I bore away the tattered prize in triumph. I remembered a gorgeous description of the twelve months of the year, which I thought would be a fine substitute for those poetical descriptions of them which your "Every-day Book" had nearly exhausted out of Spenser. "This will be a treat," thought I, "for friend Hone." To memory they seemed no less fantastic and splendid than the other. But what are the mistakes of childhood! On reviewing them, they turned out to be only a set of commonplace receipts for working the seasons, months, heathen gods and goddesses, &c., in samplers! Yet, as an instance of the homely occupation of our great-grandmothers, they may be amusing to some readers. "I have seen," says the notable Hannah Woolly, "such ridiculous things done in work, as it is an abomination to any artist to behold. As for example: You may find, in some pieces, Abraham and Sarah, and many other persons of old time, clothed as they go now-a-days, and truly sometimes worse; for they most resemble the pictures on ballads. Let all ingenious women have regard, that when they work any image, to represent it aright. First, let it be drawn well, and then observe the directions which are given by knowing men. I do assure you, I never durst work any Scripture story without informing myself from the ground of it; nor any other story, or single person, without informing myself both of the visage and habit; as followeth : "If you work Jupiter, the imperial feigned God, he must have long, black, curled hair, a purple garment trimmed with gold, and sitting upon a golden throne, with bright yellow clouds about him." THE TWELVE MONTHS OF THE YEAR. March. Is drawn in tawny, with a fierce aspect: a helmet upon his head, and leaning on a spade; and a basket of garden-seeds in his left hand, and in his right hand the sign of Aries; and winged. April. A young man in green, with a garland of myrtle and hawthorn-buds; winged; in one hand primroses and violets, in the other the sign Taurus. May. With a sweet and lovely countenance; clad in a robe of white and green, embroidered with several flowers; upon his head a garden of all manner of roses; on the one hand a nightingale, in the other a lute. His sign must be Gemini. June. In a mantle of dark grass-green; upon his head a garland of bents, kings-cups, and maiden-hair; in his left hand an angle, with a box of cantharides; in his right, the sign Cancer; and upon his arms a basket of seasonable fruits. July. In a jacket of light yellow, eating cherries; with his face and bosom sun-burnt; on his head a wreath of centaury and wild thyme; a scythe on his shoulder, and a bottle at his girdle; carrying the sign Leo. August. A young man of fierce and choleric aspect, in a flame-coloured garment; upon his head a garland of wheat and rye; upon his arm a basket of all manner of ripe fruits; at his belt a sickle: his sign Virgo. September. A merry and cheerful countenance, in a purple robe; upon his head a wreath of red and white grapes; in his left hand a handful of oats; withal carrying a horn of plenty, full of all manner of ripe fruits; in his right hand the sign Libra. October. In a garment of yellow and carnation; upon his head a garland of oak-leaves with acorns; in his right hand the sign Scorpio ; in his left hand a basket of medlars, services, and chestnuts, and any other fruits then in season. November. In a garment of changeable green and black; upon his head a garland of olives, with the fruit in his left hand; bunches of parsnips and turnips in his right: his sign Sagittarius. December. A horrid and fearful aspect, clad in Irish rags, or coarse frieze girt unto him; upon his head three or four night-caps, and over them a Turkish turban; his nose red, his mouth and beard clogged with icicles; at his back a bundle of holly, ivy, or mistletoe; holding in furred mittens the sign of Capricornus. January. Clad all in white, as the earth looks with the snow, blowing his nails; in his left arm a billet; the sign Aquarius standing by his side. February. Clothed in a dark sky-colour, carrying in his right hand the sign Pisces. 4 66 The following receipt " To dress up a chimney very f fine for the summer-time, as I have done many, and they have been liked very well," may not be unprofitable to the housewives of this century 2—107 "First, take a pack-thread, and fasten it even to the inner part of the chimney, so high as that you can see no higher as you walk up and down the house. You must drive in several nails to hold up all your work. Then get good store of old green moss from trees, and melt an equal proportion of beeswax and rosin together; and, while it is hot, dip the wrong ends of the moss in it, and presently clap it upon your pack-thread, and press it down hard with your hand. You must make haste, else it will cool before you can fasten it, and then it will fall down. Do so all around where the pack-thread goes; and the next row you must join to that, so that it may seem all in one: thus do till you have finished it down to the bottom. Then take some other kind of moss, of a whitish colour and stiff, and of several sorts or kinds, and place that upon the other, here and there carelessly, and in some places put a good deal, and some a little; then any kind of fine snail-shells, in which the snails are dead, and little toad-stools, which are very old, and look like velvet, or any other thing that was old and pretty place it here and there as your fancy serves, and fasten all with wax and rosin.⠀ Then, for the hearth of your chimney, you may lay some orpan-sprigs in order all over, and it will grow as it lies; and, according to the season, get what flowers you can, and stick in as if they grew, and a few sprigs of sweet-briar: the flowers you must renew every week; but the moss will last all the summer, till it will be time to make a fire; and the orpan will last near two months. A chimney thus done doth grace a room exceedingly." 1 One phrase in the above should particularly recommend it to such of your female readers as, in the nice language of the day, have done growing some time, little toadstools, &c., and anything that is old and pretty." Was ever 1 antiquity so smoothed over? The culinary recipes have nothing remarkable in them, except the costliness of them. Every thing (to the meanest meats) is sopped in claret, steeped in claret, basted with claret, as if claret were as cheap as ditch-water. I remember Bacon recommends opening a turf or two in your garden walks, and pouring into each a bottle of claret, to recreate the sense of smelling, being no less grateful than beneficial. We hope the Chancellor of the Exchequer will attend to this in his next reduction of French wines, that we may once more water our gardens with right Bourdeaux. The medical recipes areas whimsical as they are cruel. Our ancestors were not at all effeminate on this head. Modern sentimentalists would shrink at a cock plucked and bruised in a mortar alive to make a cullis, or a live mole baked in an oven (be sure it be alive) to make a powder for consumption. But the whimsicalest of all are the directions to servants (for this little book is a compendium of all duties): the footman is seriously admonished not to stand lolling against his master's chair while he waits at table; for " to lean on a chair when they wait is a particular favour shown to any supe→ rior servant, as the chief gentleman, or the waiting-woman when she rises from the table." Also he must not "hold the plates before his mouth to be defiled with his breath, nor touch them on the right [inner] side." Surely Swift must have seen this little treatise. alq • utang bum blo to Hannah concludes with the following address, by which the self-estimate which she formed of her usefulness may be calculated:→→→→ }} *་ li ti bos 1970 "Ladies, I hope you're pleas'd, and so shall I, If what I've writ, you may be gainers by : *If not, it is your fault, it is not mine,ve wager dem qod Your benefit in this I do design. 'Lv ti l'it 19 LIKE Much labour and much time it hath me cost, ter fiw Therefore, I beg, let none of it be lost. The money you shall pay for this my book, busty You'll not repent of, when in it you look. † »Ó 1 No more at present to you I shall say, oft to 38 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON. THE subject of our Memoir is lineally descended from Johan de L'Estonne (see "Domesday Book," where he is so written), who came in with the Conqueror, and had lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent. His particular merits or services, Fabian, whose authority I chiefly follow, has forgotten, or perhaps thought it immaterial, to specify. Fuller thinks that he was standard-bearer to Hugo de Agmondesham, a powerful Norman baron, who was slain by the hand of Harold himself at the fatal battle of Hastings. Be this as it may, we find a family of that name flourishing some centuries later in that county. John Delliston, knight, was High Sheriff for Kent, according to Fabian, quinto Henrici Sexti; and we trace the lineal branch flourishing downwards, the orthography varying, according to the unsettled usage of the times, from Delleston to Leston or Liston, between which it seems to have alternated, till, in the latter end of the reign of James I., it finally settled into the determinate and pleasing dissyllabic arrangement which it still retains. Aminadab Liston, the eldest male representative of the family of that day, was of the strictest order of Puritans. Mr. Foss, of Pall Mall, has obligingly communicated to me an undoubted tract of his, which bears the initials only, A. L., and is entitled, "The Grinning Glass, or Actor's Mirrour; where in the vituperative Visnomy of Vicious Players for the Scene is as virtuously reflected back upon their mimetic Monstrosities as it has viciously (hitherto) vitiated with its vile Vanities her Votarists." A strange title, but bearing the impress of those absurdities with which the title-pages of that pamphlet-spawning age abounded. The work bears date 1617. It preceded the "Histriomastix" by fifteen years; and, as it went before it in time, so it comes not far short of it in virulence. It is amusing to find an ancestor of Liston's thus bespattering the players at the commencement of the seventeenth century :— "Thinketh He" (the actor), "with his costive counte |