Winter Weather.—Snow.—Christmas.—Old Customs gradually disused.
"If you would live in health," says the proverb, "wear the same garment in summer which you wear in winter." It seems as if the English had some such fool's adage, by the little difference there is between their summer and their winter apparel. The men, indeed, when they go abroad put on a great coat, and the women wear muffs, and fur round the neck; but all these are laid aside in the house. I no longer wonder why these people talk so much of the weather; they live in the most inconstant of all climates, against which it is so difficult to take any effectual precaution, that they have given the matter up in despair, and take no precautions at all. Their great poet, Milton, describes the souls of the condemned as being hurried from fiery into frozen regions: perhaps he took the idea from his own feelings on such a day as this, when, like me, he was scorched on one side and frost-bitten on the other; and, not knowing which of the two torments was the worst, assigned them to the wicked both in turn. "Why do you not warm your rooms like the Germans," I say to them, "and diffuse the heat equally on all sides?" "Oh," the reply, "it is so dismal not to see the fire!" And so for the sake of seeing the fire, they are contented to be half starved and half roasted at the same time, and to have more women and children burnt to death in one year than all the heretics who ever suffered in England in the days when heresy was thought a crime.
I happened to sleep in the country when the first snow fell; and in the morning when I looked out of window every thing was white, and the snow flakes like feathers floating and falling with as endless and ever-varying motions as the dance of musquitos in a summer evening. And this mockery of life was the only appearance of life; and indeed it seemed as if there could be nothing living in such a world. The trees were clothed like the earth, every bough, branch, and spray; except that side of the bark which had not been exposed to the wind, nothing was to be seen but what was perfectly and dazzingly white; and the evergreens in the garden were bent beneath the load. White mountains in the distance can give no idea of this singular effect. I was equally delighted with the incrustation upon the inside of the windows. Nothing which I have ever seen equals the exquisite beauty of this frost-work. But when I returned to London the scene was widely different.—There the atmosphere is so full of soot from the earth-coal, that the snow is sullied as it falls; men were throwing it from the top of every house by shovels full, lest it should soak through the roof;—and when it began to melt, the streets were more filthy and miserable than I could have conceived possible. In wet weather women wear a clog, which is raised upon an iron ring about two inches from the ground; they clatter along the streets like horses.
The cold in this country is intense; and because it is not quite severe enough to nip off a man's nose if he puts it out of doors, they take no precautions against it, and therefore suffer more than the Germans or Russians. Nay, the Russian soldiers who were in England during the late war died of the cold; they had been accustomed to their stoves and their furs, for which regimentals and English barracks were such bad substitutes, that they sickened and died off like rotten sheep. Liquids freeze in the house. My water-bottle burst last night with a loud report. An exorcist would have taken it for a signal gun of the enemy, and have discharged a volley of anathemas in return. I was startled, and could not divine the cause till day-light explained it.
I happened to go into a pastrycook's shop one morning, and enquired of the mistress why she kept her window open during this severe weather—which I observed most of the trade did. She told me, that were she to close it, her receipts would be lessened forty or fifty shillings a-day;—so many were the persons who took up buns or biscuits as they passed by and threw their pence in, not allowing themselves time to enter. Was there ever so indefatigable a people!—I may here mention, that the first confectioner who ever carried on the trade in England was a Spaniard, by name Balthezar Sanchez, who founded a hospital near London at the close of the sixteenth century. Some of the English sweetmeats exceed ours: the currant and the raspberry, fruits which flourish in a cold climate, form delicious preserves. Their iced creams also are richer than our iced waters; but these northern people do not understand the management of southern luxuries; they fill their cellars with ice instead of snow, though it is procured with more difficulty and greater expense, and must be broken to the consistency of compressed snow before it can be used.
Just at this time these shops are filled with large plum-cakes, which are crusted over with sugar, and ornamented in every possible way. These are for the festival of the kings, it being part of an Englishman's religion to eat plum-cake on this day, and to have pies at Christmas made of meat and plums. This is the only way in which these festivals are celebrated; and if the children had not an interest in keeping it up, even this would soon be disused. All persons say how differently this season was observed in their fathers' days, and speak of old ceremonies and old festivities as things which are obsolete. The cause is obvious. In large towns the population is continually shifting; a new settler neither continues the customs of his own province in a place where they would be strange, nor adopts those which he finds, because they are strange to him, and thus all local differences are wearing out. In the country, estates are purchased by new men, by the manufacturing and mercantile aristocracy who have no family customs to keep up, and by planters from the West Indies, and adventurers from the East, who have no feeling connected with times and seasons which they have so long ceased to observe.
Perhaps no kingdom ever experienced so great a change in so short a course of years without some violent state convulsion, as England has done during the present reign. I wish I could procure materials to show the whole contrast:—A metropolis doubled in extent; taxes quintupled; the value of money depreciated as rapidly as if new mines had been discovered; canals cut from one end of the island to the other; travelling made so expeditious that the internal communication is tenfold what it was; the invention of the steam-engine, almost as great an epocha as the invention of printing; the manufacturing system carried to its utmost point; the spirit of commerce extended to every thing; an empire lost in America, and another gained in the East; these would be parts of the picture. The alteration extends to the minutest things, even to the dress and manners of every rank of society.
