Alfred the Great was twelve years old before he could read. He had admired a beautifully illuminated book of Saxon poetry in his mother's hands, and she allured him to learn by promising him the splendid volume as a reward. From that hour he diligently improved himself; and, in the end, built up his mind so strongly, and so high, and applied its powers so beneficially to his kingdom, that no monarch of the thousand years since his rule attained to be reputed like Alfred, and called the great. He always carried a book in his bosom, and amidst the great business and hurries of government, snatched moments of leisure to read. In the early part of his reign, he was

Cast from the pedestal of pride by shocks,

Which Nature gently gave, in woods and fields.

Invaded, overwhelmed, and vanquished by foreign enemies, he was compelled to fly for personal safety, and to retreat alone into remote wastes and forests:-"learning policy from adversity, and gathering courage from

misery,"

Where living things, and things inanimate

Do speak, at Heaven's command, to eye and ear,
And speak to social reason's inner sense,
With inarticulate language.

-For the man

Who, in this spirit, communes with the forms
Of Nature, who, with understanding heart,
Doth know and love such objects as excite
No morbid passions, no disquietude,

No vengeance, and no hatred, needs must feel
The joy of the pure principle of Love
So deeply, that, unsatisfied with aught
Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose
But seek for objects of a kindred love
In fellow nature, and a kindred joy.-

-Contemplating these forms,
In the relation which they bear to man,
He shall discern, how, through the various means
Which silently they yield, are multiplied
The spiritual prisoners of absent things.
Convoked by knowledge; and for his delight
Still ready to obey the gentle call.-

Thus deeply drinking in the Soul of Things
We shall be wise perforce; and while inspired
By choice, and conscious that the will is free,
Unswerving shall we move, as if impelled
By strict necessity, along the path
Of order and of good. Whate'er we see,
Whate'er we feel, by agency direct
Or indirect shall tend to feed and nurse
Our faculties, shall fix in calmer seats

Of moral strength, and raise to loftier heights
Of love divine, our intellectual soul.

Alfred became our greatest legislator, and pre-eminently our patriot king: for when he had secured the independence of the nation, he rigidly enforced an impartial administration of justice; renovated the energies of his subjects by popular institutions for the preservation of life, property and order; secured public liberty upon the basis of law; lived to see the prosperity of the people, and to experience their affection for the commonwealth of the kingdom; and died so convinced of their loyalty, that he wrote in his last

will, “The English have an undoubted right to remain free as their own thoughts." It was one of his laws that freemen should train their sons" to know God, to be men of understanding, and to live happily." The whole policy of his government was founded upon "the beginning of Wisdom :" the age was simple, and the nation poor; but the people were happy. Little was known of the arts, and of science less. A monarch's state-carriage was like a farmer's waggon, and his majesty sat in it holding in his hand a long stick, having a bit of pointed iron at the top, with which he goaded a team of oxen yoked to the vehicle.

Ours is an age of civilization and refinement, in which art has arrived to excellence, and science erected England into a great work-house for the whole world. The nation is richer than all the other nations of Europe, and distinguished from them by Mammon-worship, and abject subserviency to Mammon-worshippers; the enormous heaps of wealth accumulated by unblest means; the enlarging radius of indigence around every Upas-heap; the sudden and fierce outbreakings of the hungry and ignorant; and more than all, a simultaneous growth of selfishness with knowledge, are awful signs of an amalgamation of depravity with the national character. Luxury prevails in all classes: private gentlemen live "like lords," tradesmen and farmers like gentlemen, and there is an universal desire to "keep up appearances," which situations in life do not require, and means cannot afford. The getters and keepers of money want more and get more; want more of more, and want and get, and get and want, and live and die-wanting happiness. Thoughtless alike of their uses as human beings, and their final destiny; many of them exhibit a cultivated intellect of a high order, eagerly and heartlessly engaged in a misery-making craft, to which end only they think and conThese Englishmen are not the English" contemplated by Alfred. Life's Autumn past, I stand on Winter's verge,

verse.

And daily lose what I desire to keep;

Yet rather would I instantly decline

To the traditionary sympathies

Of a most rustic ignorance

than see and hear

The repetitions wearisome of sense,

Where soul is dead, and feeling hath no place;
Where knowledge, ill begun in cold remark
On outward things, with formal inference ends;
Or if the mind turns inward 'tis perplexed,
Lost in a gloom of uninspired research;
Meanwhile, the Heart within the Heart, the seat
Where peace and happy consciousness should dwell,
On its own axis restlessly revolves,

Yet no where finds the cheering light of truth.

Most of us will find, if we look inward upon ourselves, that we have to unlearn a great deal of what we have learned, before we can gain even a glimpse of approaching satisfaction. Evil indeed must we be, and to the utmost of iniquity, if we do not desire that our children may not be worse for what they learn from us, and gather from their miscellaneous reading. In selecting materials for the Every-Day Book, and Table Book, I aimed to avoid what might injure the youthful mind; and in the Year Book there is something more than in those works, of what seemed suitable to ingenuous thought. For the rest, I have endeavoured to supply omissions upon subjects that the Every-Day Book and the Table Book were designed to include; and, in that, I have been greatly assisted by very kind correspondents to whom I tender respectful thanks for their contributions. W. HONE,

13, Gracechurch-street, January, 1832.

With an abundance of freshly accumulated materials, and my power not lessened, for adventuring in the track pursued in the Every-Day Book, I find, gentle reader, since we discoursed in that work, that the world, and all that is therein, have changed-I know not how much, nor whether to the disadvantage of my present purpose. It is my intention, however, to persevere in my endeavours to complete a popular and full record of the customs, the seasons, and the ancient usages of our country.

Each new year has increased my early likings, and my love for that quiet without which research cannot be made either into

antiquity, or a man's self. The most bustling are not the busiest. The "fool i' the forest" was not the melancholy Jaques : he bestowed the betrothed couples, recommended them to pastime, and withdrew before the sports began. My present doings are not with the great business that bestirs the world, yet I calculate on many who are actors in passing events finding leisure to recreate with the coming pages, where will be found many things for use, several things worth thinking over, various articles of much amusement, nothing that I have brought together before, and a prevailing feeling which is well described in these verses

POWER AND GENTLENESS.

I've thought, in gentle and ungentle hour,
Of many an act and giant shape of power;
Of the old kings with high exacting looks,
Sceptred and globed; of eagles on their rocks
With straining feet, and that fierce mouth and drear,
Answering the strain with downward drag austere ;
Of the rich-headed lion, whose huge frown,
All his great nature, gathering, seems to crown;
Then of cathedral, with its priestly height,
Seen from below at superstitious sight;

Of ghastly castle, that eternally

Holds its blind visage out to the lone sea;

And of all sunless subterranean deeps

The creature makes, who listens while he sleeps,
Avarice; and then of those old earthly cones

That stride, they say, over heroic bones;

And those stone heaps Egyptian, whose small doors
Look like low dens under precipitous shores;
And him great Memnon, that long sitting by

In seeming idleness, with stony eye,
Sang at the morning's touch, like poetry;
And then of all the fierce and bitter fruit
Of the proud planting of a tyrannous foot
Of bruised rights, and flourishing bad men;
And virtue wasting heav'nwards from a den;
Brute force and fury; and the devilish drouth
Of the fool cannon's ever-gaping mouth;
And the bride widowing sword; and the harsh bray
The sneering trumpet sends across the fray;
And all which lights the people-thinning star
That selfishness invokes,-the horsed war
Panting along with many a bloody mane.

I've thought of all this pride and all this pain,
And all the insolent plenitudes of power,
And I declare, by this most quiet hour,
Which holds, in different tasks, by the fire-light,
Me and my friends here this delightful night,
That Power itself has not one half the might
Of Gentleness. "Tis want to all true wealth,
The uneasy madman's force to the wise health;
Blind downward beating, to the eyes that see;
Noise to persuasion, doubt to certainty ;

The consciousness of strength in enemies,
Who must be strained upon, or else they rise;
The battle to the moon, who all the while
High out of hearing passes with her smile;
The Tempest, trampling in his scanty run,
To the whole globe, that basks about the sun;
Or as all shrieks and clangs, with which a sphere,
Undone and fired, could rake the midnight ear,
Compared with that vast dumbness nature keeps
Throughout her million starried deeps,

Most old, and mild, and awful, and unbroken,

Which tells a tale of peace, beyond whate'er was spoken.

4. Literary Pocket Book, 1819.

There are weather prognostics derived from St. Vincent's Day, January 22d; St. Paul's, January 25th; Candlemas, February 24; St. John, June 24th; St. Swithin, July 15th; and St. Simon and Jude, October 28th. But, to render the prognostics concerning these or any other days valid and consistent, a constant relation should subsist between the phenomena of each in every year. This is not the case, and therefore, if there were no other reason, the fa..ary of relying on the weather of any particular day is obvious.

It is true that certain critical changes of the weather usually take place, and certun well known plants begin to flower 15 a sun-dance, about the time of certain testival days; yet these marks of the year are connected only, because the festivals were appointed to be celebrated at the weather-changing and plant-blowing sea

The fragrant coltsfoot in mild seasons has the greatest quantity of its flowers at Christmas.

The dead nettle is generally in flower on St. Vincent's Day, January 228.

The winter hellebore usually flowers, in mild weather, about the conversion of Paul, January 25th.

The snowdrop is almost proverbially constant to Candlemas Day, or the Purification, February 2d. The mildness or severity of the weather seems to make but little difference in the time of its appearance; it comes up blossoming through the snow, and appears to evolve its white and pendant flowers, as if by the most determined periodical laws.

The yellow spring crocus generally flowers about St. Valentine's Day, February 14th; the white and blue species come rather later.

The favorite daisy usually graces the meadows with its small yellow and white blossoms about February 22d, the festival day of St. Margaret of Cortona, whence it is still called in France La Belle Marguerite, and in England Herb Margaret.

The early daffodil blows about St. David's Day, March 1st, and soon covers the fields with its pendant yellow cups.

The pilewort usually bespangles the banks and shaded sides of fields with its golden stars about St. Perpetua, March 7th.

About March 18th, the Day of St. Edward, the magnificent crown imperial blows.

The cardamine first flowers about March 25th, the festival of the Annunciation, commonly called Lady Day. Like the snowdrop it is regarded as the emblem of virgin purity, from its whiteness.

The Marygold is so called from a fancied resemblance of the florets of its disk to the rays of glory diffused by artists from the Virgin's head.

The violets, heartseases, and primroses, continual companions of spring, observe less regular periods, and blow much longer

About April 23d, St. George's Day, the blue bell, or fuld byacinth, covers the