ade is not nothing; in
more genial ages, your Christmas Guisings, Feasts of the Ass, Abbots
of Unreason, were a considerable something: since sport they were; as
Almacks may still be sincere wish for sport. But what, on the other
hand, must not sincere earnest have been: say, a Hebrew Feast of
Tabernacles have been! A whole Nation gathered, in the name of the
Highest, under the eye of the Highest; imagination herself flagging
under the reality; and all noblest Ceremony as yet not grown ceremonial,
but solemn, significant to the outmost fringe! Neither, in modern
private life, are theatrical scenes, of tearful women wetting whole ells
of cambric in concert, of impassioned bushy-whiskered youth threatening
suicide, and such like, to be so entirely detested: drop thou a tear
over them thyself rather.

At any rate, one can remark that no Nation will throw-by its work, and
deliberately go out to make a scene, without meaning something thereby.
For indeed no scenic individual, with knavish hypocritical views, will
take the trouble to soliloquise a scene: and now consider, is not a
scenic Nation placed precisely in that predicament of soliloquising;
for its own behoof alone; to solace its own sensibilities, maudlin or
other?--Yet in this respect, of readiness for scenes, the difference of
Nations, as of men, is very great. If our Saxon-Puritanic friends, for
example, swore and signed their National Covenant, without discharge of
gunpowder, or the beating of any drum, in a dingy Covenant-Close of the
Edinburgh High-street, in a mean room, where men now drink mean
liquor, it was consistent with their ways so to swear it. Our
Gallic-Encyclopedic friends, again, must have a Champ-de-Mars, seen of
all the world, or universe; and such a Scenic Exhibition, to which the
Coliseum Amphitheatre was but a stroller's barn, as this old Globe
of ours had never or hardly ever beheld. Which method also we reckon
natural, then and there. Nor perhaps was the respective keeping of these
two Oaths far out of due proportion to such respective display in taking
them: inverse proportion, namely. For the theatricality of a People goes
in a compound-ratio: ratio indeed of their trustfulness, sociability,
fervency; but then also of their excitability, of their porosity, not
continent; or say, of their explosiveness, hot-flashing, but which does
not last.

How true also, once more, is it that no man or Nation of men, conscious
of doing a great thing, w