the interval. For can we conceive it possible
that they should be repeated anywhere in Europe
at the present day?

PINCHBACK'S AMUSEMENTS,

England is scarcely " Merry England" now,
or is it even asserted to be so, except in those
pseudo-patriotic songs in which "The Oak,"
"Roast-beef," The Church," and "The Flag
that's braved a thousand years," are the primary
ingredients.

The work of Pinchback, the English labourer,
is pretty well known: it consists of sheep-
minding, sheep-washing, ploughing, hedging,
sowing, thrashing, cart-driving, harrowing,
planting, wood-cutting, and so forth. From
dark to dark he lifts heavy weights, toils with
all his might, groans between the plough tilts,
wields the heavy axe; digs, hews, and hoes,
through the long hours, and when night comes,
what is his amusement? It might be almost
any sort of amusement that whiles away the
cares of the gentlefolks at the Hall. All his
senses are clear and sound, and he has a good
memory. He has the same craving for occasional
diversion as the squire has: let us see what
pleasurable occupation he finds for his hard-
earned leisure hours.

The English labourer has only one place of
amusement, and that is the beer-shop; the
beer-shop is his club, his reading-room, his
theatre, his music-hall, his evening party; it is
his shelter from care in the summer, and his
basking-place in winter.

Now, I do not praise his choice of the public-
house, though I cannot altogether wonder at it.
It may lead him into drinking, or at least into
spending more money than he ought to spend.
He sometimes meets bad characters there, and
often hears what he had better not hear. His
amusement there is selfish, for he must leave
his wife and children pining at home. It also
leads him into late hours, and into expense. But
if the public-house were even a perfect school
of virtue, it would not afford the right sort of
healthy amusement for the English labourer.
The landlord's only motive is to sell his liquor:
chess, dominoes, anything that interferes with
drinking, he detests and discountenances. If
he has a bagatelle-table, it is only to bring men
to the house, and to make them thirsty at petty
gambling.

Those of our educated people who have not
the right sympathy with the poor, simply
because they do not understand them, lay too
much stress on reading as an all-sufficing amusement
for the virtuous labourer. They forget
how little pleasure there is in stammering and
spelling for half an hour over a single page of
a book; they forget how sluggish and unelastic
the brain becomes when the body that owns it
has been twelve hours at hard labour. They
forget that most amusing books are too high-
flown for the labourer; and that their authors
shoot over his head: also, that one cannot spend
a whole life in reading over and over again, The
Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe. As
for the poets, even Shakespeare, they are all too
grand for Pinchback. He does not " know
where to have them." Grand poets do not
understand his feelings or his wants. Moreover,
and after all, even if our labourer could read
easily, it is chiefly for winter amusement that
he would resort to books.

Dramatic performances, even of the humblest
kind, Pinchback has none, either to raise his
admiration for virtue, or to increase his horror
of guilt, except once a year at fair-time, when
The Orphan of Samarcand and The Bleeding Nun
delight and terrify him. As for music, he has
only the two fiddles in church on Sunday, and
the coarse songs that he hears whistled or
shouted at the " Blue Dog" or the " Flying Sun"
on week days. Without exaggeration, Giles
Pinchback's life is a dull and melancholy one.

But as he is a poor doctor who only points
out to you your disease and does not offer you
a remedy, I will first show how much gayer and
merrier the countryman's life was two hundred
and even one hundred years ago, and then
suggest some means of alleviating its present hopeless
dreariness, its stupidity, and its lethargic
monotony. I must premise, that I am not going
to praise past times at the expense of the present.
I am no lover of medievalism, with its monkery,
its cruelty, its feudality, and its grossness. I
despise the doctrine of divine right, and I believe
in the perfect equality of souls; but yet, there
is no age in which I cannot find something to
admire; no age which I do not discover to have
been, in some respects wiser, though in some
more foolish, than our own.

With all its faults, the Elizabethan age was
a great and a happy one. There were fewer
social jealousies then than now. Men's ranks
were known at once by their dress and by their
speech. There were more independent yeomen
then than now; trade was less painfully
competitive and feverishly intermittent; the love of
money was not yet a national passion. Religion
was less pretentious, more fervid and simple-
hearted. But let me pass on to the subject of
country happiness in the Elizabethan age.

In the first place, holidays were more numerous.
The church-ale, the fair, the quarterly
festival, all brought times of recreation for hope
to look forward to as to green spots in a dusty
barren life. Now, all these have been pared
down, until a day at Whitsuntide is all that
is left to the farmer's servant. Formerly old
Pinchback had his romps on Plough-Monday,
his football at Shrove-tide, his jovial harvest-
home, his May-day dances, and his Christmas
mummings. Education has done away with
these sports, and the farmer has replaced these
honest and hearty amusements with no others.
No poor man in the world has fewer holidays
than the English labourer of our times.

The unenclosed country, then gave a poor
man an opportunity of occasionally improving
his fare by a stray rabbit; not so, now. The
poor man had then large commons—long since
stolen away by the giant Riches—where he