our power, yet it is not within the reach of any private gentleman's exertions or finances to set them on their legs again. It should be made a national matter of; and as the old gentleman, with his family, will be coming our way soon after the publication of the present volume, we trust we may be the means of inducing some to receive them with the ancient welcome and feast them after the ancient fashion. To enable our readers to do this with due effect, we will endeavor to furnish them with a programme of some of the more important ceremonies observed by our hearty ancestors on the occasion, and to give them some explanation of those observances which linger still, although the causes in which their institution originated are becoming gradually obliterated, and although they themselves are falling into a neglect which augurs too plainly of their final and speedy extinction. It is, alas! but too true that the spirit of hearty festivity in which our ancestors met this season has been long on the decline; and much of the joyous pomp with which it was once received has long since passed away. Those "divers plente of plesaunces," in which the genius of mirth exhibited himself,-- "About yule, when the wind blew cule, And the round tables began,"-- have sent forward to these dull times of ours but few, and those sadly degenerated, representatives. The wild, barbaric splendor; the unbridled "mirth and princely cheare" with which, upon the faith of ancient ballads, we learn that "ages long ago" King Arthur kept Christmas "in merry Carleile" with Queen Guenever, "that bride soe bright of blee;" the wholesale hospitality; the royal stores of "pigs' heads and gammons of bacon" for a Christmas largesse to the poor, at which we get glimpses in the existing records of the not over-hospitable reign of King John; the profuse expenditure and stately ceremonial by which the season was illustrated in the reign of the vain and selfish Elizabeth; and the lordly wassailings and antic mummings, whose universal prevalence, at this period of the year, furnished subjects of such holy horror to the Puritans in the time of the first Charles,--have gradually disappeared before the philosophic pretensions and chilling pedantry of these sage and self-seeking days. The picturesque effects of society--its strong lights and deep shadows--are rapidly passing away; as the inequalities of surface from which they were projected are smoothed and polished down. From a period of high ceremonial and public celebration, which it long continued to be in England, the Christmas-tide has tamed away into a period of domestic union and social festivity; and the ancient observances which covered it all over with sparkling points are now rather perceived--faintly and distantly and imperfectly--by the light of the still surviving spirit of the season than contribute anything to that spirit, or throw as of old any light over that season from themselves.