CHRISTMAS GIFT-BOOKS—MR. LEIGH HUNT'S JAR. OF HONEY: MRS. S. C

HALL'S MIDSUMMER EVE.

ALTHOUGH the Annuals are few in number and of deteriorated charac- ter, old Christmas is not unaccompanied by tokens of his kindly spirit— by things that, however good in themselves, are far better for the feeling of kindliness they are the means of calling forth. In the foremost rank of these we see Mr. Leigh Hunt's Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and Mrs. Hall's Midsummer Eve, "a Fairy Tale of Love."

As Mr. Hunt was walking along Piccadilly, his attention was attracted by a little jar in a shop-window. The deep blue colour carried the ob- server's mind to Italy and art ; the shape reminded him of classical anti- quity; but the contents, " Sicilian Honey," at once transported him to /Etna and Scylla and Charybdis, to Homer, Theocritus, and the two Dio- genes, with all that nature and art have done for Sicily, including a little of war, something of philosophy, and a touch of science in Archimedes. The idea thus flashing across the mind was shortly pat into shape; a series of essays on or about Sicily and Sicilians were gradually produced, and appeared from time to time in a monthly publication. They have now been revised and amplified; set off and illustrated by typographical and graphic art ; and enlarged by a pleasant introductory chapter, smacking of Mr. Hunt's older style, both in its merits and defects, and embracing, among a great many other things, this ingenious defence of a foreign subject at Christmas time.

"If you would banish foreign matters from Christmas, you must banish Christ- mas itself. You must sweep away mince-pies, with their currants from Greece, their cloves and mace from the Spice Islands, and their peel of lemon from Sicily. You must abolish your plum-pudding, with its raisins from Malaga, your boar head from Germany, chestnuts from Spain and France, oranges from Portugal, wines every one of them except British, all your hot pickles, all your teas and coffees, your very twelfth-cake with its sugar; nay, even the name of the season, to say nothing of things too reverend to be specified. You would not have a ma- hogany table to dine upon. Sixpence would not be left you to buy a cigar, nor a cigar to be bought; and if you wished to console yourself with singing a carol, ten to one but the tune would be taken out of your mouth, being found to belong to Pergolese or Palestrina, or some other Italian inventor of the phrases of melody."

The earlier chapters of the Jar of Honey are devoted to classical legends relating to Sicily, with gossip touching some of its remarkable men, including a notice of Theocritus, and translated specimens, done with Mr. Hunt's wonted acumen and vivacity, but perhaps with a shade too much of his mannerism. By the sixth chapter we get down to King Robert of Sicily ; whose story Mr. Hunt thinks Shakspere ought to have treated : but if the great dramatic poet was acquainted with the tale, he probably saw that its transformations, and its paucity of action, unfitted it for the drama, however well adapted it might be for a poem. When the proud, metamorphosed, and finally penitent king is taken leave of, the reader is carried to modern pastoral poetry ; Mr. Hunt running cur- sorily over the Italians and the English, with a few allusions to Christ- mas of yore : from which digression he again returns to /Etna and its characteristics of beauty and terror ; with a very natural little love-tale, coming in to relieve the horror of the volcano's commotions. An agreeable chapter on Bees, in which there is an intermixture of science, obser- vation, and fancy, carries the reader to the closing chapter ; where he is presented with a notice of Meli, a late Sicilian poet, accompanied by spe- cimens.

As a pleasant and very various melange, touching upon mythology, poetry, history, customs, tales of life, and sketches of nature, opposite to each other as a flood of lava and a purling stream, A Jar of Honey is just the thing for the season : pretty to look at, a something to pass about from haud to band, full of pointed specimens to be read in minute or two, and so divided that the book may be laid down at any time. These merits for present purposes rather induce a critical defect as regards substance : there seems a good deal more in the subject than there is in the book, the author handles what he touches rather jauntily, and some topics he omits. This slightness of substance has probably affected the style ; which is sometimes trivial and personal, in the sense of the author's personality, as if he came too fatly before the reader without necessity, and introduced topics too much in the way of " likes and dis- likes."

That is not the pervading character; and it might easily be got rid of by excision, not of parts, but of excrescences. The main composition is full of penetrating remarks cleverly expressed : Addison's definition of fine writing—thoughts natural but not obvious..

WHY PEOPLE LIVE ON A VOLCANO.

A river of lava has been known to be fifty feet deep and four miles broad. Fancy such a stream coining towards London, as wide as from Marylebone to Mile-end! By degrees, the lava thickens into a black and rustling semi-liquid; rather pushed along than flowing; though its heat has been found lingering after a lapse of eight years. When the survivors of all these horrors gather breath and look back upon time and place, they find houses and families abolished, and have to begin, as it were, their stunned existence anew. Yet they build again over these earthquakes. They inhabit and delight in this mountain. Catania, the city at its foot, which has been several times demolished, is one of the gayest in Italy.

How is this P—The reason is, that all pain, generally speaking, is destined to be short and fugitive, compared with the duration of a greater amount of plea- sure-' that the souls which perish in the convulsion were partakers of that plea- sure forthe greater part of their lives, perhaps the gayest of the gay city; that all of them were born there, or connected with it; that it is inconvenient, perhaps without government aid impossible, to remove and commence business elsewhere; that they do not think the catastrophe likely to recur soon, perhaps not in the course of their lives; nay, that possibly there may be something of a gambling excitement—of the stimulus of a mixture of hope and fear—in thus living on the borders of life and death—of this great snap-dragon bowl of Europe—especially surrounded as they are with the old familiar scenes, and breathing a joyous at- mosphere. But, undoubtedly, the chief reasons are necessity, real or supposed, and the natural tendency of mankind to make the best of their position and turn their thoughts from sadness. So the Catanian goes to his dinner, and builds a new ball-room out of the lava!

BEES.

Did any one ever sufficiently admire the entire elegance of the habits and pur- suits of bees P—their extraction of nothing but the quintessence of the flowers; their preference of those that have the finest and least adulterated odour; their avoidance of everything squalid (so unlike flies); their eager ejection or exclusion of it from the hive, as in the instance of carcases of intruders, which, if they can- not drag away, they cover up and entomb; their love of clean, quiet, and delicate neighbourhood, thymy places with brooks; their singularly clean management of SO liquid and adhesive a thing as honey, from which they issue forth to their work as if they had had nothing to do with it; their combination with honey-making of the elegant manufacture of wax, of which they make their apartments, and which is used by mankind for none but patrician or other choice purposes; their orderly policy; their delight in sunshine; their attention to one another; their ap- parent indifference to everything purely regarding themselves apart from the

common good? • •

Beautiful are those tapers, without doubt; and well might the poet express his admiration at their being the result of the work of the little unconscious insect who compounded the material. So, in every wealthy house in England, every evening, when lamps do not take its place, the same beautiful substance is lit up for the inmates to sit by, at their occupations of reading, or music, or discourse. The bee is there with her odorous ministry. In the morning she has probably been at the breakfast-table. In the morning, she is honey; in the evening, the waxen taper; in the summer noon, a voice in the garden or the window; in the winter, and at all other times, a meeter of us in books.

A TRAIT OF CICERO.

Verres, one of the governors of Sicily while it was a Roman province; infamous for the tyranny and effrontery of his extortions, even if but half of what Cicero said of him was true: for we must confess that we seldom believe more of what is told us by that illustrious talker-' especially as he warns us against himself, by contradicting in one passage what he says in another. Vide his recommendations of people in his letters, and his discommendations of them in other letters, pri- vately sent at the same lime: also, his vituperations and panegyrics of the same individuals concerned in the civil wars, just as it suited him to condemn or to court them; to say nothing of his divorces and weddings for interest's sake.

Mrs. Hall's Midsummer Eve has more of elaboration about it than the Jar of Honey; with great decorative richness of binding and pictures— anything more attractive for a table cannot be. The literature does not challenge such unqualified praise. The tale is founded on an Irish super- stition : "it is believed that a child whose father has died before its birth is placed by nature under the peculiar guardianship of the Fairies ; and if born on Midsummer-eve, it becomes their rightful property." The hero- ine, Eva Raymond, is in this predicament; she is led through various difficulties ; and, after being sought by an heir, but preferring his cousin —losing her mother by death, and submitting in her married life to a sordid poverty—she becomes rich and great at last through her husband's succeeding to his cousin's estate.

The introduction of the Fairy mythology is the main feature of the book ; but it is hardly successful. The Fairies are not sufficiently atrial—without being gross, they talk and behave too much like mortals ; they do very little to advance or influence the story, in comparison with their frequent appearances; and they have a rather clumsy aid in the shape of an old peasant named Randy. Having once endowed their pro- tdgde with her peculiar characteristics, they might have left her to herself till great occasions, and then should have acted chiefly by influence : but when really most wanted they are not present.

There is no novelty in the substance of the tale, and scarcely matter enough for the length to which it is expanded by the frequent introduction of the Fairies. But the great defect both of the mythological and human parts is the want of continuous narrative ; it is less a story than a suc- cession of scenes. This has probably arisen from its original mode of pub- lication; for Mrs. Hall's book, like the Jar of Honey, has already ap- peared in a periodical form. Hence we have incidents worked up for single effects, without reference to the whole; and a good deal of minute painting both in description and feeling—well done, but more attractive in a single paper than in a continuous tale. Perhaps the place of first appearance, the Art-Union, has occasioned another mistake : the hero is made an artist,—a person for whom there is little sympathy in English romance. Art is not so pervading a pursuit in this country as in Ger- many, Italy, or even France ; nor is the career of an artist so much in- terwoven with social life as to excite such interest in his doings. Let it be said, too, that foreigners generally treat such subjects with more propriety and nature. They give preeminence to art, the artist's feelings, and family affections ; the hero's whole soul is in his work, and neither in thought nor deed is he " above his business." In English art-tales, the art is sub- servient to something else ; mostly eminence or riches, with the view of giving the hero a lift, to get him a rich or noble wife. This is the case only indirectly in the tale before us ; but the struggles are exaggerated, the poverty is too physical, and social greatness is the end and the reward.