GOOD RESOLUTIONS

By HC Bailey

Every man, said Elia, has two birthdays to keep. One is his own proper birthday, and the other is the birthday of the New Year. “No one,” he goes on, “ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.” Charles Lamb, in fact, took his first of January very sombrely. He would not, like Job, curse the day he was born, or, like Swift, make a fast of lamentation on the day that his mother bore a man-child, but he talked of graves and worms and epitaphs, and, professing a love “for this green earth” and a very uncomfortable consciousness that all things pass away, was moved by the midnight chimes that ring the old year out to ask eagerly, “Can a ghost laugh or shake his gaunt sides when you are pleasant with him?” This sort of thing, as Joseph Surface complained of Charles, gave worthy men ground for great uneasiness, and Coleridge said sadly that Lamb was “one hovering between heaven and earth, neither hoping much nor fearing anything.” But we may doubt whether his vision of everything much affected by the coming of another New Year’s Day has any real substance. We put up the new calendar, we scratch out the wrong figures we have put at the head of our letters, we contemplate with severity the flowing tide of bills, we try to remember to say the proper thing and to reply to it with a decent enthusiasm, but it seldom occurs to us that we are keeping a solemn, significant festival. By figures, to be sure, we look a year older, but it is the mirror, and not figures, which have to settle that question. By figures we ought to feel a year older, but a twinge of gout will do more to convince you that age is coming on than all the festivals.