They flourished in times full of spirit and lustihood, when men
enjoyed life roughly, but heartily and vigorously--times wild and
picturesque, which have furnished poetry with its richest
materials and the drama with its most attractive variety of
characters and manners. The world has become more worldly. There
is more of dissipation, and less of enjoyment. Pleasure has
expanded into a broader, but a shallower stream, and has forsaken
many of those deep and quiet channels where it flowed sweetly
through the calm bosom of domestic life. Society has acquired a
more enlightened and elegant tone, but it has lost many of its
strong local peculiarities, its homebred feelings, its honest
fireside delights. The traditionary customs of golden-hearted
antiquity, its feudal hospitalities, and lordly wassailings, have
passed away with the baronial castles and stately manor-houses in
which they were celebrated. They comported with the shadowy hall,
the great oaken gallery, and the tapestried parlor, but are
unfitted to the light showy saloons and gay drawing-rooms of the
modern villa.
Shorn, however, as it is, of its ancient and festive honors,
Christmas is still a period of delightful excitement in England.
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