The author of the paragraph quoted above, expresses forcible remembrance of his youthful pleasures on the coming in of the new year.--“Hail! to thee, JANUARY!--all hail! cold and wintry as thou art, if it be but in virtue of thy first day. THE DAY, as the French call it, _par excellence_, ‘Le jour de l’an.’ Come about me, all ye little schoolboys that have escaped from the unnatural thraldom of your taskwork--come crowding about me, with your untamed hearts shouting in your unmodulated voices, and your happy spirits dancing an untaught measure in your eyes! Come, and help me to speak the praises of new-year’s day!--_your_ day--one of the three which have, of late, become yours almost exclusively, and which have bettered you, and have been bettered themselves, by the change. Christmay-day, which _was_; New-year’s-day, which _is_; and Twelfth-day, which _is to be_; let us compel them all three into our presence--with a whisk of our imaginative wand convert them into one, as the conjurer does his three glittering balls--and then enjoy them all together,--with their dressings, and coachings, and visitings, and greetings, and gifts, and “many happy returns”--with their plum-puddings, and mince-pies, and twelfth-cakes, and neguses--with their forfeits, and fortune-tellings, and blindman’s-buffs, and sittings up to supper--with their pantomimes, and panoramas, and new penknives, and pastrycooks’ shops--in short, with their endless round of ever new nothings, the absence of a relish for which is but ill supplied, in after life, by that feverish lingering and thirsting after excitement, which usurp without filling its place. Oh! that I might enjoy those nothings once again in fact, as I can in fancy! But I fear the wish is worse than an idle one; for it not only may not be, but it ought not to be. “We cannot have our cake and eat it too,” as the vulgar somewhat vulgarly, but not less shrewdly, express it. And this is as it should be; for if we could, it would neither be worth the eating nor the having.”[6] WASSAIL! [Illustration] The Wassail Bowl. Health, my lord king, the sweet Rowena said, Health, cry’d the chieftain, to the Saxon maid; Then gayly rose, and ’midst the concourse wide, Kiss’d her hale lips, and plac’d her by his side: At the soft scene such gentle thoughts abound, That health and kisses ’mongst the guests went round; From this the social custom took its rise, We still retain, and must for ever prize. Now, on New-year’s-day as on the previous eve, the wassail bowl is carried from door to door, with singing and merriment. In Devonshire, A massy bowl, to deck the jovial day, Flash’d from its ample round a sunlike ray. Full many a cent’ry it shone forth to grace The festive spirit of th’ Andarton race, As, to the sons of sacred union dear, It welcomed with _lambs’ wool_ the rising year. _Polwhele._