CHRISTMAS SCRAPS.
We have spiced our former volumes, as well as our present number, with two or three articles suitable to this jocund season; but we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of adding "more last words." People talk of Old and New Christmas with woeful faces; and a few, more learned than their friends, cry stat nominis umbra,—all which may be very true, for aught we know or care. Swift proved that mortal MAN is a broomstick; and Dr. Johnson wrote a sublime meditation on a pudding; and we could write a whole number about the midnight mass and festivities of Christmas, pull out old Herrick and his Ceremonies for Christmasse—his yule log—and Strutt's Auntient Customs in Games used by Boys and Girls, merrily sett out in verse; but we leave such relics for the present, and seek consolation in the thousand wagon-loads of poultry and game, and the many million turkeys that make all the coach—offices of the metropolis like so many charnel-houses. We would rather illustrate our joy like the Hindoos do their geography, with rivers and seas of liquid amber, clarified butter, milk, curds, and intoxicating liquors. No arch in antiquity, not even that of Constantine, delights us like the arch of a baron of beef, with its soft-flowing sea of gravy, whose silence is only broken by the silver oar announcing that another guest is made happy. Then the pudding, with all its Johnsonian associations of "the golden grain drinking the dews of the morning—milk pressed by the gentle hand of the beauteous milk-maid—egg, that miracle of nature, which Burnett has compared to creation—and salt, the image of intellectual excellence, which contributes to the foundation of a pudding." As long as the times spare us these luxuries, we leave Hortensius to his peacocks; Heliogabalus to his dishes of cocks-combs; and Domitian to his deliberations in what vase he may boil his huge turbot. We have epicures as well as had our ancestors; and the wonted fires of Apicius and Sardanapalus may still live in St. James's-street and Waterloo-place; but commend us to the board, where each guest, like a true feeler, brings half the entertainment along with him. This brings us to notice Christmas, a Poem, by Edward Moxon, full of ingenuousness and good feeling, in Crabbe-like measure; but, captious reader, suspect not a pun on the poet of England's hearth—for a more unfortunate name than Crabbe we do not recollect.
Mr. Moxon's is a modest little octavo, of 76 pages, which may be read between the first and last arrival of a Christmas party. As a specimen, we subjoin the following:—
Hail, Christmas! holy, joyous time,
The boast of many an age gone by,
And yet methinks unsung in rhyme,
Though dear to bards of chivalry;
Nor less of old to Church and State,
As authors erudite relate.
If so, my harp, thou friend to me,