FAVOURITE HOURS.
WE all have our favourite hours, just as we have our favourite days of the week and our favourite times of the year. Certain hours and seasons and days are not much liked by any one. No one enjoys the middle of the night. Our only wish is to be unconscious of it, our only association with it one of weariness and anxiety. Friday is nobody's favourite day. "Friday-faced" in Eliza- beth's time was still an expression for sour-looking. The Puritans in endeavouring to abolish Friday may be said to have cheered the week, only unfortunately they inoculated Sunday with a little of Friday's melancholy. Hardly any one likes January, and very few people have a good word to say for November. To come back to hours, we think the least agreeable are those from luncheon to teatiine, except for those who have sufficient leisure and lack of principle to sleep through them. Resistance to the temptation to take forty winks grows harder with the years. But outside these generally unpopular times and seasons there are as many opinions as individuals. Where sleep is ooncerned one hour before midnight is supposed to be worth two after it, and there are certain lovers of morning who feel that the hours before noon are worth double those which succeed the meridian. On the other hand, "morning grief" is so common a sensation that doctors try to alleviate it with drugs, and there is an evening gaiety which transforms the breakfast " bear" into a model of festive geniality. A few men and women feel a recurrent sense of pleasure which seldom fails to accompany their first consciousness of the light. Restoration "to life and power and thought" is to them a delicious sensation, as it evidently was to Keble. A sort of contentment comes with the dawn, and we think this feeling is commonest in those who have a special detestation of the dark. The sense of pleasure in waking is supposed to be a healthy sign, and certainly those who experience it make as a rule a good breakfast. They will tell you that in the coldest weather they can keep warm up till twelve o'clock. Later on their temperamental thermometer falls, and by bed- time they look upon the world with other eyes. Early birds are not always very sociable. Their happiness does not depend altogether upon companionship, and not at all upon company. The children of the sunset are perhaps more genial. As the day goes on their fellow-creatures reconcile them to the world. They do not long to go to bed and be free of the throng as does the lover of the morning. False lights inspirit them more than the Eastern sun. They want to sit np and put off the moment of awakening. They do not care very much for life for life's sake, but only for what it has to give. There is something more civilized, more sophisticated, and, perhaps it might be argued, rather higher about the point of view of the man who wakes unhappy and finds the world too interesting to leave at bedtime. On the other hand, he knows nothing about that joie do vivre which the man who loves the morning knows that he shares with the animals, and yet believes it has something about it that ie sublime.
It seems absurd that any one should favour any special day of the week, unless for the simple reason that he likes leisure or loves church. The week is an arbitrary divi- sion of time, free of the subtle influence of the moon or the seasons. All the same, most people have a favourite weekday, though they may be able to assign no reason for their pre- ference. We never remember to have heard any one express a preference for Monday. Monday has had in the past rather a bad name. There is a very old joko about St. Monday's Day being kept as a fast after Sandal's indiscre- tions in the matter of eating and drinking. The clergy speak of feeling "Mondayish " after their Sunday's work. Mr. Rudyard Kipling talks of a "Monday head" to describe a headache, and Murray's Dictionary condescends to quote the expression. Where an atmosphere of good luck or happiness hangs about the name of a day we think it is generally traceable to some association of very early youth. The present writer as a small child was taken to visit his grandparents once a week. The pleasure of his welcome still caste a glow over the name of one day in seven. A charming legacy truly ! free of Death Duties, and one which can be neither squandered nor stolen. There was no doubt a time when Sunday was a dull day while it was still "Friday-faced" Now the jokes about British Sundays belong to the same category as jokes about mothers-in-law. It is a day of leisure and pleasure, and even the most narrow-minded atheist could hardly find an argument against the opportunities provided for public worship, free as they are from any shadow of com- pulsion, moral or otherwise. Any bitter gravity such as once attached to Sunday now belongs to the past, and we cannot but hope that the reactionary tendency to liken it to other days has reached its limit. It effectually breaks the monotony of life for the working class, and among its less obvious but not minor advantages is its democratic influence. That there should be one day in the week when all men dress alike is a great thing. We do not mean that the working man in his best clothes looks exactly like the man whose clothes come from a Bond Street tailor; but the differences of attire are not marked in any such way as to suggest a class costume. As for the dressmaker's girl, she looks very often as smart as her customers, and on a Sunday it is sometimes literally impossible to draw a line, so fat' as frocks go, between the "young lady in business" and the girl from Mayfair. Once a week we all look alike, or we think we do. On a Sunday the Church and the world agree, and declare together that the distinctions between master and servant are merely matters of expediency involving no principle, and those who will not listen to the one can hardly avoid hearing the other. By the by, the persons who airily declare that you "never see any poor people in church" immensely overstate the truth, deceived by the fact that very few people look poor on a Sunday—in the country literally no one. Again, the fact that the majority of people have a good dinner on Sunday is a great safeguard against class bitterness. Of coarse, from the strictly common-sense and logical point of view, it might be better if the money which goes in Sunday clothes went to improve the quality of workaday garments, and if the money spent on Sunday meals were spent on better dinners daily ; but most Englishmen of all classes would rather be very com- fortable sometimes than a little less uncomfortable always. Again, the natural vanity of the young must have a recognized outlet. Young people must seek to please one another by dressing up, and one day in seven is not too much to give that instinct play. We are constantly being told by the strangers now in our midst that London looks dreary on Sunday with ite black shop-fronts. Long may they remain black! Looking at shop-windows is a pleasurable occupation to all normally con- stituted women, but shop-windows are now so huge, so varied, and so beautiful that the chief shopping streets are turning into exhibitions, and with a great many women shop-gazing threatens to become a mania. It is more than desirable that such should be deprived of their amusement at regular intervals. Their minds become wholly obsessed with the thought of merchandise, and the peace-destroying quality of covetousness is intimately connected with plate-glass.
In all big cities and in the neighbourhood of all manufac- turing towns the Sunday aspect does not depend upon clothes or shop-fronts. The atmosphere is clearer. In certain parts of Ayrshire, for instance, where the coal districts abut upon the wild, the look of a Sunday, so to speak, is totally different from the look of a weekday—everything shines, tall columns of smoke no longer threaten the beauty of the distance and interrupt the peace of the horizon. George Herbert's " bridal of the earth and sky " is still celebrated on Sunday, though even in Scotland Sabbatarianism seems to be doomed.
There are a few people who tell one with apparent sincerity that they like winter better than summer. There is some- thing very irritating about such an eccentricity. They are like the people who never feel so happy as when they are sitting over the fire and a storm is raging outside. They cannot enjoy being at ease unless they are sure that they are more at ease than somebody else. Jewett thought old age the happiest time of life. We should doubt whether any other man ever agreed with him. We think, however, that a certain number would be found to admit that middle age is the hest time of life —in calm weather. But the weather of middle age is seldom calm for long together. It is after we have given hostages to fortune that the stress of life begins. The summer of life, like the summer in England, too often consists of "three fine days and a thunderstorm." But the fine days are very pleasant, almost as pleasant as spring.
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