Sown somewhere far off in the shallow dales of Hertfordshire there
lies a village of great beauty, and I doubt not of admirable virtue,
but of eccentric and unbalanced literary taste, which asked the present
writer to come down to it on Sunday afternoon and give an address.
Now it was very difficult to get down to it at all on Sunday afternoon,
owing to the indescribable state into which our national laws
and customs have fallen in connection with the seventh day.
It is not Puritanism; it is simply anarchy. I should have some
sympathy with the Jewish Sabbath, if it were a Jewish Sabbath,
and that for three reasons; first, that religion is an intrinsically
sympathetic thing; second, that I cannot conceive any religion
worth calling a religion without a fixed and material observan
