more lamentably apparent when we see the
crowded bridges, steamboats, and tea-gardens,
on any of those chance occasions set aside by
authority as days of fasting and humiliation
for war, or pestilence, or famine; when we know
that one great and awful anniversary in the
Christian year—Good Friday—is the day on
which railway companies advertise cheap
excursion trips, and pigeon and sparrow-shooting
matches come off at the Red House, and
the eleven of Nova Scotia meet the eleven of
Little Britain upon the tented cricket-field.
So few festivals have we, that the weary
panting workers seize on the fasts to make
festivity upon.

Admitting, then, that Sunday is almost the
only available holiday of regular recurrence,
how, let me ask, should that holiday be
spent? I think I may best answer my own
question, and hint what Sunday ought or
ought not to be, if I describe it as it is. So,
to paraphrase the good old penman who
wrote the Ecclesiasticalle Politie, "if for no
other cause, yet for this, that posterity may
know that we have not loosely, through
silence, permitted things to pass away as in
a dream, there shall be so much extant of the
present state of Sunday among us, and their
careful endeavours which would have amended
the same."

Sunday on the river—that shall be my
theme this after-dinner-time, and Hungerford
Pier my place of embarkation. Luckily for
the holiday makers, and especially for those
poor foreigners to whom a London Sunday
is a day of wailing and gnashing of teeth,
from the pervading outer dulness, the day is
very fine. The vehicular movement is
prodigious. Legs hang from the tops of omnibuses
much thicker than leaves in Vallombrosa.
Four-wheelers, out for the day, abound. Here
it is the comfortable tradesman who has been
drudging all the week selling his patented or
registered merchandise; inventing new Greek
names for trowsers and shirt collars, or labouring
in the throes of composition in the
manufacture of novel advertisements for the daily
papers; and who on Sunday orders, with
becoming pride, the smooth-clipped pony to be
put into the "conveyance," and drives Mrs.
Co and the little Cos to Beulah Spa or
Hampton Court. The tradesman's Sunday
out is among the most comfortable of Sundays.
It is something to see one's own shutters up,
and note that they are cleaner and brighter
than those of your neighbours. It is
something to see the coats, boots, and hats you
have turned out from your establishment
displayed upon the persons of patented
dandies: it is more to be nodded to
familiarly by brother tradesmen, and to be
patronisingly recognised by the patented
dandies themselves—knowing that these dandies
dare not cut you any more than they can
sever the Gordian knots of red and blue lines
that bind them to the debit side of your
ledger at home. Superbly dressed is the
comfortable tradesman, and in good taste
too; for, if his name be Stultz, his brother
Hoby has probably made his boots; and if
he be Lincoln & Bennett, his neighbour
Truefitt has dressed his hair or trimmed
his whiskers. Mrs. Co is gorgeous, and
absolutely forgets the existence of the shop,
not even condescending to make use of the
week-day compromise in which she speaks of
her husband's place of business as the
Warehouse or the Establishment. The little Cos,
who are enjoying their Sunday out from
genteel boarding-schools in the neighbourhood
of Gower Street and the New Road, only
wish Sunday were three times as long as it
is. They like going to church with papa and
mamma, dining at home, and driving to
Beulah Spa afterwards, much better than
passing Sunday at Miss Gimp's establishment
for young ladies (the name has been changed
to Collegiate Seminary lately)—much better
than morning service at Saint Somnus's
Church, where the Litany is so long, so
drearily long, for little ears to listen to, and
where Doctor Snuffles coughs and mumbles
so much during that tedious three quarters
of an hour's sermon, of which the young
ladies are expected to give a compendious
viva voce abridgment on their return to Miss
Gimp's, their information on the subject
consisting ordinarily of a confused mixture of
notions that a text from the third chapter and
the fourth verse was twice given forth from
the pulpit: that there were a greater number
of hard words on earth than there were
previously dreamt of in their philosophy; that
a red cushion surmounted by a gentleman in
a black gown and white bands quite equalled
laudanum in somnolent properties; and that
it was unlawful for a man to marry his
grandmother. Little Cos, growing Cos,
grown-up Cos who read this! have rigidly-
enforced, wrongly-apportioned Sunday duties
never wearied you in a similar manner?
Those long, droning, half-inaudible Sunday
sermons; those long Sunday afternoons at
home, when Scripture genealogies were to be
read aloud, and all save good books (which to
be good seemed imperatively required to be
dreary, verbose, and unillumined by a ray
of kindly interest) were prohibited; those
Sunday evenings when smiles were looked
upon as sinful, and people couldn't sit
comfortably or talk comfortably because it was
Sunday, and when at length, in sheer
paroxysms of weariness, they tried to yawn
themselves into sleepiness, and went to bed
and couldn't sleep; I ask you, members all
of the Co family, have you no such
remembrances?

Tradesmen's "conveyances" form but one
item among the multifarious throng of Sunday
vehicles. Mr. Buff, the greengrocer drives
his missus out in the spring cart which during
the week has not been too proud to fetch
the homely cabbage and the unpretending
cauliflower from Covent Garden Market.