not a knight to enjoy tranquillity in the bosom of his family, while his peers were waging war beyond the seas-of opinion, which compels the gamester to pay a debt of honour with the money, for want of which his industrious tradesman is starving-of opinion, which does not permit a man to refuse a challenge, though the law has designated it a crime-of opinion, before the influence of which even tyrants tremble.*

We shall give one of the cases, with the decision of the ladyjudges, for the edification of our fair readers, especially those who are casuistically and coquettishly inclined.

CASE. A knight, betrothed to a lady, had been absent a considerable time beyond the seas. She waited, in vain, for his return, and his friends, at last, began to despair of it. The lady, impatient of the delay, found a new lover. The secretary of the absent knight, indignant at the infidelity of the lady, opposed this new passion. The lady's defence was this:-" Since a widow, after two years of mourning,† may receive a new lover, much more may she, whose betrothed husband, in his absence, has sent her no token of remembrance or fidelity, though he lacked not the means of transmitting it."

This question occasioned long debates, and it was argued in the court of the Countess of Champagne. The judgment was delivered as follows:

"A lady is not justified in renouncing her lover, under the pretext of his long absence, unless she has certain proof that his fidelity has been violated, and his duty forgotten. There is, however, no legal cause of absence, but necessity, or the most honourable call. Nothing should give a woman's heart more delight than to hear, in lands far distant from the scene of his achievements, the renown of her lover's name, and the reverence in which he is held by the warlike and the noble. The circumstance of his having refrained from despatching a messenger, or a token of his love, may be explained on prudential reasons, since he may have been unwilling to trust the secret of his heart to every stranger's keeping; for though he had confided his despatches to a messenger, who might not have been able to comprehend them, yet, by the wickedness of that messenger, or by his death on the journey, the secret of his love might be revealed."

The ingenuity, displayed by the pleaders on both sides, was considerable, and the decisions of the judges, which are gene

* Raynouard, II. cxxiii.

This was one of the laws of the court of love, "Two years' widowhood, in case of death, shall be duly observed by the survivor." The lady, who was the defendant in this cause, would not have found so easy an excuse in our law, which requires that seven years should pass after the absence of any one beyond sea, before the presumption of death can arise.

rally pretty diffuse, are usually luminous and conclusive. Unfortunately for the fame of la gaie science, there were no reporters at that day to transmit to us the authentic records of the courts of love; and we must, therefore, be satisfied with the relics which have been casually preserved of these singular proceedings. We may remark, however, that the authority of the decisions which remain, are still unimpeached by any superior jurisdiction.

ART. V.-SUNDAY.

[New Monthly Magazine-April, 1821.]

"I am no herald to enquire of men's pedigrees; it sufficeth me if I know their SIDNEY. virtues." Sunday must needs be an excellent institution, since the very breaking of it is the BONNEL THORNTON. support of half the villages round town."

If it were possible to trace back the current of an Englishman's blood to its early fountains, what a strange compound would the mass present! What a confusion and intermingling of subsidiary streams from the Britons, Romans, Danes, Saxons, and Normans; amalgamating with minor contributions from undiscoverable sources, mocking the chemist's power to analyse, and almost bewildering imagination to conceive! Being myself" no tenth transmitter of a foolish face," I have sometimes maliciously wished that a bona fide, genuine, scrupulously-accurate family tree, shooting its branches up into the darkness of antiquity, could be displayed before some of our boasters of high descent and genealogical honours. Heavens! how would it vary from their own emblazoned parchment and vellum records! What confusion of succession-what scandal thrown upon Lady Barbaras and Lady Bridgets, all immaculate in their time-what heraldic bars in noble scutcheons, ancient and modern, from the now first-detected intrigues of chaplains, captains, pages, and serving-men, with their frail mistresses, whose long stomachers, stuck up in the picture-gallery of the old Gothic hall, look like so many insurance-plates against the fire of Cupid's torch!Strange that there should be a limit to this pride of ancestry! If it be glorious to trace our family up to Edward the First, it should be still more so to ascend to Edward the Confessor; yet pride seldom mounts higher than the first illustrious name, the first titled or celebrated progenitor, whom it chooses to call the founder of the family. The haughtiest vaunter of high pedigree and the honours of unbroken descent, from the time of William the Conqueror, would probably weep with shame at being enabled to follow his name three hundred years farther back, through a succession of ploughmen, labourers, or malefactors. As it cannot be denied that all families are, in point of fact, equally

ancient, the distinction consists in possessing records to prove a certain succession; and even this, it appears, ceases to be a boast beyond a certain point. Fantastical vanity! which, while it cannot deny to the beggar at the gate the privilege of being equally descended from Adam and Eve, rests its own claim to superiority upon being enabled to prove a fiftieth part of the same antiquity, struts, like the jay in the fable, in others' finery, and piques itself upon the actions of ancestors, instead of its own. Give me the man who is an honour to his titles; not him whose titles are his honour!

But, if an Englishman be such an heterogeneous compound as to his personal composition, he has the consolation of knowing, that his language is, at least, equally confused and intermingled with Teutonic, Celtic, and classical derivations. Let us consider, for instance, the hebdomadary (as Dr. Johnson would call it,) or the days of the week, named after the Sun, the Moon, Tuisco, Woden or Odin, Thor, Freya, and Saturn; four Scandinavian or northern deities, three Pagan gods worshipped in the south, and not one christian sponsor! Let the reader lift up the curtain of time, and, taking a hasty glimpse of the last ten or twenty centuries, suffer his imagination to wander amid the scenes and associations suggested by the enumeration we have just made. Perched on the crags of rocks and mountains, and frowning at the rolling clouds and snow-storms that lour beneath, he will mark the gigantic heroes of the north; the warriors of Ossian will stalk gloomily before him; he will roam through the five hundred and forty halls of Thor's palace, till he find him seated on his throne with his terrific wife, Freya, by his side, and in his hand the gigantic hammer of which he has read in the Runic poetry; and finally, he will ascend into the Scandinavian elysium, or palace of Valhalla, where he will behold the beatified warriors drinking mead out of the skulls of their enemies, administered by the fair hands of the Valkyriæ, those virgin Houris of the north, blessed with perpetual youth and never-fading beauty. Turning from the appalling sublimity of these cold, desolate, and warlike regions, let his fancy revel in the rich and sunny luxuriance of Grecian landscape, awakening from their long sleep all the beautiful realities and classical fictions connected with the glorious god of the Sun, the Apollo of the poets, the patron deity of Delphi and of Delos. How beautiful is the morning! Slowly rising above the mountains of Argos, the sun shoots a golden bloom over the undimpled waters of the Ægean and the sea of Myrtos, gilding every height of the Cycladean Islands, as if the very hills had caught fire to do honour to the quinquennial festival of Apollo, now celebrating at Delos. See! in every direction the green ocean is studded with the white sails of barks (like daisies in the grass) hastening

to the ceremony from Attica, Boeotia, and Thessaly; from Lesbos and Crete; from Ionia and the coasts of Asiatic Greece.— As they approach, their crews are seen doing reverence to the sun, and the faint dulcet sound of flutes and hautboys melts along the wave. But what stately vessel is that hurrying from the east, whose numerous rowers make the waters sparkle with their gilded oars? It is the Paralos, or sacred bark of Athens. Hark! what a high and swelling symphony pours from the numerous band on board;-she approaches the shore of Delos, whose inhabitants flock to the beach, and as the band, and dancers, and choristers, debark, they are compelled, by immemorial usage, to rehearse their lessons, and chaunt their new hymn to Apollo. Other boats have now landed their crews in various parts of the island, and as they advance towards the temple with music, dancing, and singing, behold! the priests of Apollo, and a long procession of choristers, descending from Mount Cynthus, wind along the banks of the Inopus, chanting the ancient hymns composed by Homer and Hesiod when they visited the island. As, with their right hands pointed to the sun, the whole population celebrate the praises of Apollo, every face is lighted up with enthusiasm and joy; and while the air is loaded with the melody of pipes, timbrels, and lutes, and the nobler harmony of human voices, the god of day, slowly ascending in cloudless magnificence, seems, with his lidless eye of fire, to smile with complacency upon the homage of his worshippers.

Let me stop, Mr. Editor, for if I am suffered to proceed, I shall gallop to every province of Greece, and visit every scene of jubilee, from the great Olympic Games to the Feast of Adonis, which the Syracusan gossips of Theocritus were so anxious to witness. Suffice it, that a slight sketch has been attempted of a Sun-day among the people of Delos. Let us see how it has been celebrated by other nations. In Hebrew, the word Sabbath signifies rest; and the Jews fixed it on the Saturday, the last day of the week, to commemorate the completion of the work of creation, and the reposing of the Lord. It was not distinguished by a mere cessation from labour, but was enlivened by every species of rejoicing, they who took the most pleasure deeming themselves the most devout; and, amid a variety of puerile and superstitious ceremonies, they were particularly enjoined to lie longer in bed on that morning. If it were allowable to reverse the profane jest of the pork-lover, who wished to be a Jew, that he might have the pleasure of eating pork and sinning at the same time, I should be tempted to express a similar desire for the contemporaneous comfort of lying in bed and performing a religious duty. The Sunday, or Christian Sabbath, was appropriated to the first day of the week, in eternal rememVOL. III.

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brance of the resurrection of Christ; but was not strictly solemnized as a period of cessation from all business until about the year 321, when Constantine ordered its 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 May-games, Whitsun-ales, or Morrice-dances; or setting up of May-poles, 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,