia." He is from Liverpool, pings under umbrellas. A long downpour has and after laying down authoritatively that begun; they remain seated; in the end they a family that does not keep a carriage that husband and wife should not be separated were drenched like ducks. This was in order may live comfortably there upon three or by going below to the cabins. four hundred a year, goes on to say that "one must marry, that is a matter of course; and that he hopes to be married within a year or two; adding with commendable caution"It is better, how-freedom and expression of infinite tenderness. ever, to remain a bachelor if one does not meet the person with whom one desires to pass one's whole life;"" but "-plucking up spirit" one always meets with her, the only thing is not to let the chance slip.' A dowry he declares to be unnecessary: "It is natural and even pleasant to undertake the charge of a portionless wife and of a family." Moral: "It is clear to me (loquitur M. Taine) "that their happiness (the happiness of Englishmen) consists in being at home at six in the evening with a pleasing attached wife, having four or five children on their knees, and respectful domestics." And by no means a bad notion of happiness either; but the deduction from such slender premises reminds us of our friend at Knebworth founding conclusions on the river and the pond. The response of the Liverpool oracle as to morals is somewhat mystical:

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sea-sickness; her husband, who had the look of "Another young wife suffered much from a merchant's clerk, took her in his arms, supported, tried to read to her, tended her with a

"Two young girls of fifteen and sixteen, who speak German and French exceedingly well and without accent, large restless eyes, large white teeth; they chatter and laugh with perfect unconstraint, with admirable petulance of friendly gaiety; not the slightest trace of coquetry, none and done on purpose; they never think about of our nice little tricks which have been learned the onlookers."

husband, in a worn-out dress, with relics of "A lady of forty in spectacles beside her feminine ornaments, extraordinary teeth in the style of tusks, very serious and most ludicrous; a Frenchwoman, even middle-aged, never forgets to adjust herself to arrange her dress.

"Patience and phlegm of a tall dry Englishman, who has not moved from the seat, has taken but a single turn, who has spoken to no one, who suffices to himself. As a contrast, three Frenchmen, who put random questions, make hap-hazard assertions, grow impatient, to them, appeared to me pleasant fellows." gesticulate, and make puns or something akin

We invite attention to these groups; "Of all the countries this Englishman has for they are all representative, and each

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of them eventually, if unconsciously, sup- vaults; sad faces, worn or wild, pass out plies the keynote to a chapter or a care- and in. Let us visit the churches." He fully illustrated and expanded note. That visits four in the morning, and two in the they do so may be fairly cited by M. afternoon, staying out the sermon in two Taine in confirmation of his doctrine of of them. The congregations impressed dependencies; as showing that a compe- him rather favourably. They come to tent observer might deduce the peculiari- provision themselves with moral counsels, ties and tendencies of a people from half- to refresh their principles. When reada-dozen examples, as surely as Professor ing the numerous essays in English literOwen would infer the shape and habits of ature, and the moralizings of the Saturan animal from a bone. day Review,' one perceives that commonplaces do not weary them." He is pleased by finding the Book of Cominon Prayer, "the mass-book of England," on the ledges of the pews; and an anthem in Westminster Abbey suggests that "worship thus understood is the opera of elevated, seTaine the Frenchman who, on entering rious, and believing souls." Was M. the vault under the great Pyramid, exclaimed: "Quelle place pour un billard!"

The first day M. Taine passes in London - at all events, the first of which he makes mention-happens to be a Sunday; and he takes the Continental (we think superficial) view of our mode of observing it:

“Sunday in London in the rain: the shops are shut, the streets almost deserted; the aspect

is that of an immense and a well-ordered ceme

tery. The few passers-by under their umbrellas, in the desert of squares and streets, have the look of uneasy spirits who have risen from their graves; it is appalling.

On returning to his hotel he reads the Queen's Proclamation, by which her loving subjects are prohibited from playing at dice, cards, or any other game whatsoever on the Lord's Day, and the magistrates. enjoined to prevent the publicans from selling liquors or permitting guests to remain in their houses in the time of divine service; —

"I had no conception of such a spectacle, which is said to be frequent in London. The rain is small, compact, pitiless; looking at it one can see no reason why it should not continue to the end of all things; one's feet churn water, there is water everywhere, filthy water impregnated with an odour of soot. A yellow, dense fog fills the air, sweeps down to the ground; "This order is not strictly observed; the tavat thirty paces a house, a steamboat appear as 'ern doors are closed during service, but they can spots upon blotting-paper. After an hour's be opened, and drinking goes on in the back walk in the Strand especially, and in the rest of room. In any case this is a relic of the old Puthe City, one has the spleen, one meditates sui-ritanism altogether distasteful in France. Procide."

hibit people to drink and amuse themselves on In this frame of mind he calls Somerset peasant, Sunday appears to have been made Sunday? But to a French workman, and to a House a frightful thing; and after con- for nothing else. Stendhal said that here, in templating the British Museum and St. Scotland, in true Biblical countries, religion Paul's, exclaims: "These spots are mel- spoils one day out of seven, destroys the seventh ancholy, being the decay of stone. And part of possible happiness. He judges the Engthese nude statues in memory of Greece! lishman, the man of the North, after the model Wellington is a fighting hero, naked, under of the man of the South, whom wine exhilarthe dripping trees of the park. The hid-ates and does not brutalize, who can without ineous Nelson, stuck on his column, with a convenience give way to his instinct, and whose coil of rope in the form of a pigtail, like a rat impaled on the top of a pole. A swamp like this is a place of exile for the arts of antiquity. When the Romans disembarked here, they must have thought themselves in Homer's hell, in the land of the Cimmerians." This assumes, of course, that they disembarked like M. Taine on a wet Sunday, and took a stroll in a corresponding disposition through the Strand and the parks. "But what is to be done on the day of rest? There is the church and the pothouse, intoxication and a sermon, insensibility and reflection, but no other way of spending a Sunday like this. I observe many doors ajar in the spirit

pleasure is poetical. Here the temperament is different, more violent and more combative; pleasure is a brutish and bestial thing: I could said to me, When a Frenchman is drunk, he cite twenty examples of this. An Englishman chatters; when a German is drunk, he sleeps; when an Englishman is drunk, he fights.' "'

In other words, the only answer to Stendhal is that, if an Englishman were allowed the same liberty on Sundays as a Frenchman, he would get drunk and disorderly: that the primary use of Sunday observances is to keep him out of mischief; and that the French laxity in this particular is an infallible sign of the higher civilization and happier tempera

ment of the French. To test the sound- Continental mode of keeping it prevailed in ness of this opinion let us take a wider this country. In one of Queen Elizabeth's range: let us extend the comparison to injunctions, Sunday is classed with other other countries besides England and holidays; and it is declared that if, for France, and to other times beyond the any scrupulosity of conscience, some present. Let it also be remembered that should superstitiously abstain from workFrench Sundays are not invariably fine, ing on those days, they shall grieviously nor English Sundays invariably wet; that offend. The "Book of Sports" was a the environs of this metropolis, on an av- proclamation issued by James I. in 1618, erage Sunday, offer much that is bright specifying the recreations which were and cheering to compensate for its gloom. allowable after divine service, including The shop windows are closed, the streets dancing, archery, and all athletic games. are not alive with traffic, there are fewer handsome equipages, and fewer people of fashion in the parks. But whatever direction you take in the afternoon, you will see groups of men, women, and children, gaily dressed, and looking as if they thoroughly enjoyed their holiday, which most of them could not have at all if the shops were kept open, and the thronging carriages were driving about, and the usual weekday stir and brilliancy were kept up. Take your stand on London or Westminster Bridge and watch the crowded steamers; or go the round of the metropolitan railway stations and form a rough estimate of the thousands of pleasure-seekers who are starting_for Richmond, Hampton Court, Epping Forest, Greenwich, or Blackheath. All the suburban villages and favourite places of resort, for an area of twelve miles round, present the same cheerful aspect. So do the country towns; and that the picture is frequently defaced by intemperance or disorderly conduct, we deny. Follow these groups or couples after their trip or stroll, and you will find most of them forming part of a family circle or enjoying a quiet chat round a tea-table.

--

The Parisian has his shops open, his innumerable cafés and restaurants, his theatres, and his races; but what proportion of the population are kept at work to minister to his gratification? - nay, are more hardly worked on that day to add to it? If the question were to be decided, without reference to religion, by the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it must be decided against the French; and M. Taine is very much mistaken if he supposes that the English observance of Sunday, as generally understood and practised, is the result of bigotry. It is the result, like so many other English customs and institutions, of a wise compromise- a compromise between those who wish to make Sunday a mere festival, and those who would fain convert it into a Pharisaical Sabbath. For more than a century after the Reformation, the

It is no affair of Protestantism. Luther's opinion is pointedly expressed in his "Table Talk:" "If anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake,—if anyone anywhere sets up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this encroachment on Christian liberty." Knox and Calvin took the same view. "Upon Sunday at night," writes Randolph to Cecil from Edinburgh in 1562, "the Duke supped with Mr. Knox, where the Duke desired I should be." According to Disraeli, the elder, " At Geneva a tradition exists that, when John Knox visited Calvin on a Sunday, he found his austere coadjutor bowling on a green. At this day, and in that place, a Calvinist preacher, after his Sunday sermon will take his seat at the card table." The Scotch Calvinists have gone to the opposite extreme. They hold a Sunday walk to be unlawful; and it was actually proposed by a distinguished member of the Kirk to call in the interference of the police to prevent this peculiarly obnoxious mode of Sabbath breaking. In parts of Scotland, consequently, may actually be seen that state of things which M. Taine was thinking of when he said that an English Sunday left no alternative between dulness and intoxication, a state of things to which all England was reduced for an entire generation, and which, transplanted

*

At a meeting of the Edinburgh United Presbyterian Presbytery, Feb. 8th, 1560, reported in the "Scotsman," Dr. Johnston said" He should never forget what he saw when he was in Strasbourg. He had a letter of recommendation to a gentleman in in the afternoon of the Lord's Day; the servant told Strasbourg-a good man. He delivered his letter him that his master was walking with his lady on the ramparts, and he found it was the common custom of the Christians in Strasbourg to walk on the ramparts." Mr. Parlane, of Tranent: "Why did you deliver the letter on that day?" Dr. Johnston: I can explain that, if it is necessary. It was a work of necessity." His explanation was a halting one, and his delivery of the letter appears to have been deemed the greater atrocity of the two. Dr. ant Sweden, where counting-houses are kept open Johnston would have found things worse in Protestand bills discounted on Sundays.

to the New World, was pushed to the of Charles II.'s reign may be taken as a ne plus ultra of absurdity. sample:

A violent reaction in the ascetic direction had preceded the "Book of Sports." It was preached in Oxfordshire that to do any work on the Sabbath was as great a sin as to kill or to commit adultery. It was preached in Somersetshire that to throw a bowl on the Sabbath Day was as great a sin as to commit murder. It was preached in Norfolk that to make a feast or wedding dinner on that day was as great a sin as for a father to take a knife and cut his son's throat. It was preached in Suffolk that to ring more bells than one on the Lord's Day to call the people to church was as great a sin as to do an act of murder. This was at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was impatience at not being able to enforce their doctrines, or at being compelled witnesses, if not partakers, of profane pastimes, rather than political persecution, that caused the first emigration of the Puritans:

"The pilgrim bands, who crossed the sea to keep Their Sabbaths in the eye of God alone In his wide temple of the wilderness."

The spirit of the Sabbatarian legislation, when uncontrolled, may be inferred from a few articles in the transatlantic Codes or Regulations collected by Dr. Hessey:

"No one shall run on the Sabbath Day, or walk in his garden, or elsewhere, except reverently to and from meeting.

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No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or shave on the Sabbath Day.

ye King. I saw this evening such a scene of "Jan. 25, 1865. Dr. Dove preach'd before profane gaming, and the King in the midst of his three concubines, as I had never before seen. Luxurious dallying and profaneness."

This profanation of the day did not extend far beyond the Court circle. The principle statute still in force "for the better observance of the Lord's day" (29 Car. II. c. 71) was passed in 1676: respect for the Church was as essential a part of the Cavalier faith as loyalty to the King; and both before and after the Revolution, the Sunday at most country houses was got through in much the same fashion as at Osbaldistone Hall:

"The next morning chanced to be Sunday, a day peculiarly hard to be got rid of at Osbaldistone Hall; for after the formal religious service of the morning had been performed, at which all the family regularly attended, it was hard to say upon which individual, Rashleigh and Miss Vernon excepted, the fiend of ennui descended with the most abundant outpouring of his spirit "And since we talk of heraldry (said Sir Hildebrand) I'll go and read Gwillym.". This resolution he intimated with a yawn, resistless as that of the goddess in the Dunciad, which was responsively echoed by his giant sons as they dispersed in quest of the pastimes to

which their several minds inclined them: Percie to discuss a pot of beer with the steward in the gallery - Thorncliff to cut a pair of cudgels and fix them in their wicker hilts-John to dress May-flies-Dickon to play at pitch-andtoss by himself, his right hand against his left - and Wilfrid to bite his thumbs and hum himself into a slumber which should last till dinner

"No woman shall kiss her child on the Sab-time, if possible." bath or Fasting Day.

"If any man shall kiss his wife, or wife her

This easy, indifferent, and yet not whol

husband, on the Lord's Day, the party in faulty irreverent mode of passing Sunday shall be punished at the discretion of the mag

istrates."

and far into the nineteenth. Lord Stanlasted through the eighteenth century, hope, in his Chapter on Methodism, quotes The Sabbatarian legislation of the Com- a passage bearing on the subject from the monwealth was severe enough to justify "Life of the Rev. William Grimshaw," the pungent satire of Butler, if no cat was who joined the Methodists, and stood high actually hanged on Monday for killing of with them. "He endeavoured to supa mouse on Sunday; whilst the looseness press the generally prevailing custom in of the Restoration was a melancholy com-country places during the summer of mentary on the tendency of mankind to take refuge from one extreme in another and haply a worse. Evelyn's description of the Court on the last Sunday but one

• Strype-quoted by Dr. Hessey in his Bampton

Lectures on Sunday: its Origin, History, and Present Obligation." These lectures comprise almost everything that can be said or brought to bear upon the subject. and the notes are full of curious Information and valuable references. See also Cox's "Literature of the Sabbath Question."

walking in the fields on a Lord's Day, between the services, or in the evening, in companies. He not only bore his testimony against it from the pulpit, but reconnoitred the fields in person to detect and " This excess of reprove delinquents.' zeal did more harm than good. During

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eyes to Him who has been elevated as the sign cratic country. At the gate of St. James's Park is the following notice: The park-keepers have orders to prevent all beggars from entering the gardens, and all persons in ragged or dirty clothes, or who are not outwardly decent and well-behaved.' At every step one feels oneself further removed from France."

of salvation.' Other tokens denote an aristo

the entire reign of George III., of pious | to me two printed pages on the brazen serpent and decorous memory - indeed, till within of Moses, with applications to the present life: living memory-lawyers had their consul-You, too, oh reader, have been bitten by the tations by preference on Sunday: Cabinet fiery serpents. To heal yourself lift up your dinners were most frequent on that day: and ladies of quality gave regular Sunday card parties without reproach. It is related of Lord Melbourne, during a visit to the Archbishop of York at Nuneham, that when his right reverend host suggested an attendance at evening service in addition to morning, he replied, "No, my Lord, once is orthodox; twice is Puritanical." Here, regard to decency, religious enThis was long the prevalent tone and thusiasm, and inequality of condition, are mode of thinking of the higher class, who have leaned of late to a stricter obser- is so offensive to the refined, fastidious, all lumped together; and the combination vance of the day with the especial object of making it a day of rest for their domes- Cosmopolitan Frenchman that, at every tics and dependents. But, out of Scot-step, he feels farther removed from France, and (like Goldsmith's traveller) “drags at land, there has been no national backeach remove a length'ning chain." sliding into Puritanism; and our Sunday has been held up to imitation by earnest and able writers in Germany and France. An imperial chaplain, the Abbé Mullois, in the palmy days of the Second Empire, emphatically called upon his countrymen to exchange their "Dimanche égoïste, scélérat et debraillé, sans cœur et sans pitié," for "the respectable, beneficent, and humane Sunday of England."

the evils of an English Sunday, by leaving Climate, we have been told, aggravates refuge but a dram; and climate, we find, the unoccupied tradesman or mechanic no is the cause of our ingrained heaviness, homeliness, dulness, habitual depression, common-place unimaginative way of living, and bad taste. bids fair to rival the traveller who said Occasionally M. Taine This slight historical retrospect may bog-districts to their bogs by making them that Nature had adapted the Irish of the help to clear away the popular misappre-web-footed. After referring to primohensions which abound, both at home and abroad, touching the nature and extent of the obligation which the right-minded and reflecting people of England deem binding on them to keep one day in the week free for worship, rest, and harmless recreation. They are no more answerable for the perversion of Biblical authority by the northern Pharisees than M. Taine is answerable for the vandalism of the Parisian Commune.* To complete the charge of Puritanism, he confounds things essentially distinct:

:

"Other traces of Puritanical severity, among the rest, are the recommendations on the stairs which lead down to the Thames, and elsewhere; one is requested to be decent. At the railwaystation there are large Bibles fastened to chains for the use of passengers while waiting for the train. A tall, sallow, and bony fellow handed

dren in which English couples rejoice, as geniture, and the large number of chilstimulants to exertion, he continues:

"Second cause, the climate; I always recur to this, because there is no greater power. Consider that this humidity and this fog existed, and even worse, under the Saxon kings, and that this race has lived amid them, as far as can be traced, even in its earliest country on the coasts of the Elbe and of Jutland. At Manchester, last winter, one of my friends informed me that in the principal hotel of that city it was necessary to keep the gas burning for five days; at midday it was not clear enough to see to write; the sixth day the fog still lasted, but the supply of gas was exhausted. During six months, and during several days in the other months, this country seems to have been made for wild ducks."

The ideal under this sky is comfort; * The circumstance that so many of the Peninsular solid succulent dinner; a chat with a faithdry, clean, well-warmed habitation; a battles, and notoriously Waterloo, were fought on a Sunday, is thus accounted for by M Esquiros: ful wife, dressed with care; rosy-cheeked "Knowing the respect of the English for the rest children, well-washed and in clean clothes." Given these, the average Englishman believes that all the possible wants, bodily and mental, of an intellectual being are provided for :

of the seventh day, the French generals hoped to profit by it in their attacks. I confess that they had not always reason to praise their calculations, for the English troops gloriously broke the Sabbath. They thus justified the proverb current in Great Britain, The better the day, the better the deed.'" The English at Home, vol. ii. 263. The duel between Pitt and Tierney was fought on a Sunday.

"On the contrary, in Provence, in Italy, in

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