If we cannot claim with all the patriotic confidence we should like to feel that it was Irving who set Christmas in that light in which Dickens saw its aesthetic capabilities, it is perhaps because all origins are obscure.  For anything that we positively know to the contrary, the Druidic rites from which English Christmas borrowed the inviting mistletoe, if not the decorative holly, may have been accompanied by the recitations of holiday triads.  But it is certain that several plays of Shakespeare were produced, if not written, for the celebration of the holidays, and that then the black tide of Puritanism which swept over men’s souls blotted out all such observance of Christmas with the festival itself.  It came in again, by a natural reaction, with the returning Stuarts, and throughout the period of the Restoration it enjoyed a perfunctory favor.  There is mention of it; often enough in the eighteenth-century essayists, in the Spectators and Idlers and Tatlers; but the world about the middle of the last century laments the neglect into which it had fallen.  Irving seems to have been the first to observe its surviving rites lovingly, and Dickens divined its immense advantage as a literary occasion.  He made it in some sort entirely his for a time, and there can be no question but it was he who again endeared it to the whole English-speaking world, and gave it a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before upon the fancies and affections of our race.

The might of that great talent no one can gainsay, though in the light of the truer work which has since been done his literary principles seem almost as grotesque as his theories of political economy.  In no one direction was his erring force more felt than in the creation of holiday literature as we have known it for the last half-century.  Creation, of course, is the wrong word; it says too much; but in default of a better word, it may stand.  He did not make something out of nothing; the material was there before him; the mood and even the need of his time contributed immensely to his success, as the volition of the subject helps on the mesmerist; but it is within bounds to say that he was the chief agency in the development of holiday literature as we have known it, as he was the chief agency in universalizing the great Christian holiday as we now have it.  Other agencies wrought with him and after him; but it was he who rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust, and humanized it and consecrated it to the hearts and homes of all.

Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in working his miracle, but there is no doubt about his working it.  One opens his Christmas stories in this later day—­’The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man, The Cricket on the Hearth,’ and all the rest—­and with “a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,” asks himself for the preternatural virtue that they once had.  The pathos appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; the character theatrical; the joviality pumped; the psychology