SUNDAY CHIT-CHAT. BY THE EDITOR. SUNDAY. No post day. No letter day. No newspaper day. What are we to do with ourselves? We have been working hard all the week in our chambers in the Temple. We have turned over musty papers and law books, and, by snatches, the pages of the last new novel, which we pushed under a heap of parchments whenever we heard a client's knock at the door: we have laboured, as hard as others do for six days; and now we are rejoicing, as others rejoice, to ruralise on this seventh day of rest. We have been to church: we have joined our unworthy prayers to the merits of the Sacred Victim. But now, shade of Sir Andrew Agnew! tell us how to employ the remainder of the day. We are too far from our church to be able to walk to it again. We will read Vespers by and bye, and a sermon (on the third commandment); but our mind needs relaxation; and we cannot do much more in the way of piety. We cannot take walking exercise for, as all the world knows, we are lame: let us, however, hobble round our garden as far as the white gate that opens upon the dull lane near which our villa has seated itself; and, turning to the left, beside the laurel bushes, let us creep under the weeping ash, and wind amongst the dozen apple trees at the foot of which virbenas, carnations, wall flowers, and sweet peas bloom: let us then (taking a nibble at the mustard and cress as we pass) creep on into the little kitchen garden as far as the bower in which we are afraid to enter, for, although the pea sticks have been, at last, removed, spiders hang down from its thatch, and the benches are so beguanoed that we dare not rest our weary limbs upon them: on, therefore, let us hobble -taking care not to tread upon the one chick of the hen that is tied by its leg to the cherry tree, nor upon the many voracious ones that rush from the coop that encumbers the narrow walk and riotously chirp for food: on, therefore, let us hobble-past the strawberry beds where there is nothing left to detain uspast the sweet jessamines trained against the paling of the coach yard, back into the flower garden and in at the open door of the pretty conservatory. We may tarry here a few minutesmoving every plant and flower-pot back to the place from which we moved it a day or two ago, and from which it will be moved again next time we come :-we may linger here or in the elegant little drawing-room beside it; but we have read all the richlybound books on the shelves of the rosewood and marble chiffoniers; china and nick-knacks encumber the tables; and though anti VOL. XII. Macassors protect every couch, we fancy that we shall be more comfortable in our little parlour up stairs. We hobble up, and throwing ourselves upon the sofa, listlessly take up yesterday's "Times," and are soon deeply interested in the advertising columns. And is it to produce such a Sunday as this in thousands of homes from Hackney to Fulham, that Lord Sackcloth-andAshes and his co-peers have laboured? "Papa, why is there no post to-day ?" inquired a little girl. "Because Lord John Russell thinks that Mr. Lee, our upholsterer and post-master, is too worldly-minded; and has therefore ordered him to spend the whole of the Sunday on his knees on the top of his counter." "What! are all post-masters obliged to kneel on their counters all day long?" 66 Every one of them. Their shutters are shut; but there they are kneeling: and they are to be severely punished if they get down on any account whatever.” As our eye drowsily wanders over the advertising columns of the old newspaper, it is caught by the name of Dr. Rockannounced as one of the contributors to a weekly antiquarian publication. Though we cannot but grudge to our contemporary any thing from the pen of Dr. Rock that would grace our own pages, yet will we occasionally endeavour to resign his support in the hope that the other learned contributors to that paper will, in time, know the difference between Mass and Tenebræ ; and will no longer talk, as Sir Walter Scott ingenuously did, of "Evening Mass." As mediæval lore and etymology are in vogue just now, we would ask some of these scholars to tell us whence is derived the word "asparagus"-vulgarly pronounced sparrow-grass. "Unde derivatur ?" they exclaim: any one can answer that query: from a, privative and oneipeσbai to sow-because it grows many years without sowing." So the dictionaries say. Wise dictionaries! On the same principle, wherefore is not an oak tree called asparagus?-it, too, grows many years without sowing. "Lucy," we said to a child of sixteen, (she was not a dictionary maker, but a Catholic), "Lucy, what do you think is the origin of asparagus?" 66 Asparagus," she replied musing: "in French, it is asperges: may it not have had something to do with sprinkling holy water? Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor-Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop and I shall be cleansed.'" Learned men are, doubtless, not aware that such is the beginning of the Anthem from Psalm 1., sung before Mass, while the priest sprinkles holy water over the congregation with a brush. This we have seen done occasionally with the bough of a tree, as, in former times, it was always wont to be: what could more effectually scatter the water than the feathering stalk of the asparagus, when too old to eat and before the red berries drop, like coral beads, from each tapering branch? Learned men will perhaps have learning enough to twit us that this was a pagan custom used at ancient Roman sacrifices: they may quote 66 Spargite me lymphis; carmenque recentibus aris Propert iv. 6, 7. With water dew me: while Mygdonian wine True enough and we remember lines in Virgil of similar import : "Idem ter socios purá circumtulit undá Then three times walked he round the social crew, Very pagan indeed is our use of holy water! we own it; and, for our own part, we love it more on that account: as its very antiquity proves to us that the custom must either be in accordance with some unexplained natural sympathy of the human soul, or that it must have come down to us from some forgotten revelation. The pagan priest at the funeral of Misenus, from which we have quoted, sprinkles the people three times: there was a mysterious charm in the number three. To satisfy the infernal gods, earth was cast three times upon the dead body. The concocters of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer must have gone back to the same source from whence we all draw some of our ceremonies when, in the burial service, they directed the clerk to throw earth upon the coffin three several times while the minister should repeat the words: "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Each number of this sentence means the same thing it is much admired: but sober Protestantism has no more idea that the ceremonial is a continuance of a pagan rite than that the very word funeral is derived from the "funes accensi-the lighted torches," formerly burned even at noonday, at the burial of the pagan dead! Let us recur to the advertisements in the "Times." WANT PLACES through two columns. Poor things! What countless numbers of ladies'-maids, wet-nurses and governesses offer their fingers, their milk or their talents to an over-supplied public! Cooks are the only people who seem to be in request: here are fifteen advertisers who want "good-plain cooks." But wherefore, we thought as we drowsily lay on the sofa, wherefore should they be so anxious to have "plain" cooks? Why should a cook's beauty be a disqualification, as it apparently is? our own taste, we fancy that the cream would be sweeter if it were smiled upon by good looks, rather than curdled by sour If ever we have to advertise for a cook, it shall be for a handsome one rather than a plain one. ones. 66 "The advertisement would be objected to," observed some one: "it would be thought improper." "Improper!" we exclaimed: Corpo di Bacco; as we say at Rome, what impropriety would there be in advertising 'WANTED. A pretty-good cook?'-we do not want a plain one: we want a tolerably good one:-a pretty, good cook :the comma between pretty and good, may pass for an error of the press." The cookery of the Reform Club used to be celebrated when M. Soyer presided over cet apartment le plus interessant de l'hotel, as every Frenchman thinks the kitchen; and his kitchen was also celebrated for the beauty of the cooks he employed. And yet it seemed to be a very quiet, unpretending little establishment. The kitchen itself was, by no means, large; though the fire places were of glorious dimensions-the bars being placed perpendicularly instead of horizontally. But M. Soyer himself was the great charm of the establishment: and as he pulled out little drawers in which were little cutlets ready trimmed and lying between ice till called for, and conversed familiarly or artistically on cookery or on his wife's painting, he reminded one of Reynolds, to whom the haunch was sent, ." undrest, "To paint it or eat it just which he liked best." M. Soyer has an admirable talent of adapting himself to the people amongst whom he is thrown. During the famine, he went to Ireland; and knowing that the Irish delight in "a broth of a boy," he invented soup kitchens for them. He presided at the recent agricultural gathering at Exeter; and aware that farmers have been ever considered pudding-headed, he signalised himself by inventing a pudding. He called it a "buddine à la Exeter;" and has generously offered the receipt to the editors of all the newspapers of the country. On the same festive occasion, he also improved on the art of gastronomy by roasting a bullock whole by gas. What learned man will now question the derivation of the word gastronomy? He will expose himself if he does: but that will be no unusual accident : .6 Quem Deus vult perdere priùs dementat." a fine Roman epigram, we have been told by them from our youth upwards! although, in fact, it is not Roman at all; but only a translation of a Greek iambic in Euripides. "Demento," so used, is not classical. Between cooks and veterinary surgeons, scarcely an advertisement intervenes. All modes of life and of speculation are mixed up together in these columns, much as they are in the real world; and our present humour inclining us to etymology, we beg to inquire of the learned whence comes the word veterinary? "Latin." What Latin?-Do you give it up?-Annimalià Větěrĭna— Pliny Nat. Hist. 8. 42.-(Veheterina seu vecterina: from veho, to carry) beasts of burden. Větěrīnarius, a horse-doctor. But the jumble of cognate languages, the use of words having the same sound to express different meanings, and the appropriation of different words to denote similar ideas, is even more amusingly traced in modern than in ancient languages. We have all heard the story of the English sailor who had been ashore in France, and who, returning to his fellows, exclaimed, "Jack, do you know what they call cabbage? why they call it shoe! d-mn 'em, why can't they call it cabbage." So a French girl, petting another, calls her not "her little duck," but her "cabbage" or "her fowl-" mon choux," or "mon poule." We say, in England, that the bird that is eaten at Christmas with tongue comes from Turkey; the French say that it is from India-D'inde; and we ourselves have puzzled English children by assuring them that Dinde was the French for goose :-in the moral sense, where, in English, we should call a person goose," ," in French, he would be called "a turkey-dinde." 66 a It is not generally known that the Turkey oak, now so much cultivated in England, is so called because the turkey selects to roost upon it of all the trees of the American forests. In England, we talk of "Venetian blinds," having derived the articles from Venice: French etymology gives them another origin and calls them "Persiannes." Without much stretch of orthography or ideas, we may say that the French for a "town" is a "villa;" for a "city" a country "seat;" and that the English for a "bon vivant" is "bad liver." Who can doubt but that our amiable exclamation "oh dear!" is engrafted upon the French "oh Dieu!" or that our national abjurgation "God damn!" is a corruption of the French expletive "dame," and only means "by God and Our Lady";-having been so euphoniously improved by our dread of Popery and our avoidance of the Blessed Virgin? The classical-sounding expression "hocus-pocus," was evident |