“The youth of this city,” says the honest old chronicler and historian of the metropolis his native place, “used on holidays, after evening prayers, to exercise their basters and bucklers, at their master's doors; and the maidens, one of them playing on a timbrel, to dance for garlands hanged athwart the streets, which open pastimes in my youth, being now suppressed, worser practises within doors are to be feared.” Every one who is conversant with the Middle Ages, and with the literature of the reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles I. must have perceived in how much kindlier relations the different classes of society existed toward each other in those days than they have since done. The very word independence had hardly found a place in the English language, or was known only as denoting a mischievous heresy. It is indeed, as one of our most thoughtful contemporaries has well said, an “unscriptural word,”—and “when applied to man, it directly contradicts the first and supreme laws of our nature; the very essence of which is universal dependence upon God, and universal interdependence on one another.” The Great Rebellion dislocated the relations which had for some centuries thus happily subsisted; and the money getting system which has long been the moving principle of British society, has, aided by other injurious influences, effectually prevented the recovery which time, and the sense of mutual interest, and mutual duty, might otherwise have brought about. It was one characteristic of those old times, which in this respect deserve to be called good, that the different classes participated in the enjoyments of each other. There were the religious spectacles, which, instead of being reformed and rendered eminently useful as they might have been, were destroyed by the brutal spirit of puritanism. There were the Church festivals, till that same odious spirit endeavoured to separate, and has gone far toward separating, all festivity from religion. There were tournaments and city pageants at which all ranks were brought together: they are now brought together only upon the race-course. Christmas Mummers have long ceased to be heard of. The Morris dancers have all but disappeared even in the remotest parts of the kingdom. I know not whether a May-pole is now to be seen. What between manufactures and methodism England is no longer the merry England which it was once a happiness and an honour to call our country. Akenside's words “To the Country Gentlemen of England,” may be well remembered.