interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the four
seasons,--the _red-letter days_, now become, to all intents and
purposes, _dead-letter days_. There was Paul, and Stephen, and
Barnabas--

Andrew and John, men famous in old times

--we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as I was at
school at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the same token,
in the old _Baskett_ Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy
posture--holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flaying, after the
famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti.--I honoured them all, and could almost
have wept the defalcation of Iscariot--so much did we love to keep
holy memories sacred:--only methought I a little grudged at the
coalition of the _better Jude_ with Simon-clubbing (as it were) their
sanctities together, to make up one poor gaudy-day between them--as an
economy unworthy of the dispensation.

These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life--"far
off their coming shone."--I was as good as an almanac in those days.
I could have told you such a saint's-day falls out next week, or the
week after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity,
would, once in six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better
than one of the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign the wisdom
of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation of
these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious.

Only in a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses
the Bishops had, in decency, been first sounded--but I am wading out
of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and