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    recollections . Our eternal classifications have cut up the common feeling , and kept down or perverted the common taste , by which a national anniversary should be prompted and celebrated . Wo cannot endure the needful commingling of ranks , and obliteration of station , even for the day and the hour . At our public feasts , the peer must be at the head of the table , and Hobson below the salt .

    As to the Marchioness and Mrs . Hobson sitting at the same table , even if it were a mile long , that never entered the wildest conceptions of an English imagination . Then , who ever saw a public banquet well got up in this country ? A stiff portrait of the hero of the day , with two boughs of withered laurel stuck on each side , at the upper end of the room ; at the other end , a transuarencv of the uncouth and unmeaning figures called his * arms i parency of the uncouth and unmeaning figures called his * arms ; 1

    wind instruments blowing away over the door ; a fellow with a stentorian voice behind the chair , bawling away all meaning or feeling from what are called toasts or sentiments : that ' s what we reckon getting up a public dinner . As for all the rest , the rejoicings of our men , are like the education of our boys , cram , cram for ever . In France , open theatres mark public holidays : but do

    you think Mr . Middle-class Wiggins would go to an open theatre , to say nothing of his wife and family , ( he has daughters , ) with all the riff-raff , on a no-pay night ? And then a procession ; only think of the English nation as now constituted , walking in a procession ! Why , it would require as many marshals and heralds at arms , to arrange them for the purpose , as there now are parsons and lawyers . It would be a great loss of time besides . We

    will do nothing that can level distinctions . But whatever is national , must level distinctions ; therefore , any national festivity is as intolerable as eating fish at Dover on a Saturday . All fish cau ght near Dover , comes to London on every day in the week , except Saturday , when , as Sunday in London holds no fish-market , you may have it at Dover , fine , fresh , and cheap ; and consequently , no respectable person eats it , as it would be no distinction

    from the commonalty ; and distinctions must be kept up . We see no prospect of great national anniversaries and festivals , till two changes shall have taken place , one of which is going on , and the other is coming on . We shall specify : first , there must be a wider diffusion amongst us , of enjoy ment in the arts ; of taste ; of poetical appreciation of the grand and the pictorial . Public celebrations , to be worth any thing , are the poetry which expresses

    a nation ' s feeling , and which reacts upon that feeling . They have hitherto obtained most in a state of society which precedes the one in which we are at present . The civilisation which results from commerce , and the greater division of labour , is not poetical in its character . It puts poetry and nationality in abeyance together . Were the modern Jews possessed of Palestine , there would be no such doings , as in the days of their ancestors . The temple processions ; the chorueses of the Levites ; the grand

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    National Anniversaries . 751

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• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1834, page 751, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2639/page/3/