Now this is manly, and so is the diet it advises; I recommend both to my readers. Let each determine to make one convert, himself that one. On Christmas day, let each dine off, or at least have on his table, the good old English fare, roast beef and plum-pudding! and does such beef as our island produces need recommendation? What more nutritive and delicious? and, for a genuine healthy Englishman, what more proper than this good old national English dish? Let him whose stomach will not bear it, look about and insure his life--I would not give much for it. It ought, above all other places, to be duly honoured in our officers' mess-rooms. As Prior says, "If I take Dan Congreve right, Pudding and beef make Britons fight." So, then, if beef be indeed so excellent, we shall not much wonder that Shakspeare should say, --"A pound of man's flesh Is not so estimable or profitable. As flesh of mutton, beeves, or goats!" The French have christened us (and I think it no disreputable _sobriquet_) Jack Roastbeef, from a notion we cannot live without roast-beef, any more than without plum-pudding, porter, and punch; however, the notion is palpably erroneous. We are proving more and more every day--to our shame be it spoken!--that we can live without it. At least do not let it be said we can pass a Christmas without it, merely to make way for turkeys, fricassees, and ragouts! "Oh, reform it altogether!" * * * * * England was always famous among foreigners for the celebration of Christmas, at which time our ancestors introduced many sports and pastimes unknown in other countries, or now even among ourselves. "At the feast of Christmas," says Stowe, "in the king's court, wherever he chanced to reside, there was appointed a lord of misrule, or master of merry disports; the same merry fellow made his appearance at the house of every nobleman and gentleman of distinction; and, among the rest, the lord mayor of London and the sheriffs had their lords of misrule, ever contending, without quarrel or offence, who should make the rarest pastime to delight the beholders." Alas! where are all these, or any similar, "merry disports" in our degenerate days? We have no "lords of misrule" now; or, if we have, they are of a much less innocent and pacific character. Mr. Cambridge, also, (No 104, of the _World_) draws a glowing picture of an ancient Christmas. "Our ancestors," says he, "considered Christmas in the double light of a holy commemoration and a cheerful festival; and accordingly distinguished it by devotion, by vacation from business, by merriment and hospitality. They seemed eagerly bent to make themselves and every body about them happy. With what punctual zeal did they wish one another a merry Christmas! and what an omission would it have been thought, to have concluded a letter without the compliments of the season! The great hall resounded with the tumultuous joys of servants and tenants, and the gambols they played