Little Britain may truly be called the heart's core of the city; the strong-hold of true John Bullism. It is a fragment of London as it was in its better days, with its antiquated folks and fashions. Here flourish in great preservation many of the holiday games and customs of yore. The inhabitants most religiously eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, hot-cross-buns on Good Friday, and roast goose at Michaelmas; they send love-letters on Valentine's Day, burn the Pope on the fifth of November, and kiss all the girls under the mistletoe at Christmas. Roast beef and plum-pudding are also held in superstitious veneration, and port and sherry maintain their grounds as the only true English wines. In more than casual respect for such traditions Irving goes on to introduce the rival oracles of Little Britain, to escort us to Wagstaff's and the Roaring Lads, to act as personal conductor to Bartholomew Fairs and a Lord Mayor's Day, and finally to lament the baleful influence of the socially ambitious Misses Lamb and the decline of the choice old games All-Fours, Pope Joan, and Tom-come-tickle-me. It is no wonder that the youthful Dickens loved these papers, for the same England appealed to both Irving and Dickens throughout their lives. It was a rough, boisterous, jolly England, with a good deal of vulgarity which they were ready to forgive and a good many vices which they chose to overlook in favor of its chief virtues--a blunt honesty, a hearty laugh, and a full stomach. There is another side of old England that was dear to those two--that John Bull could "easily be moved to a sudden tear" (see p. 109, first topic). In the old days of even a hundred years ago men of Saxon stock were much more ready to express themselves than they are to-day, for the accepted manners of the present are comparatively reserved and impassive. If a man was amused he laughed loud and long; if he was angered he came up with "a word and a blow"; and if his deeper feelings were touched he was not ashamed of a tear. In fact he seemed almost to feel a certain pride in his "sensibility," as if his power to weep proved that his nature was not destitute of finer feeling and made up for his quickness to wrath and his fondness for a broad joke. In perhaps unconscious recognition of this habit of mind the literature of a century ago contained a great many frank appeals to the reader's feeling for pathos, appeals which the modern reader would be likely to condemn as unworthily sentimental.