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
cauldron 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,
reading all the way down from Drury Lane to the Britannia at
Hoxton. Bob and I went to two pantomimes. One was at the
Theatre of Fancy, and the other at the Fairy Opera, and I don't
know which we liked the best.