NATIONAL ANNIVERSARIES. PLEASE to remember poor old Guy! Yes, it is come to this. Even those ragged urchins, who will be in at the death of the gunpowder plot commemoration; who will live to see the last of the first festival in our national calendar; who, though they know 'No reason Why gunpowder treason are themselves in such a state of oblivious confusion, that in the figure they fabricate, the attributes are blended of the Pope and the conspirator; and they appeal to our compassion, in the tone of affectionate supplication, something like pity the sorrows of a poor old man,' for this compounded horror of the tiara and the tinder-box. The gunpowder thanksgiving is damped beyond all possibility of future igniting. It has missed fire for so many years that it will never blaze again; and the paupers in the streets, like the priests in the churches, poorly preserve, for the sake of the pence, the ragged remnants of the ceremony. As a public anniversary, as a national commemoration, the 5th of November has now, for a long time, been dead and gone, rotten and forgotten. Even the Percival No Popery' cry could not blow up the blownout embers of that grand blow-up that was to have been; and in later'attempts, how many anti-catholic crackers have proved to be very harmless serpents. The feeling has passed away, and the fireworks follow. The tar-barrel is out, and so is the beer-barrel. There is scarcely left the dim, cold memory of a memory. The festival has given up the ghost, and the nation has given up the festival, with nothing but the Irish moral for its epitaph:— To-night's the day, I speak it with great sorrow, That we were all to have been blown up to-morrow, 'Tis a cold frosty morning, so good night!' Nor are any other of our festivals in better condition. Some Irishmen continue to drink Glorious and immortal memory;' (which is not another festival indeed, but the same; this being gifted with duplicity of deliverance ;) but they probably do not know whose memory they drink, and very likely suppose it to be their own memory, viz. of the good things that are gone, in the precious days of Croppie-catching, Protestant peculation, long leases of public property, and jovial jobbery all the land over. On the 30th of January, when extremes meet; that Janus of a day, which looks proud to some and penitential to others; one does sometimes see a cold church with its doors open, and nothing going therein; and a hot calf's head with its mouth open and a No. 95. 3 H lemon sticking therein; but these are rare sights; most folks take a juste milieu course, and seek nothing extra, either in churchservice, or in dinner-service. Then there is the 29th of May, when all that happens, is that one sometimes sees an oak-apple in a bumpkin's hat, wondering how or why it got there, and quite as well able as the wearer to tell the reason. Besides these, there are only the movable festivals of each happy and glorious reign in succession; days chiefly marked by being holidays at the public offices; or by disappointed parsons, desperate of preferment, sometimes repeating the pulpit joke, about preaching from sufficient for the day, is the evil thereof.' Truly, for National Anniversaries, these are but a paltry bundle of dry sticks. There is no vitality in them. They have neither the fun and frolic of voluntary and gladsome recollection, nor the dignified demeanour of high and stately ceremonial. They are the first of April without a fool, and May-day without a queen. Pretty things, indeed, to show, as adornments of the pleasuregrounds of a people's memory! They would disgrace a cockney's garden in the suburbs. They are like the poor, dusty, shrivelled, withered sticks in pots, (blasphemous mockery of plants!) that stand, rank and file, in the lower window of some close lane in London, without even a telescope to look upwards for a glimpse of the third reflection of the sunshine, three stories above their heads. We know nothing, in England, of real national festivals. The words mean nothing in our ears. They are worth less than even the unmeaning terms of faith without charity; for they are 'sounding brass, and the tinkling cymbal.' For us the brass sounds not, nor tinkle the cymbals. Our nothing is noiseless. We have no anniversaries. We once knew a little club that bravely resolved to hold four anniversaries every year; and they all proved right joyous ones; but the great club of the nation has not one. What can be the reason? We suppose the nation does not want them. For where there is a demand, there is a supply, say the political economists: though some hungry mechanics deny the universality of the proposition. Certain it is, however, as the wise Polonius affirmeth, that this effect defective comes by cause.' We should like to trace its genealogy, and ascertain whether it be essential or accidental, removable or incurable. Is it that social enjoyment, and pageantry, and public demonstration, are not the Englishman's mode of showing his feelings? or is it, that his history and experience lack the requisite stimulus, in achievements of great public good, to call up the feeling itself from year to year? Does he despise red-letter days, or are there no red-letter days in his calendar? Something of both reasons may hold, perhaps. But not enough of either to show that he may not mend his manners, if it be an amendment. With all our boasted nationality, there is not much that is really national in our pleasures, our sympathies, our interests, and our recollections. Our eternal classifications have cut up the common feeling, and kept down or perverted the common taste, by which a national anniversary should be prompted and celebrated. We cannot endure the needful commingling of ranks, and obliteration of station, even for the day and the hour. At our public feasts, the peer must be at the head of the table, and Hobson below the salt. As to the Marchioness and Mrs. Hobson sitting at the same table, even if it were a mile long, that never entered the wildest conceptions of an English imagination. Then, who ever saw a public banquet well got up in this country? A stiff portrait of the hero of the day, with two boughs of withered laurel stuck on each side, at the upper end of the room; at the other end, a transparency of the uncouth and unmeaning figures called his arms;' wind instruments blowing away over the door; a fellow with a stentorian voice behind the chair, bawling away all meaning or feeling from what are called toasts or sentiments: that's what we reckon getting up a public dinner. As for all the rest, the rejoicings of our men, are like the education of our boys, cram, cram for ever. In France, open theatres mark public holidays: but do you think Mr. Middle-class Wiggins would go to an open theatre, to say nothing of his wife and family, (he has daughters,) with all the riff-raff, on a no-pay night? And then a procession; only think of the English nation as now constituted, walking in a procession! Why, it would require as many marshals and heralds at arms, to arrange them for the purpose, as there now are parsons and lawyers. It would be a great loss of time besides. We will do nothing that can level distinctions. But whatever is national, must level distinctions; therefore, any national festivity is as intolerable as eating fish at Dover on a Saturday. caught near Dover, comes to London on every day in the week, except Saturday, when, as Sunday in London holds no fish-market, you may have it at Dover, fine, fresh, and cheap; and consequently, no respectable person eats it, as it would be no distinction from the commonalty; and distinctions must be kept up. see no prospect of great national anniversaries and festivals, till two changes shall have taken place, one of which is going on, and the other is coming on. We shall specify: first, there must be a wider diffusion amongst us, of enjoyment in the arts; of taste; of poetical appreciation of the grand and the pictorial. Public celebrations, to be worth any thing, are the poetry which expresses a nation's feeling, and which reacts upon that feeling. They have hitherto obtained most in a state of society which precedes the one in which we are at present. The civilization which results from commerce, and the greater division of labour, is not poetical in its character. It puts poetry and nationality in abeyance together. Were the modern Jews possessed of Palestine, there would be no such doings, as in the days of their ancestors. The temple processions; the chorusses of the Levites; the grand All fish We |