more rigorous observance, and interdicted all prosecutions, pleadings, and juridical processes, public or private. Of all the blessings ever bestowed on the world, it may be questioned whether any have been attended with more beneficial consequences to morals, health, and happiness, than the institution of a seventh day of rest, without which the lot of mortality, to the mass of mankind, would be hardly endurable. What contemplation so kindly, social, and endearing, as to behold the great human family linked by religion in one domestic brotherhood, and reduced to one common level, assembling weekly under the same roof to pour forth their gratitude to God, their universal benefactor and father? And yet how various have been the temper and spirit, with which the Sabbath has been solemnized in different ages, fluctuating from the sternest self-mortification and the most inexorable rigour, to the opposite extreme of irreverend and licentious hilarity. Well might Erasmus say, that the human understanding was like a drunken clown attempting to mount a horse ;-if you help him up on one side, he falls over on the other. The old Puritan, who refused to brew on a Saturday, lest his beer should work on the Sunday, was scarcely more ridiculous than the sceptical G. L. Le Sage of Geneva, who, according to his biographer Prevost, being anxious to ascertain whether the great Author of nature still prescribed to himself the observance of the original day of rest, measured, with the nicest exactitude, the daily increase of a plant to ascertain whether it would cease growing on the Sabbath, and finding that it did not, of course decided for the negative of the proposition. By statute 1 Car. I. no persons on the Lord's day

shall assemble out of their own parishes, for any sport whatsoever; nor, in their parishes, shall use any bull or bear-baiting, interludes, plays, or other unlawful exercises or pastimes; on pain that every offender shall pay 3s. 4d. to the poor." In 1618 King James, on the other hand, was graciously pleased to declare, "That for his good people's recreation, his Majesty's pleasure was, that after the end of divine service they should not be disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreations; such as dancing, either of men or women; archery for men; leaping, vaulting, or any other harmless recreations; nor having of Maygames, Whitsun-ales, or Morrice-dances; or setting up of Maypoles, or other sports therewith used, so as the same may be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or let of divine service." A statute, the 29 Charles II. enacts, "that no person shall work on the Lord's day, or use any boat or barge;" and by the non-repeal of this absurd law, the population of London, on the only day when its labouring classes have leisure for recreation, are denied the healthy enjoyment of their noble river, unless they choose to subject themselves to a penalty of 5s.

Our own times have had their full share of this pendulating

between extremes. To the lively Parisians nothing appeared more atrociously tyrannical, than that their lately restored sovereign should shut up the shops on a Sunday, and compel some little external reverence to the day, beyond the mere opening of the church-doors for the accommodation of a few devout old women. His pious inflexibility, on this point, had very nearly occasioned a counter-revolution. "Eh! mon dieu," said the Frenchman in London, when he looked out of window on a Sunday morning in the city," what national calamity has happened ?" The houses all shut up-the silent and deserted streets forming such a sepulchral contrast to their ordinary bustle-the solemn countenances of the few straggling passengers, and the dismal tolling of innumerable bells, might well justify this exclamation in a foreigner; nor would his wonder be diminished, upon learning that this was the English mode of exhibiting their cheerfulness and gratitude to Heaven. What would such a man say, especially when he reflected upon the Sunday theatres, dances, and festivities of France, were he to be told that, even in these times, the lawfulness of shaving on a Sunday had been seriously discussed by one of our most numerous sects? The question was thus gravely submitted to the Methodist conference of 1807: "As it has been suggested that our rule respecting the exclusion of barbers, who shave or dress their customers on the Lord's day, is not sufficiently explicit and positive, what is the decision of the conference on this important point?" And thus replieth that august body to the weighty interrogatory: "Let it be fully understood that no such person is to be suffered to remain in any of our societies. We charge all our superintendants to execute this rule in every place, without partiality and without delay." Poor human nature how often in thy failure to enforce these and other unattainable austerities, dost thou verify the lines of Dryden :

"Reaching above our nature does no good,

We must fall back to our old flesh and blood."

Is there no island of rest for thee between Scylla and Charybdis; must thou be for ever bandied to and fro by the conflicting battledores of fanaticism and indifference?

It may not be unamusing, perhaps not uninstructive, to consider the mode, in which some of the various classes of London society dispose of themselves upon the Sabbath.

The rational Christian goes to church in an exhilarating spirit of grateful devotion to God, and universal charity to mankind; and feeling persuaded that the most acceptable homage to the Creator must be the happiness of the creature, dedicates the rest of the day to innocent recreations, and the enjoyment of domestic and social intercourse.

The bigot enters his Salem or Ebenezer, hoping to propitiate the

God of unbounded benignity by enforcing systems of gloom and horror; by dreadful denunciations against the rest of mankind, and ascetical self-privations. He holds with the Caliph Omar, that we must make a hell of this world to merit heaven in the next. In all probability, he is a vice-suppresser, and hating to see others enjoy that which he denies to himself, wages a petty but malignant warfare against human happiness, from the poor boy's kite to the old woman's apple-stall. If in good circumstances, he orders out his coachman, footman, and horses, to go to chapel, that the world may at once know his wealth and his devoutness; yet dines upon cold meat, to let God Almighty see that he does not unnecessarily employ his servants on the Sabbath. Music on this day is an utter abomination; and, if he had his will, he would imprison the running waters for making melody with the pebbles; set the wind in the stocks for whistling; and cite the lark, the thrush, and the blackbird into the Ecclesiastical Court.

The man of fashion cannot possibly get dressed in time for church; the park is mauvais ton;-there is no other place to ride in-he hates walking-lounges at the subscription-house, and votes Sunday a complete bore, until it is time to drop in at the Marchioness's, in Arlington-street.

Jammed in by other carriages, and sometimes unable to move from the same spot for hours together, the woman of fashion spends her Sunday morning in the ring, exposed to sun, wind, and dust, and the rude stare of an endless succession of oriental vulgarians.

Half filling his showy and substantial carriage, the rich citizen rides from his country-house to the church, fully impressed with the importance of the duty he is performing, and not altogether unmindful of the necessity of acquiring an appetite for dinner. He has, moreover, a lurking hope that his supplications may not have an unpropitious effect on the fate of his missing ship, the Good Intent, on which he is short insured*; to strengthen which influence, he deplores to his son the irreligious omission of the introductory and concluding prayer in the newly printed bills of lading; censures the same impropriety in the form of modern wills; and informs him that most of the old mercantile ledgers had the words "Laus Deo" very properly printed in their first page. His wife, fat and fine, with a gorgeous pelisse, and a whole flower-garden in her bonnet, sits opposite to him, and, as they go to church to abjure all pomps and vanities, their rich liveried

*An Insurance Company, at Cadiz, once took the Virgin Mary into formal partnership, covenanting to set aside her portion of profits for the enrichment of her shrine in that city. Not doubting that she would protect every vessel, in which she had such a manifest interest, they underwrote ships of all sorts, at such reduced rates, that in a few months the infatuated partners were all declared bankrupts.

servant, with fifty bobs and tags dangling from his shoulder, clatters up the aisle behind them, to perform the essential offices of carrying one little prayer-book, and shutting the door of their pew. Whatever be the rank of those who practise this obtrusive and indecorous display, it is of the very essence of vulgar upstart pride, and constitutes an offence, which the beadle of every parish ought to have special orders to prevent.

The city dandy and dandisette, arrayed in the very newest of their septenary fashions, pick the cleanest way to the Park, and leaving the verdant sward, umbrageous avenues, and chirping birds of Kensington-gardens, to nurserymaids and children, prefer taking the dust, and enjoying the crowd by the road-side, accompanied by the unceasing grating of the carriage-wheels in the gravel.

The maid-servant, having a smart new bonnet, asks her mistress's permission to go to morning-service; and, when her fellow servants inquire what the sermon was about, exclaims, with a toss of her head, “I always told Mary what the flirting of that fellow Tomkins would come to; spite of all his fine speeches about the banns, they was'nt no more asked in church than I was."

The labourer, or mechanic, who was formerly enabled to freshen his feet in the grass of the green fields, and recreate his smoke-dried nose with the fragrance of a country breeze, can no longer enjoy that gratification now that London itself is gone out of town. He prowls about the dingy swamps of Battersea or MileEnd, with a low bull-dog at his heels, which he says he will match, for a gallon of beer, with e'er a dog in England. Being of the same stock with the cockney young lady, who pathetically lamented that she "never could exasperate the Haitch," and then innocently inquired" whether the letter We was'nt a wowell?" he, with a scrupulous inaccuracy, misplaces his H's, V's, and W's. At Vauxhall he stops to buy an ash-stick; because, as he argumentatively tells Bill Gibbons, his companion, " I always likes a hash un. However numerous may be his acquaintance, he never meets one without asking him what they shall drink, having a bibulous capacity as insatiable as that of a dustman, who, beginning at six o'clock in the morning, will swallow a quart of washy small beer at every door on both sides of a long street.

The more decent artisan, having stowed four young children, all apparently of the same age, in a hand-cart, divides with his wife the pleasure of dragging them, for the benefit of country air, as far as the Mother Red Cap in the Hampstead-road, where he ascends into a balcony commanding a fine view of the surrounding dust, smokes his pipe, drinks his ale, and, enjoying the heat of the high road as he lugs his burden back again, declares, that "them country excursions are vastly wholesome." "the

It was my intention to have contrasted with these scenes

sound of the church-going bell" in a quiet sequestered village; but, in writing of London, I have so far caught its spirit, as to have left myself little room for further enlargement, and I shall, therefore, comprise all I had to say in the following extract from Wordsworth's" White Doe of Rylstone

"From Bolton's old monastic tower,

The bells ring loud with gladsome power;
The sun is bright; the fields are gay,
With people in their best array

Of stole and doublet, hood and scarf,
Along the banks of the crystal Wharf,
Through the vale, retired and lowly,
Trooping to that summons holy.

And up among the moorlands, see
What sprinklings of blithe company!
Of lasses and of shepherd grooms,
That down the steep hills force their way,
Like cattle through the budded brooms;
Path, or no path, what care they?
And thus, in joyous mood, they hie
To Bolton's mouldering Priory."

H.

ANECDOTES OF THE GUELPHS.

Ir is singular that, in an age when the biography of individuals forms so great a portion of our national literature, the history of the illustrious House, which now enjoys the crown of England, should have been so long neglected. On the accession of the Brunswick family, indeed, several volumes appeared, which professed to contain authentic accounts of that house, but which were, for the most part, collected from the ancient chronicles, and filled with the most ridiculous fictions. The attempt of Gibbon, therefore, has been the only source to which we have hitherto had resort, for any thing like accurate and historical information on this subject. At length, however, a more extensive and finished work has been given to the public, which, if it does not supersede the labours of the future historian, will at least furnish him with a fund of accurate and valuable information.* As the annals of this warlike and adventurous family abound with interesting relations, we have selected such as were the most striking, and which, by being col

* A general History of the House of Guelph, or Royal Family of Great Britain, from the earliest period in which the name appears upon record, to the accession of his Majesty King George the First to the throne, with an appendix of authentic and original documents. By Andrew Halliday, M. D. Domestic Physician to H. R. H. the Duke of Clarence. 4to. London, Underwood, 1921.