To describe the joys and jollifications attendant on Christmas, is what my confined limits would counsel me not to attempt, even if they were describable matters. But, in fact, there is nothing which affords such truly "lenten entertainment" as a feast at secondhand: the Barmecide's dishes were fattening by comparison with it. In conclusion, therefore, let me say that I shall think it very hard, if the gentle readers of these pen and ink sketches of the Months have not been persuaded, during the perusal of each, that I have fulfilled my promise made at the commencement, of proving each, in its turn, to be better than all the rest. At any rate, if they are not so persuaded, they must, to be consistent, henceforth abandon all pretended _admiration_,--which is an affair of impulse, not of judgment,--and must proceed to _compute_ the value of every thing that comes before them, according to its comparative value in regard to some other thing. In short, they must at once adopt Horace's hateful worldly-minded maxim of "nil admirari" &c. as rendered still more hateful and worldly-minded by Bolingbroke and Pope's version of it; and must "make up their minds," as the mechanical phrase is, that not merely "not to _wonder_," (which is what Horace meant, if he meant any thing) but
"Not to _admire_, is all the art _they_ know, To make men happy, and to keep them so."
But, in truth, as it is only for the satisfaction of living friends and lovers that people sit for their portraits; not to gratify the spleen of cavilling critics, nor even to convey their effigies to a posterity that will not care a penny about them; so it is only to please the friends and lovers of Nature, that I have painted the merely natural portion of these "pictures in little" of the Months.
As to the artificial portions,--being of no use to any one else, the posterity of a twelve-month hence is welcome to them, as records of the manners of the day, caught, not "_living_ as they _rise_," but dying as they fall: for in the gardens of Fashion and Folly there are happily no perennials; and though the plants which grow there for the most part belong to that species which have winged seeds, and therefore disperse themselves to wheresoever the winds of heaven blow, the same provision causes them to escape from the spot where they sprang up, and make way for those which the chances and changes of the season may have deposited there. Thus each plant in turn has its day; and each parterre has an annual opportunity of priding itself upon an exhibition of specimens, which last year it would have laughed at, and which next year it will despise. And "thus runs the world (of Fashion) away."