mities are all dingy and dusty. Yet but a few days, Bob, and
flakes of paint will have cracked off the fairy flower-bowers, and the
revolving temples of adamantine lustre will be as shabby as the city
of Pekin. When you read this, will Clown still be going on lolling his
tongue out of his month, and saying, "How are you to-morrow?" Tomorrow,
indeed! He must be almost ashamed of himself (if that cheek is
still capable of the blush of shame) for asking the absurd question.
To-morrow, indeed! To-morrow the diffugient snows will give place to
Spring; the snowdrops will lift their heads; Ladyday may be expected,
and the pecuniary duties peculiar to that feast; in place of bonbons,
trees will have an eruption of light green knobs; the whitebait season
will bloom . . . as if one need go on describing these vernal phenomena,
when Christmas is still here, though ending, and the subject of my
discourse!

We have all admired the illustrated papers, and noted how
boisterously jolly they become at Christmas time. What wassail-bowls,
robin-redbreasts, waits, snow landscapes, bursts of Christmas song! And
then to think that these festivities are prepared months before--that
these Christmas pieces are prophetic! How kind of artists and poets
to devise the festivities beforehand, and serve them pat at the proper
time! We ought to be grateful to them, as to the cook who gets up at
midnight and sets the pudding a-boiling, which is to feast us at six
o'clock. I often think with gratitude of the famous Mr. Nelson Lee--the
author of I don't know how many hundred glorious pantomimes--walking by
the summer wave at Margate, or Brighton perhaps, revolving in his mind
the idea of some new gorgeous spectacle of faery, which the winter shall
see complete. He is like cook at midnight (si parva licet). He watches
and thinks. He pounds the sparkling sugar of benevolence, the plums
of fancy, the sweetmeats of fun, the figs of--well, the figs of fairy
fiction, let us say, and pops the whole in the seething caldron of
imagination, and at due season serves up THE PANTOMIME.

Very few men in the course of nature can expect to see ALL the
pantomimes in one season, but I hope to the end of my life I shall never
forego reading about them in that delicious sheet of The Times which
appears on the morning after Boxing-day. Perhaps reading is even better
than seeing. The best way, I think, is to say you are ill, lie in bed,
and have the paper for two hours, read