frightful thing; and after contemplating the British. Museum and St. Paul's, exclaims: These spots are melancholy, being the decay of stone. And these nude statues in memory of Greece! Wellington is a fighting hero, naked, under the dripping trees of the park. The hideous Nelson stuck on his column, with a coil of rope in the form of a pigtail, like a rat impaled on the top of a pole. A swamp like this is a place of exile for the arts of antiquity. When the Romans disembarked here, they must have thought themselves in Homer's hell, in the land of the Cimmerians.' This assumes, of course, that the Romans disembarked like M. Taine on a wet Sunday, and took a stroll in a corresponding disposition through the Strand and the parks. But what is to be done on the day of rest? There is the church and the pothouse, intoxication and a sermon, insensibility and reflection, but no other way of spending a Sunday like this. I observe many doors ajar in the spirit vaults; sad faces, worn or wild, pass out and in. Let us visit the churches.' He visits four in the morning, and two in the afternoon, staying out the sermon in two. The congregations impressed him rather favourably. They come to provision themselves with moral counsels, to refresh their principles. When reading the numerous essays in English literature, and the moralisings of the "Saturday Review," one perceives that common-places do not weary them.' He is pleased by finding the Book of Common Prayer, the mass-book of England,' on the ledges of the pews; and an anthem in Westminster Abbey suggests that worship thus understood is the opera of elevated, serious, and believing souls.' Was M. Taine the Frenchman who, on entering the vault under the great Pyramid, exclaimed: Quel emplacement pour un billard! 6 On returning to his hotel he reads the Queen's Proclamation, by which her loving subjects are prohibited from playing at dice, cards, or any other game whatsoever on the Lord's Day, and the magistrates enjoined to prevent the publicans from selling liquors or permitting guests to remain in their houses in the time of Divine service : This order is not strictly observed; the tavern doors are closed during service, but they can be opened, and drinking goes on in the back room. In any case this is a relic of the old Puritanism altogether distasteful in France. Prohibit people to drink and amuse themselves on Sunday! But to a French workman, and to a peasant, Sunday appears to have been made for nothing else. Stendhal said that here, in Scotland, in true Biblical countries, religion spoils one day out of seven, destroys the seventh part of possible happiness. He judges the Englishman, the man of the North, after the model of the man of the South, whom wine exhilarates and does not brutalise, who can without inconvenience give way to his instinct, and whose pleasure is poetical. Here the temperament is different, more violent and more combative; pleasure is a brutish and bestial thing: I could cite twenty examples of this. An Englishman said to me, "When a Frenchman is drunk, he chatters; when a German is drunk, he sleeps; when an Englishman is drunk, he fights." In other words, the only answer to Stendhal is that, if an Englishman were allowed the same liberty on Sundays as a Frenchman, he would get drunk and disorderly : that the primary use of Sunday observances is to keep him out of mischief; and that the French laxity in this particular is an infallible sign of the higher civilisation and happier temperament of the French. To test the soundness of this opinion let us take a wider range: let us extend the comparison to other countries besides England and France, and to other times beyond the present. Let it also be remembered that French Sundays are not invariably fine, nor English Sundays invariably wet that the environs of this metropolis, on an average Sunday, offer much that is bright and cheering to compensate for its gloom. The shop windows are closed, the streets are not alive with traffic, there are fewer handsome equipages, and fewer people of fashion in the parks. But whatever direction you take in the afternoon, you will see groups of men, women, and children, gaily dressed, and looking as if they thoroughly enjoyed their holiday, which most of them could not have at all if the shops were kept open, and the thronging carriages were driving about, and the usual weekday stir and brilliancy were kept up. Take your stand on London or Westminster Bridge and watch the crowded steamers; or go the round of the metropolitan railway stations and form a rough estimate of the thousands of pleasureseekers who are starting for Richmond, Hampton Court, Epping Forest, Greenwich, or Blackheath. All the suburban villages and favourite places of resort, for an area of twelve miles round, present the same cheerful aspect. So do the country towns; and that the picture is frequently defaced by intemperance or disorderly conduct, we deny. Follow these groups or couples after their trip or stroll, and you will find most of them forming part of a family circle or enjoying a quiet chat round a tea-table. The Parisian has his shops open, his innumerable cafés and restaurants, his theatres, and his races; but what proportion of the population are kept at work to minister to his gratification?-nay, are more hardly worked on that day, to add to it? If the question were to be decided, without reference to religion, by the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it must be decided against the French; and M. Taine is very much mistaken if he supposes that the English observance of Sunday, as generally understood and practised, is the result of bigotry. It is the result, like so many other English customs and institutions, of a wise compromise-a compromise between those who wish to make Sunday a mere festival, and those who would fain convert it into a Pharisaical Sabbath. For more than a century after the Reformation, the Continental mode of keeping it prevailed in this country. In one of Queen Elizabeth's injunctions, Sunday is classed with other holidays; and it is declared that if, for any scrupulosity of conscience, some should superstitiously abstain from working on those days, they shall grievously offend. The Book of Sports' was a proclamation issued by James I. in 1618, specifying the recreations which were allowed after Divine service, including dancing, archery, and all athletic games. It is no affair of Protestantism. Luther's opinion is pointedly expressed in his Table Talk: ''If anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake,-if any one anywhere sets up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this encroachment on Christian liberty.' Knox and Calvin took the same view. Upon Sunday, at night,' writes Randolph to Cecil from Edinburgh in 1562, the Duke supped with Mr. Knox, where the Duke desired I should be.' According to Disraeli the elder, 'At Geneva a tradition exists that, when John Knox visited Calvin on a Sunday, he found his austere coadjutor bowling on a green. At this day, and in that place, a Calvinist preacher, after his Sunday sermon, will take his seat at the card-table.' The Scotch Calvinists have gone to the opposite extreme. They hold a Sunday walk to be unlawful; and it was actually proposed by a distinguished member of the Kirk to call in the interference of the police to prevent this peculiarly obnoxious mode of Sabbathbreaking. In parts of Scotland, consequently, may 1 1 At a meeting of the Edinburgh United Presbyterian Presbytery, Feb. 8th, 1860, reported in the 'Scotsman,' Dr. Johnston said, 'He should never forget what he saw when he was in Strasbourg. He had a letter of recommendation to a gentleman in Strasbourg-a good man. actually be seen that state of things which M. Taine was thinking of when he said that an English Sunday left no alternative between dulness and intoxication, a state of things to which all England was reduced for an entire generation, and which, transplanted to the New World, was pushed to the ne plus ultra of absurdity. A violent reaction in the ascetic direction had preceded the Book of Sports.' It was preached in Oxfordshire that to do any work on the Sabbath was as great a sin as to kill, or to commit adultery. It was preached in Somersetshire that to throw a bowl on the Sabbath Day was as great a sin as to commit murder. It was preached in Norfolk that to make a feast or wedding dinner on that day was as great a sin as for a father to take a knife to cut his son's throat. It was preached in Suffolk that to ring more bells than one on the Lord's day to call the people to church, was as great a sin as to do an act of murder. This was at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was impatience at not being able to enforce their doctrines or at being compelled witnesses, if not partakers, of profane pastimes, rather than political persecution, that caused the first emigration of the Puritans: 'The pilgrim bands, who crossed the sea to keep In his wide temple of the wilderness.' He delivered his letter in the afternoon of the Lord's Day: the servant told him that his master was walking with his lady on the ramparts, and he found it was the common custom of the Christians in Strasbourg to walk on the ramparts.' Mr. Parlane, of Tranent: 'Why did you deliver the letter on that day?' Dr. Johnston: I can explain that, if it is necessary. It was a work of necessity.' His explanation was a halting one, and his delivery of the letter appears to have been deemed the greater atrocity of the two. Dr. Johnston would have found things worse in Protestant Sweden, where counting-houses are kept open and bills discounted on Sundays. 1 Strype-quoted by Dr. Hessey in his Bampton Lectures on 'Sunday: Its origin, history, and present obligation.' These lectures comprise almost everything that can be said or brought to bear upon the subject, |