Mirror of the Months

by P. G. Patmore

At length, however, my unwearied attendance on them, in their yearly passage past me, and the assiduous court that I have always paid to each and all of their charms, has met with its reward: for there is this especial difference between them and all other mistresses whatever, that, so far from being jealous of each other, their sole ground of complaint against their lovers is, that they do not pay equal devotion to each in her turn; the blooming May and the blushing June disdain the vows of those votaries who have not previously wept at the feet of the weeping April, or sighed in unison with the sad breath of March. And it is the same with all the rest. They present a sweet emblem of the ideal of a happy and united human family; to each member of which the best proof you can offer that you are worthy of her love, is, that you have gained that of her sisters; and to whom the best evidence you can give of being able to love either worthily, is, that you love all. This, I say, has been the kind of court that I have paid to the Months—loving each in all, and all in each. And my reward (in addition to that of the love itself—which is a “virtue,” and therefore “its own reward”) has been that each has condescended to watch over and instruct me, while I wrote down the particulars of her brief but immortal life—immortal, because ever renewed, and bearing the seeds of its renewal within itself.

These instructions, however, were accompanied by certain conditions, without complying with which I am not permitted to make the results available to any one but myself. For my own private satisfaction I have liberty to personify the objects of my admiration under any form I please; but if I speak of them to others, they insist on being treated merely as portions or periods of their beautiful parent the Year, as she is a portion of Time, the great parent of all things; and that the facts and events I may have to refer to, shall not be essentially connected with them, but merely be considered as taking place during the period of their sojourn on the earth respectively.

I confess that this condition seems to savour a little of the fastidious, not to say the affected. And, what is still more certain, it cuts me off from a most fertile source of the poetical and the picturesque. I will frankly add, however, that I am not without my suspicions that this latter may have been the very reason why this condition was imposed upon me; for I am by no means certain that, if I had been left to myself, I should not have substituted cold abstractions and unintelligible fictions (or what would have seemed such to others), in the place of that simple information which it is my chief object to convey.

Laying aside, then, if I can, all ornamental figures of speech, I shall proceed to place before the reader, in plain prose, the principal events which happen, in the two worlds of Nature and of Art, during the life and reign of each month; beginning with the nominal beginning of the dynasty, and continuing to present, on the birthday of each member of it, a record of the beauties which she brings in her train, and the good deeds which she either inspires or performs.

Hail! then, 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 been bettered themselves, by the change. Christmas-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 blind-man’s-buffs, and snap-dragons, 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 hungering 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 the 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.

If the reader complains that this is not the sober style which I just now promised to maintain, I cannot help it. Besides, it was my subject that spoke then, not myself; and it spoke to those who are too happy to be wise, and to whom, therefore, if it were to speak wisely, it might as well not speak at all. Let them alone for awhile, and they will grow too wise to be happy; and then they may be disposed and at leisure to listen to reason.

In sober sadness, then, if the reader so wills it, and after the approved manner of modern moral discourses, the subject before us may be regarded under three distinct points of view; namely, January in London—January in the country—and January in general. And first, of the first.

Now—but before I proceed further, let me bespeak the reader’s indulgence at least, if not his favour, towards this everlasting monosyllable, “Now,” to which my betters have, from time to time, been so much indebted, and on which I shall be compelled to place so much dependence in this my present undertaking. It is the pass word, the “open sesame,” that must remove from before me all lets and impediments; it is the charm that will alternately put to silence my imagination when it may be disposed to infringe on the office of my memory, and awaken my memory when it is inclined to sleep; in fact, it is a monosyllable of infinite avail, and for which, on this as on many other occasions, no substitute can be found in our own or any other language; and if I approve, above all other proverbs, that which says, “There’s nothing like the time present,” it is partly because “the time present” is but a periphrasis for Now!

Now, then, the cloudy canopy of sea-coal smoke that hangs over London, and crowns her queen of capitals, floats thick and threefold; for fires and feastings are rife, and every body is either “out” or “at home,” every night.

Now schoolboys don’t know what to do with themselves till dinner-time; for the good old days of frost and snow, and fairs on the Thames, and furred gloves, and skaiting on the canals, and sliding on the kennels, are gone by; and for any thing in the shape of winter one might as well live in Italy at once!