It was this spiritual aspect of Christmas that Percy felt to be hardly sufficiently regarded, or at least dwelt on, nowadays, and he sometimes wondered whether the modern Christmas had not been in some degree inspired and informed by Charles Dickens.  He had for that writer a very sincere admiration, though he was inclined to think that his true excellence lay not so much in faithful portrayal of the life of his times, or in gift of sustained narration, or in those scenes of pathos which have moved so many hearts in so many quiet homes, as in the power of inventing highly fantastic figures, such as Mr. Micawber or Mr. Pickwick.  This view Percy knew to be somewhat heretical, and, constitutionally averse from the danger of being suspected of “talking for effect,” he kept it to himself; but, had anyone challenged him to give his opinion, it was thus that he would have expressed himself.  In regard to Christmas, he could not help wishing that Charles Dickens had laid more stress on its spiritual element.  It was right that the feast should be an occasion for good cheer, for the savoury meats, the steaming bowl, the blazing log, the traditional games.  But was not the modern world, with its almost avowed bias towards materialism, too little apt to think of Christmas as also a time for meditation, for taking stock, as it were, of the things of the soul?  Percy had heard that in London nowadays there was a class of people who sate down to their Christmas dinners in public hotels.  He did not condemn this practice.  He never condemned a thing, but wondered, rather, whether it were right, and could not help feeling that somehow it was not.  In the course of his rare visits to London he had more than once been inside of one of the large new hotels that had sprung up—­these “great caravanseries,” as he described them in a letter to an old school-fellow who had been engaged for many years in Chinese mission work.  And it seemed to him that the true spirit of Christmas could hardly be acclimatised in such places, but found its proper resting-place in quiet, detached homes, where were gathered together only those connected with one another by ties of kinship, or of long and tested friendship.

He sometimes blamed himself for having tended more and more, as the quiet, peaceful, tranquil years went by, to absent himself from even those small domestic gatherings.  And yet, might it not be that his instinct for solitude at this season was a right instinct, at least for him, and that to run counter to it would be in some degree unacceptable to the Power that fashioned us?  Thus he allowed himself to go, as it were, his own way.  After morning service, he sate down to his Christmas fare alone, and then, when the simple meal was over, would sit and think in his accustomed chair, falling perhaps into one of those quiet dozes from which, because they seemed to be so natural a result, so seemly a consummation, of his thoughts, he did not regularly abstain.  Later, he sallied