Old Christmas: From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving

MP3 Audio CD. Old Christmas: From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving

CHRISTMAS EVE


It was a brilliant moonlight night, but extremely cold; our chaise
whirled rapidly over the frozen ground; the post-boy smacked his whip
incessantly, and a part of the time his horses were on a gallop. "He
knows where he is going," said my companion, laughing, "and is eager to
arrive in time for some of the merriment and good cheer of the servants'
hall. My father, you must know, is a bigoted devotee of the old school,
and prides himself upon keeping up something of old English
hospitality. He is a tolerable specimen of what you will rarely meet
with now-a-days in its purity, the old English country gentleman; for
our men of fortune spend so much of their time in town, and fashion is
carried so much into the country, that the strong rich peculiarities of
ancient rural life are almost polished away. My father, however, from
early years, took honest Peacham[B] for his text book, instead of
Chesterfield: he determined, in his own mind, that there was no
condition more truly honourable and enviable than that of a country
gentleman on his paternal lands, and, therefore, passes the whole of his
time on his estate. He is a strenuous advocate for the revival of the
old rural games and holiday observances, and is deeply read in the
writers, ancient and modern, who have treated on the subject. Indeed,
his favourite range of reading is among the authors who flourished at
least two centuries since; who, he insists, wrote and thought more like
true Englishmen than any of their successors. He even regrets sometimes
that he had not been born a few centuries earlier, when England was
itself, and had its peculiar manners and customs.