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N some parts of England the waits will be singing upon Christmas-eve when these lines are read. On Christmas morning the great English holiday of the year will dawn. The melody that greets it will not be the song of birds, but the music of Christmas bells. For Christmas is peculiarly an English festival. Other nations share in its benediction, and its lineage may be traced far back and beyond the England that we know. But by some essential and mystic tie it adapts itself to the English genius; it is characterized by English feeling; and old Father Christmas wreathed with holly and pouring a full flagon of generous wine, while the Christmas log blazes upon the hearth and the young folks kiss under the mistletoe, is a huge, hearty, English figure. At Christmas-time, therefore, the greatest nation which sprang from English stock, and which is founded upon English principles and practices of liberty, naturally turns to the mother country with that instinct of kindred which made the typical New-Englander, Hawthorne, call England our old home," and that genuine Englishman, Gladstone, describe Americans as "our kin beyond the sea."

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Even this Magazine, as it adorns itself for the holiday, and sets its timely pages chiming with a Christmas chorus, finds in its own experience the truth of Hawthorne's and Gladstone's happy phrases. It is conscious that it is essentially an American magazine, but it has been so warmly welcomed beyond the sea that it can not help feeling that the lion and the eagle acknowledge a common heroic descent, and delight in tracing in each other the differing development of the same quality. If the worthy Edward Cave, of St. John's Gate, like Sarah Battle, "now with God," could turn these pages and consider the text and the illustrations, the thought that his Gentleman's Magazine of one hundred and fifty-four years ago had been transfigured into such a monthly visitor would assure him a merrier Christmas than Santa Claus himself could bestow. With patriarchal benignity and conscious virtue he would contemplate this Magazine and all its associates on both sides of the sea, and complacently impart his paternal benediction, "Bless you, my children!"

As a London bookseller in the middle of the last century the beatified founder of the Gentleman's Magazine had few dealings with America, and probably knew very little of that remote colonial realm. Some Virginia planter, possibly of a literary turn, who had friendly relations with Greenway Court, in the Shenandoah Valley, whose proprietor was said to have contributed a paper to the Tatler or the Spectator, may have directed his London factor to procure a book or two at Mr. Cave's, or some late copies of the Gentleman's Magazine, and send them with the silks and knick

knacks for the ladies of the household, and the Madeira for himself, and the stout cloths for the "servants," which the good ship would bring from the wharf in London and deliver at his own wharf upon his own plantation in Virginia. Or some New England scholar may have besought the agent of the colony in London to inquire at Mr. Cave's for some modern commentary which had not yet reached the Bay. But the bookseller took no more thought of an American than of a Chinese market, and if some dreamer had held him long enough to hear a speculation upon a future international copyright, Mr. Edward Cave would have referred him to an excellent writer in Grub Street, who was preparing a paper on “Events in the Moon during the next Century" for Mr. Sylvanus Urban's magazine.

That magazine was the fruitful progenitor of a goodly race of periodicals which have been the welcome household friends of many generations. Its publication is a signal event in English literary history. Probably the sagacious Cave, as he considered the success of Addison's and Steele's charming little daily essays, treating with an indescribable lightness of touch and graceful gayety of public events and of the passing life and gossip of the town, reflected that the plan might be modified and made profitable by combining the daily essays into a monthly summary, which should carry to the slow readers in country houses as well as to the city gallants as much reading as they would wish to undertake during the month. So the first issues of the Gentleman's Magazine were composed of articles selected from the evanescent daily journals, literary insects of an hour, which glittered and hummed and vanished. Transfixed in the magazine, they made a museum of interesting specimens, and it was natural and easy to increase the attraction by adding living rivals.

But the new-comers were of a cuckoo breed. The choice articles which had been culled from the Free Briton or other current journals for the Gentleman's were gradually supplanted by original papers, and under the smooth and courtly garb of Sylvanus Urban appeared the doughty form of Samuel Johnson. But although the tremendous Doctor was the first editor of the first of popular literary periodicals, the suggestion surely came from Addison, whose spirit is still that of the modern magazine, and whose fine and light dexterity is still the true touch of the magazinist.

It was long after the Gentleman's descendants had multiplied in many forms, long after Elia had illuminated the London Magazine with the tender and humorous radiance which distinguishes that periodical as Shakespeare's genius ennobles the Blackfriars Theatre, that the first truly popular magazine ap