ing; and it may be at six or seven on the twenty-sixth of December,
our friend CHOKEPEAR, a little mellow, but not at all too mellow for the
season, returns to his sheets, and when he rises declares that he has
passed a very merry Christmas. If the human animal were all stomach--all
one large paunch--we should agree with CHOKEPEAR that he _had_ passed a
merry Christmas: but was it the Christmas of a good man or a Christian?
Let us see.

We have said all CHOKEPEAR'S daughters dined with him. We forgot: one was
absent. Some seven years ago she married a poorer husband, and poverty was
his only, but certainly his sufficient fault; and her father vowed that
she should never again cross his threshold. The Christian keeps his word.
He has been to church to celebrate the event which preached to all men
mutual love and mutual forgiveness, and he comes home, and with rancour in
his heart--keeps a merry Christmas!

We have briefly touched upon the banquet spread before CHOKEPEAR. There is
a poor debtor of his in Horsemonger-lane prison--a debtor to the amount of
at least a hundred shillings. Does _he_ dine on Christmas-day? Oh! yes;
Mr. CHOKEPEAR will read in _The Times_ of Monday how the under-marshal
served to each prisoner a pound of beef, a slice of pudding, and a pint of
porter! The man might have spent the day in freedom with his wife and
children; but Mr. CHOKEPEAR in his pew thought not of his debtor, and the
creditor at least--kept a merry Christmas!

How many shivering wretches pass CHOKEPEAR'S door! How many, with the
wintry air biting their naked limbs, and freezing within them the very
springs of human hope! In CHOKEPEAR'S house there are, it may be, a dozen
coats, nay, a hundred articles of cast-off dress, flung aside for the
moth--piles of stuff and flannel, that would at this season wrap the limbs
of the wretched in comparative Elysium. Does Mr. CHOKEPEAR, the
respectable, the Christian CHOKEPEAR, order these (to him unnecessary)
things to be given to the naked? He thinks not of them; for he wears
fleecy hosiery next his skin, and being in all things dressed in defiance
of the season--keeps a merry Christmas.

Gentle reader, we wish you a merry Christmas; but to be truly, wisely
merry, it must not be the Christmas of the CHOKEPEARS. That is the
Christmas of the belly: keep you the Christmas of the heart. Give--give.

Q.

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