In England, the custom of making Christmas presents and New Year's gifts had, except among relatives, died out, when a few years ago some apparently childish, but in reality very ingenious, person invented Christmas cards. The invention was not successful at first; and the strange practice of exchanging pieces of cardboard adorned with commonplace pictorial designs, and inscribed with conventional expressions of goodwill, was, for a time, confined to the sort of persons who might be suspected of sending valentines. Eventually, however, it spread. The initiative in this matter seems to have been taken by enterprising young ladies, whose attentions it was impossible to leave unrecognised; and endeavours were naturally made to return them cards of superior value to those which they had themselves despatched. Thus a noble spirit of emulation was generated, which the designers, manufacturers, and vendors of Christmas cards did their best to gratify and stimulate; so that, latterly, there has been a marked rise in these products as regards price, and even quality. Many of them possess undeniable artistic merit, and during the last few years some very beautiful varieties of the Christmas card have been brought out at Paris. These pictorial adaptations from the English are at least more graceful and more original than the great majority of our own dramatic adaptations from the French. If, as everyone knows, the sending of Christmas cards is a custom of but a few years' standing, New Year's gifts are by no means of recent invention; and under the Roman Empire, as now in Russia, presents used, as a matter of course, to be made on the first day of the New Year to the magistrates and high officials. In the end, the practice of making New Year's gifts grew so popular that every Roman at the opening of a new year presented the reigning emperor with a certain amount of money, proportionate to his means; and what had, in the first instance, been among ordinary individuals but a token of esteem, was now, in regard to the sovereign, an assurance of loyalty, besides being a tolerable source of income. The barbaric nations, with simpler habits, had simpler ceremonies in connection with the New Year; and the Gauls were content to present one another at this season with sprigs of mistletoe plucked from the sacred groves. Coming to much more recent times, we find the custom of giving New Year's presents in full force at the Court of Louis XIV., when, on the 1st of January, ladies received tokens from their lovers, and gave tokens in return.