Volume 1

The every-day book, or, The guide to the year : relating the popular amusements, sports, ceremonies, manner, customs, and events, incident to the three hundred and sixty-five days, in past and present times : being a series of five thousand anecdotes and facts : forming a perpetual key to the almanac... / by William Hone.

  • Hone, William, 1780-1842.
Date:
[1857?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The every-day book, or, The guide to the year : relating the popular amusements, sports, ceremonies, manner, customs, and events, incident to the three hundred and sixty-five days, in past and present times : being a series of five thousand anecdotes and facts : forming a perpetual key to the almanac... / by William Hone. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Cart^plaping* This diversion, resorted to at visitings during the twelve days of Christmas, as ef ancient custom, continues without abatement during the prolongation of friendly meetings at this season. Persons who are opposed to this recreation from religious scruples, do not seem to distin- guish between its use and its abuse. Mr. Archdeacon Butler refers to the “ harm- less mirth and innocent amusements of society,” in his sermon on “ Christian Li- berty,” before the duke of Gloucester, and the university of Cambridge, on his roya. highness’s installation as chancellor, June 30, 1811. The archdeacon quotes, as a note on that point in his sermon, a re- markable passage from Jeremy Taylor, who says, “ that cards, &c. are of them- selves lawful, I do not know any reason to doubt. He can never be suspected, in any criminal sense, to tempt the Divine Providence, who by contingent things re- creates his labour. As for the evil ap- pendages, they are all separable from these games, and they may be separated by these advices, &c.” 'On the citation, which is here abridged, the archdeacon remarks, “ Such are the sentiments of one of the most truly pious and most pro- foundly learned prelates that ever adorned any age or country; nor do I think that the most rigid of our disciplinarians can produce the authority of a wiser or a No. 4. better man than bishop Jeremy Taylor.’’ Certainly not; and therefore an objector to this pastime will do well to read the reasoning of the whole passage as it standi at the end of the archdeacon’s printed sermon : if he desire further, let him pe- ruse Jeremy Taylor’s ^ advices.” Cards are not here introduced with a view of seducing parents to rear their sons as gamblers and blacklegs, or their daughters to “ a life of scandal, an old age of cards but to impress upon them the importance of “ not morosely refusing to participate in” what the archdeacon refers to, as of the “ harmless mirth and innocent amuse- ments of society.” Persons who are wholly debarred from such amusements in their infancy, frequently abuse a plea- sure they have been wholly restrained from, by excessive indulgence in it on the first opportunity. This is human nature : let the string be suddenly withdrawn from the overstrained bow, and the re- laxation of the bow is violent. Look at a juvenile card-party—not at that which the reader sees represented in the engraving, which is somewhat varied from a design by Stella, who grouped boys almost as finely as Flamingo mo- delled their forms—but imagine a juvenile party closely aeated round a large table, with a Pope Joan board in the middle]