was, not half as passionately miserable as
I was, what then? It may be so: it may not
be so; but the world is, on the whole, round,
and it is ever turning. If my old type has
disappeared tor the moment, it will come up
again in its right place, when its right time
brings it upward. Moreover, what am I,
even as I know myself, that I should bemoan
the disappearance, real or fancied, of the like
of Me?  Because I am not virtuous, shall
there be no cakes but of my kneading, no ale
but of my brewing? Far from me be the
thought! When it comes near me, and
stays by me, I may know of a surety that
New Year's Days are finally closing in around
me, and that, in a scheme where nothing
created stops, I cannot too soon cease to be
an insignificant anomaly. Therefore, O New
Year's Days of the old Boles time, and of all
my old time, may you be ever welcome!
Therefore, non-commissioned officers,
subalterns, lieutenants, all, of the Boles spare
bedrooms, I, from the Field-Marshal chamber
stretch out my poor hand, entreating
cordiality of union among all degrees, and
cheerfully declaring my readiness to join
as well as I can, in the last new figures
of the Dance of Life, rather than growl and
grumble, with no partner, down the Dance
of Death.

And here is another New Year's Day
responsive to the Wand of the season before
I have dismissed the last. An Italian New
Year's Day, this, and the bright Mediterranean,
with a stretch of violet and purple
shore, formed the first leaf in the book of
the New Year that I turned at daybreak
this morning. On the steep hill-sides
between me and the sea, diversified by many a
patch of cypress-trees and tangled vines, is a
wild medley of roof upon roof, church upon
church, terrace upon terrace, wall upon
wall, tower upon tower. Questioning myself
whether I am not descended, without having
thought of it before, in a direct line from
the good Haroun Alraschid, I tread the
tesselated pavement of the garden-terrace,
watch the gold-fish in the marble fountains,
loiter in the pleasant grove of orange-trees,
and become a moving pillar of fragrance by
unromantically pocketing a green lemon, now
and then, with an eye to Punch to-night in
the English manner. It is not the New
Year's Day of a dream, but of broad awake
fact, that finds me housed in a palace, with a
highly popular ghost and twenty-five spare
bed-rooms: over the stone and marble
floors of which deserted halls, the highly
popular ghost (unquiet spirit of a Porter,
one would think), drags all the heavy furniture
at dead of night. Down in the town, in
the street of Happy Charles, at the shop of
the Swiss confectioner, there is at this
moment, and is all day, an eager group
examining the great Twelfth-cake—or as my
good friend and servant who speaks all
languages and knows none, renders it to the
natives, pane dolce numero dodici—sweet
bread number twelve—which has come as a
present all the way from Signor Gunter's
della Piazza Berkeley, Londra, Inghilterrra,
and which got cracked in coming, and is in
the street of Happy Charles to be mended,
and the like of which has never been seen.
It comes back at sunset (in order that the
man who brings it on his head may get clear
off before the ghost is due), and is set out
as a show in the great hall. In the great
hall, made as light as all our lights can make
it—which is rather dark, it must be
confessed—we assemble at night, to "keep it
up," in the English manner; meaning by
"we," the handful of English dwelling in that
city, and the half handful of English who
have married there into other nations, and the
rare old Italian Cavaliere, who improvises,
writes poetry, plays harps, composes music,
paints pictures, and is always inaugurating
somebody's bust in his little garden. Brown
is the rare old Cavaliere's face, but green his
young enthusiastic heart; and whatever we
do upon this mad New Year's Night, the
Cavaliere gaily bears his part in, and believes
to be essentially an English custom, which
all the English observe. When we enact
grotesque charades, or disperse in the wildest
exaggeration of an obsolete country-dance
through the five-and-twenty empty rooms,
the Cavaliere, ever foremost, believes in his
soul that all provincial respectability and
metropolitan variety, all Canterbury
Precinct, Whitfield Tabernacle, Saint James's
Parish, Clapham, and Whitechapel, are
religiously doing the same thing; and he cries,
"Dear England, merry England, the young
and joyous, home of the Fancy, free as the
air, playful as the child!" So enchanted is
the dear Cavaliere (at about three in the
morning, and after the lemons), that he folds
my hand flat, inside his white waistcoat, folds
his own two over it, and walks me up and
down the Hall, meekly prisoner, while he
improvises an enormous poem on the sports of
England: which poem, I think, throughout, I
am going to begin to understand presently, but
of which I do not comprehend one lonely
word. Nor, does even this severe intellectual
exercise use up the Cavaliere, for,
after going home and playing the harp
I don't know how many hours, he flies out
of bed, seizes pen ink and paper—the
mechanical appliances of the whole circle of the
Arts are always at his bedside, ready against
inspiration in the night—and writes quite a
Work on the same subject: as the blotted,
piebald manuscript he sends to me before I
am up next day, affectingly testifies. Said
manuscript is inscribed to myself, most
illustrious Signor, kissing my hands, and is
munificently placed at the disposal of any
English publisher whom it may please to
undertake a translation.

And here is another New Year's Day
invoked by the Wand of the time, and this