The Book of Christmas

Christmas and His Children.

Some say, that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth allnight long.
Shakspeare.

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1888.

THE
Book of Christmas;

DESCRIPTIVE OF THE
CUSTOMS, CEREMONIES, TRADITIONS,
SUPERSTITIONS, FUN, FEELING, AND FESTIVITIES OF

By THOMAS K. HERVEY.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY R. SEYMOUR.

Galantee Show.

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1888.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE BOOK OF CHRISTMAS.

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

We take no note of time
But from its loss; to give it, then, a tongue
Is wise in man.
Dr. Young.

To give a language to time, for the preservation of its records and the utterance of its lessons, has been amongst the occupations of man from the day when first he found himself in its mysterious presence down to these latter ages of the world; and yet, all the resources of his ingenuity, impelled by all the aspirations of his heart, have only succeeded in supplying it with an imperfect series of hieroglyphics, difficult in their acquirement and uncertain in their use. Ages upon ages of the young world have passed away, of which the old hath no chronicle. Generations after generations of men have "made their bed in the darkness," and left no monuments. Of the crowded memorials reared by others along the stream of time, many (and those the mightiest) are written in a cipher of which the key is lost. The wrappings of the mummy are letters of a dead language; and no man can translate the ancient story of the pyramid!

We have learnt to speak of time, because it is that portion of eternity with which we have presently to do,—as if it were a whit more intelligible (less vague, abstract, and unimaginable) than that eternity of which it is a part. He who can conceive of the one, must be able to embrace the awful image of the other. We think of time as of a section of eternity, separated and intrenched by absolute limits; and thus we seem to have arrived at a definite idea, surrounded by points on which the mind can rest. But when the imagination sets out upon the actual experiment, and discovers that those limits are not assignable, save on one only side, and finds but a single point on which to rest its failing wing, and looks from thence along an expanse whose boundaries are nowhere else within the range of its restricted vision,—then does the mortal bird return into its mortal nest, wearied with its ineffectual flight, and convinced that a shoreless ocean and one whose shores it cannot see are alike formless and mysterious to its dim and feeble gaze.

And yet notwithstanding the connection of these two ideas,—of time and of eternity,—(the notion of the former being only reached through the latter) we deal familiarly, and even jestingly, with the one, while the mind approaches the other with reverential awe. Types, and symbols, and emblems—and those ever of a grave meaning—are the most palpable expressions which we venture to give to our conceptions of the one; whilst the other we figure and personify,—and that, too often, after a fashion in which the better part of the moral is left unrepresented. Yet who shall personify time? And who that has ever tried it, in the silence of his chamber and the stillness of his heart, hath not bowed down in breathless awe before the solemn visions which his conjuration has awakened? Oh, the mysterious shapes which Time takes, when it rises up into the mind as an image, at those hours of lonely inquisition!—"And he said unto her, 'What form is he of?' And she said, 'An old man cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle.'"—The mysterious presence which it assumes "in thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men"! Who, as he strove to collect the mournful attributes about which his fancy had been busy into an impersonation, hath not suddenly felt as if "a spirit passed before his face! . . . It stood still, but he could not discern the form thereof; an image was before his eyes, there was silence;" and out of that silence hath seemed to come a voice like that which whispered to Job, "They that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth, they are destroyed from morning to evening; they perish for ever, without any regarding it."

Time, abstractedly considered as what in truth it is,—a portion of the vast ocean of eternity, a river flowing from the sea and flowing to the sea, a channel leading from deep to deep, through shores on which the races of the world are permitted to build for awhile, until the great waters shall once more cover all, and time, as time, "shall be no more,"—must long have defied the skill of man to map out its surface, and write his memorials upon its impalpable bosom. The thousand keels that sweep over the visible waters of the world leave on their face traces of their passage more legible and enduring than do the generations of men as they come and go on that viewless and voiceless stream. The ingenuity which has taught man to lay down the plan of the material ocean, to assign to each spot on its uniform surface its positive whereabout and actual relation, and by a series of imaginary lines and figures to steer his way across its pathless solitudes with a knowledge as certain as that which guides him amidst the substantive and distinctive features of the solid earth, is scarcely more admirable than that which, by a similar device, has enabled him to measure out the expanse of the silent river, to cover, as it were, its surface with a crowd of imaginary latitudes and longitudes intersecting each other at all points, and to ascertain at any moment, by observation, his relative position on the great stream of time.

How long the unaided genius of man might have been ere it could have fallen upon a scheme for the one achievement or the other, if left to struggle with its own resources and unassisted by hints from without, we need not conjecture. But in each case the solution of the problem was suggested to him, as the materials for working it are still furnished, by the finger of God himself. The great architect of the universe hath planted in its frame all necessary models and materials for the guidance and use of its human inhabitants, leaving them to the exercise of those powers and capacities with which they have been furnished to improve the lessons and apply the examples thus conveyed. In each of the cases of which we have spoken, the constellations which surround the world and "are the poetry of heaven" have been the sources of the inspiration, as they are still the lights by which that inspiration works. The hand that fashioned the "two great lights," and appointed to them their courses, and gave them to be "for signs and for seasons and for days and years," pointed out to man how he might, by the observation of their revolutions, direct his course along the unbroken stream of time or count its waves as they flowed silently and ceaselessly away. The sun and moon were the ancient and at first the only measures of time, as they are the essential foundations of all the modes by which man measures it now; and in the order of the world's architecture, the "watches of the element" which guide us yet were framed and "set in the firmament of heaven" at that distant and uncertain period whose "evening and morning were the fourth day."

Nor did the beneficent power which erected these great meters of time in the constitution of the universe leave the world without suggestions how their use might be improved in the business of more minute subdivision. The thousand natural inequalities of the earth's surface, and the vegetable columns which spring from its bosom, furnish—as do the spires and towers and columns which man rears thereon—so many gnomons of the vast dial, on which are unerringly written with the finger of shadow the shining records of the sky. There is something unutterably solemn in watching the shade creep, day by day, round a circle whose diameter man might measure with his grave or even cover with his hand, and contrasting the limits within which it acts with the spaces of time which its stealing tread measures out, and feeling that it is the faithful index of a progress before which the individual being and the universal frame of things are alike hastening to rapid and inevitable decay. There are few types more awfully representative of that which they typify than is the shadow. It is Time almost made visible. Through it the mind reaches the most vivid impersonation of that mysterious idea which it is capable of containing. It seems as if flung directly from his present and passing wing. The silent and ceaseless motion—gliding for ever on and on, coming round again and again, but reverting never and tarrying never, blotting out the sunshine as it passes and leaving no trace where it has passed—make it the true and solemn symbol of him (the old unresting and unreturning one) who receded not, even when that same shadow went back on the dial of the king of Judah, nor paused when the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and the moon lingered over the valley of Ajalon! Of that mysterious type and its awful morals a lost friend of ours[1] has already spoken better than we can hope to speak; and as he is ("alas, that he is so!") already one whose "sun shall no more go down, neither shall his moon withdraw itself," we will avail ourselves of a language which deserves to be better known, and sounds all the more solemnly that he who uttered it hath since furnished in his own person a fresh verification of the solemn truths which he sung so well.

"Upon a dial-stone,
Behold the shade of Time,
For ever circling on and on
In silence more sublime
Than if the thunders of the spheres
Pealed forth its march to mortal ears!
"It meets us hour by hour,
Doles out our little span,
Reveals a presence and a power
Felt and confessed by man:
The drop of moments, day by day,
That rocks of ages wears away.
"Woven by a hand unseen
Upon that stone, survey
A robe of dark sepulchral green,
The mantle of decay,
The fold of chill oblivion's pall,
That falleth with yon shadow's fall!
"Day is the time for toil,
Night balms the weary breast,
Stars have their vigils, seas awhile
Will sink to peaceful rest;
But round and round the shadow creeps
Of that which slumbers not, nor sleeps!
"Effacing all that's fair,
Hushing the voice of mirth
Into the silence of despair,
Around the lonesome hearth,
And training ivy-garlands green
O'er the once gay and social scene.
"In beauty fading fast
Its silent trace appears,
And where—a phantom of the past,
Dim in the mist of years—
Gleams Tadmor o'er oblivion's waves,
Like wrecks above their ocean-graves.
"Before the ceaseless shade
That round the world doth sail
Its towers and temples bow the head,
The pyramids look pale,
The festal halls grow hushed and cold,
The everlasting hills wax old!
"Coeval with the sun
Its silent course began,
And still its phantom-race shall run,
Till worlds with age grow wan,
Till darkness spread her funeral pall,
And one vast shadow circle all!"

To the great natural divisions of time (with their aid, and guided by these hints) the ingenuity of man, under the direction of his wants, has been busy since the world began in adding artificial ones, while his heart has been active in supplying impulses and furnishing devices to that end. Years, and months, and days—the periods marked out by the revolutions of our celestial guides—have been aggregated and divided after methods almost as various as the nations of the earth. Years have been composed into cycles and olympiads and generations and reigns, and months resolved into decades and weeks, days into hours, and hours into subdivisions which have been again subdivided almost to the confines of thought. Yet it is only in these latter ages of the world that a measurement has been attained, at once so minute and so closely harmonizing with the motions and regulated by the revolutions of the dials of the sky, that, had the same machinery existed from the commencement of time,—with the art of printing to preserve its results,—the history of the past might be perused, with its discrepancies reconciled and many of its blanks supplied. And could the world agree upon its uniform adoption now, together with that of a common epoch to reckon from, comparative chronology would be no longer a science applicable to the future; and history, for the time to come (in so far as it is a mere record of facts), would present few problems but such as "he who runs may read."

But out of these conventional and multiplied divisions of time, these wheels within the great wheel, arise results far more important than the verification of a chronological series or the establishment of the harmonies of history. Through them not only may the ages of the world be said to intercommunicate, and the ends of the earth in a sense to meet, but by their aid the whole business of the life of nations and of individuals is regulated, and a set of mnemonics established upon which hinges the history of the human heart. By the multiplied but regular system of recurrences thus obtained, order is made to arise out of the web of duties and the chaos of events; and at each of the thousand points marked out on these concentric circles are written their appropriate duties and recorded their special memories. The calendar of every country is thus covered over with a series of events whose recollection is recalled and influence kept alive by the return of the cycles, in their ceaseless revolution, to those spots at which the record of each has been written; and acts of fasting or of festival, of social obligation or of moral observance,—many of which would be surely lost or overlooked, amidst the inextricable confusion in which, without this systematic arrangement, they must be mingled,—are severally pointed out by the moving finger of Time as he periodically reaches the place of each on his concentric dials.

But besides the calendar of general direction and national observance, where is the heart that has not a private calendar of its own? Long ere the meridian of life has been attained, the individual man has made many a memorandum of joy or pain for his periodical perusal, and established many a private celebration, pleasant or mournful, of his own. How many a lost hope and blighted feeling which the heart is the better for recalling, and would not willingly forget, would pass from the mind amid the crowd and noise and bustle of the world, but for these tablets on which it is ineffaceably written and yearly read! How many an act of memory, with its store of consolations and its treasure of warnings, would remain postponed, amid the interests of the present, till it came to be forgotten altogether, but for that system which has marked its positive place upon the wheels of time, and brings the record certainly before the mental eye, in their unvarying revolution! Many are the uses of these diaries of the heart. By their aid something is saved from the wrecks of the past for the service of the present; the lights of former days are made to throw pleasant reflections upon many an after period of life; the weeds which the world and its cares had fostered are again and again cleared away from the sweet and wholesome fountain of tears; the fading inscriptions of other years are renewed, to yield their morals to the future; and the dead are restored, for a fleeting hour of sweet communion, or hold high and solemn converse with us from the graves in which we laid them years ago.

And this result of the minute and accurate partitions of time, which consists in the establishment of a series of points for periodic celebration, is, as regards its public and social operation, more important than may at first sight appear. The calendar of almost every country is, as we have observed, filled with a series of anniversaries, religious or secular, of festival or abstinence, or instituted for the regulation of business or the operations of the law. In England, independently of those periods of observance which are common to the realm and written in her calendar, there are few districts which are without some festival peculiar to themselves, originating in the grant of some local charter or privilege, the establishment of some local fair, the influence of some ancient local superstition, or some other cause, of which, in many cases, the sole remaining trace is the observance to which it has given rise,—and which observance does not always speak in language sufficiently clear to give any account of its parent. Around each of these celebrations has grown up a set of customs and traditions and habits, the examination into which has led to many a useful result, and which are for the most part worth preserving, as well for their picturesque aspect and social character as for the sake of the historic chambers which they may yet help us to explore. Their close resemblance, as existing amongst different nations, has formed an element in the solution of more than one problem which had for its object a chapter of the history of the world; and they may be said, in many cases, to furnish an apparent link of connection between generations of men long divided and dwelling far apart. They form, too, amid the changes which time is perpetually effecting in the structure of society, a chain of connection between the present and former times of the same land, and prevent the national individuality from being wholly destroyed. They tend to preserve some similarity in the moral aspect of a country from epoch to epoch, and, without having force enough to act as drags on the progress of society towards improvement, they serve for a feature of identification amid all its forms. Curious illustrations they are, too, of national history; and we learn to have confidence in its records when we find in some obscure nook the peasant of to-day, who troubles himself little with the lore of events and their succession, doing that which some ancient chronicler tells us his ancestors did a thousand years ago, and keeping in all simplicity some festival, the story of whose origin we find upon its written page.

To the philosophic inquirer, few things are more important in the annals of nations than their festivals, their anniversaries, and their public celebrations of all kinds. In nothing is their peculiar character more strikingly exhibited. They show a people in its undress, acting upon its impulses, and separated from the conventions and formalities of its every-day existence. We may venture to say that could we, in the absence of every other record, be furnished with a complete account of the festivals, traditions, and anniversaries of any given nation now extinct, not only might a correct estimate be therefrom made of their progress in morals and civilization, but a conjectural history of their doings be hazarded, which should bear a closer resemblance to the facts than many an existing history constructed from more varied materials.

For these reasons—and some others, which are more personal and less philosophical—we love all old traditions and holiday customs. Like honest Sir Andrew Aguecheek, we "delight in masques and revels, sometimes altogether." Many a happy chance has conducted us unpremeditatedly into the midst of some rustic festival, whose recollection is amongst our pleasant memories yet,—and many a one have we gone venturously forth to seek,—when we dwelt in the more immediate neighborhood of the haunts to which, one by one, these traditionary observances are retiring before the face of civilization! The natural tendency of time to obliterate ancient customs and silence ancient sports, is too much promoted by the utilitarian spirit of the day; and they who would have no man enjoy without being able to give a reason for the enjoyment which is in him, are robbing life of half its beauty and some of its virtues. If the old festivals and hearty commemorations in which our land was once so abundant—and which obtained for her, many a long day since, the name of "merrie England"—had no other recommendation than their convivial character, the community of enjoyment which they imply, they would on that account alone be worthy of all promotion, as an antidote to the cold and selfish spirit which is tainting the life-blood and freezing the pulses of society. "'Tis good to be merry and wise;" but the wisdom which eschews mirth, and holds the time devoted to it as so much wasted by being taken from the schoolmaster, is very questionable wisdom in itself, and assuredly not made to promote the happiness of nations. We love all commemorations. We love these anniversaries, for their own sakes, and for their uses. We love those Lethes of an hour which have a virtue beyond their gift of oblivion, and while they furnish a temporary forgetfulness of many of the ills of life, revive the memory of many a past enjoyment, and reawaken many a slumbering affection. We love those milestones on the journey of life beside which man is called upon to pause, and take a reckoning of the distance he has passed, and of that which he may have yet to go. We love to reach those free, open spaces at which the cross-roads of the world converge, and where we are sure to meet, as at a common rendezvous, with travellers from its many paths. We love to enter those houses of refreshment by the way-side of existence, where we know we shall encounter with other wayfarers like ourselves,—perchance with friends long separated, and whom the chances of the world keep far apart,—and whence, after a sweet communion and lusty festival and needful rest, we may go forth upon our journey new fortified against its accidents, and strengthened for its toils. We love those festivals which have been made, as Washington Irving says, "the season for gathering together of family connections, and drawing closer again those bonds of kindred hearts which the cares and pleasures and sorrows of the world are continually operating to cast loose; of calling back the children of a family who have launched forth in life and wandered widely asunder, once more to assemble about the paternal hearth, that rallying place of the affections, there to grow young and loving again among the endearing mementos of childhood." Above all, we love those seasons ("for pity is not common!" says the old ballad) which call for the exercise of a general hospitality, and give the poor man his few and precious glimpses of a plenty which, as the world is managed, his toil cannot buy; which shelter the houseless wanderer, and feed the starving child, and clothe the naked mother, and spread a festival for all,—those seasons which in their observance by our ancestors, kept alive, by periodical reawakenings, that flame of charity which thus had scarcely time wholly to expire during all the year. We love all which tends to call man from the solitary and chilling pursuit of his own separate and selfish views into the warmth of a common sympathy, and within the bands of a common brotherhood. We love these commemorations, as we have said, for themselves; we love them for their uses; and still more we love them for the memories of our boyhood! Many a bright picture do they call up in our minds, and in the minds of most who have been amongst their observers; for with these festivals of the heart are inalienably connected many a memory for sorrow or for joy, many a scene of early love, many a merry meeting which was yet the last, many a parting of those who shall part no more, many a joyous group composed of materials which separated only too soon and shall never be put together again on earth, many a lost treasure and many a perished hope,—

"Hopes that were angels in their birth,
But perished young, like things of earth."

Happy, happy days were they!—"Oh, their record is lively in my soul!"—and there is a happiness, still, in looking back to them:—

"Ye are dwelling with the faded flowers
Ye are with the suns long set,
But oh, your memory, gentle hours,
Is a living vision yet!"

Yet are they, for the most part, eras to count our losses by. Beside them, in the calendar of the heart, is written many a private note, not to be read without bitter tears:—

"There's many a lad I loved is gone,
And many a lass grown old;
And when, at times, I think thereon,
My weary heart grows cold."

"Oh, the mad days that I have spent," says old Justice Shallow, "and to see how many of mine old acquaintance are dead!" Yet still we love these commemorations and hail them, each and all, as the year restores them to us, shorn and scarred as they are. And though many and many a time the welcome has faltered on our lips as we "turned from all they brought to all they could not bring," still by God's help we will enjoy them, as yet we may,—drawing closer to us, and with the more reason, the friends that still remain, and draining to the last—

"One draught, in memory of many
A joyous banquet past."

The revels of merry England are fast subsiding into silence, and her many customs wearing gradually away. The affectations and frivolities of society, as well as its more grave and solemn pursuits,—the exigences of fashion, and the tongue of the pedagogue,—are alike arrayed against them; and, one by one, they are retreating from the great assemblies where mankind "most do congregate," to hide themselves in remote solitudes and rural nooks. In fact, that social change which has enlarged and filled the towns at the expense of the country, which has annihilated the yeomanry of England, and drawn the estated gentleman from the shelter of his ancestral oaks, to live upon their produce in the haunts of dissipation, has been, in itself, the circumstance most unfavorable to the existence of many of them, which delight in bye-ways and sheltered places, which had their appropriate homes in the old manor house or the baronial hall. Yet do they pass lingeringly away. Traces of most of them still exist, and from time to time reappear even in our cities and towns; and there are probably scarcely any which have not found some remote district or other of these islands in which their influence is still acknowledged, and their rites duly performed. There is something in the mind of man which attaches him to ancient superstitions even for the sake of their antiquity, and endears to him old traditions even because they are old. We cannot readily shake off our reverence for that which our fathers have reverenced so long, even where the causes in which that reverence originated are not very obvious or not very satisfactory. We believe that he who shall aid in preserving the records of these vanishing observances, ere it be too late, will do good and acceptable service in his generation; and such contribution to that end as we have in our power it is the purpose of these volumes to bestow. Of that taste for hunting out the obsolete which originates in the mere dry spirit of antiquarianism, or is pursued as a display of gladiatorial skill in the use of the intellectual weapons, we profess ourselves no admirers. But he who pursues in the track of a receding custom,—which is valuable either as an historical illustration or because of its intrinsic beauty, moral or picturesque,—is an antiquary of the beneficent kind; and he who assists in restoring observances which had a direct tendency to propagate a feeling of brotherhood and a spirit of benevolence, is a higher benefactor still. Right joyous festivals there have been amongst us, which England will be none the merrier—and kindly ones which she will be none the better—for losing. The following pages will give some account of that season which has, at all times since the establishment of Christianity, been most crowded with observances, and whose celebration is still the most conspicuous and universal with us, as well as throughout the whole of Christendom.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] The late John Malcolm, of Edinburgh.

Part First.
THE CHRISTMAS SEASON.

"Merry Christmas to You!"—Page 29.

THE CHRISTMAS SEASON.

This Book of Christmas is a sound and good persuasion for gentlemen, and all wealthy men, to keep a good Christmas.

A ha! Christmas! By T. H. London, 1647.

Any man or woman . . . that can give any knowledge, or tell any tidings, of an old, old, very old gray-bearded gentleman, called Christmas, who was wont to be a verie familiar ghest, and visite all sorts of people both pore and rich, and used to appeare in glittering gold, silk, and silver, in the Court, and in all shapes in the Theater in Whitehall, and had ringing, feasts, and jollitie in all places, both in the citie and countrie, for his comming: . . . whosoever can tel what is become of him, or where he may be found, let them bring him back againe into England.

An Hue and Cry after Christmas.

In Ben Jonson's "Mask of Christmas," presented before the court in 1616,—wherein the ancient gentleman so earnestly inquired after in one of the quotations which heads this chapter, and a number of his children, compose the dramatis personæ,—that venerable personage (who describes himself as "Christmas, Old Christmas, Christmas of London, and Captain Christmas") is made to give a very significant hint to some parties who fail to receive him with due ceremony, which hint we will, in all courtesy, bestow upon our readers. "I have seen the time you have wished for me," says he; . . . "and now you have me, they would not let me in. I must come another time!—a good jest! As if I could come more than once a year!" Over and over again, too, has this same very pregnant argument been enforced in the words of the old ballad, quoted in the "Vindication of Christmas,"—

"Let's dance and sing, and make good cheer,
For Christmas comes but once a year!"

Now if this suggestion was full of grave meaning in the days of Jonson,—when the respectable old man was for the most part well received and liberally feasted, when he fed with his laughing children at the tables of princes, and took tribute at the hands of kings, when he showed beneath the snows of his reverend head a portly countenance (the result of much revelling), an eye in which the fire was unquenched, and a frame from which little of the lustihood had yet departed,—we confess that we feel its import to be greatly heightened in these our days, when the patriarch himself exhibits undeniable signs of a failing nature, and many of his once rosy sons are evidently in the different stages of a common decline. A fine and a cheerful family the old man had; and never came they within any man's door without well repaying the outlay incurred on their account. To us, at all times, their "coming was a gladness;" and we feel that we could not, without a pang, see their honest and familiar faces rejected from our threshold, with the knowledge that the course of their wanderings could not return them to us under a period so protracted as that of twelve whole months.

Snap-dragon.—Page 31.

In that long space of time, besides the uncertainty of what may happen to ourselves, there is but too much reason to fear that, unless a change for the better should take place, some one or more of the neglected children may be dead. We could not but have apprehensions that the group might never return to us entire. Death has already made much havoc amongst them, since the days of Ben Jonson. Alas for Baby-cocke! and woe is me for Post-and-paire! And although Carol, and Minced-pie, and New-year's Gift, and Wassail, and Twelfth-cake, and some others of the children, appear still to be in the enjoyment of a tolerably vigorous health, yet we are not a little anxious about Snap-dragon, and our mind is far from being easy on the subject of Hot-cockles. It is but too obvious that, one by one, this once numerous and pleasant family are falling away; and as the old man will assuredly not survive his children, we may yet, in our day, have to join in the heavy lamentation of the lady at the sad result of the above "Hue and Cry." "But is old, old, good old Christmas gone?—nothing but the hair of his good, grave old head and beard left!" For these reasons, he and his train shall be welcome to us as often as they come. It shall be a heavy dispensation under which we will suffer them to pass by our door unhailed; and if we can prevail upon our neighbors to adopt our example, the veteran and his offspring may yet be restored. They are dying for lack of nourishment. They have been used to live on most bountiful fare,—to feed on chines and turkeys and drink of the wassail-bowl. The rich juices of their constitution are not to be maintained, far less re-established, at a less generous rate; and though we will, for our parts, do what lies in our power, yet it is not within the reach of any private gentleman's exertions or finances to set them on their legs again. It should be made a national matter of; and as the old gentleman, with his family, will be coming our way soon after the publication of the present volume, we trust we may be the means of inducing some to receive them with the ancient welcome and feast them after the ancient fashion.

To enable our readers to do this with due effect, we will endeavor to furnish them with a programme of some of the more important ceremonies observed by our hearty ancestors on the occasion, and to give them some explanation of those observances which linger still, although the causes in which their institution originated are becoming gradually obliterated, and although they themselves are falling into a neglect which augurs too plainly of their final and speedy extinction.

It is, alas! but too true that the spirit of hearty festivity in which our ancestors met this season has been long on the decline; and much of the joyous pomp with which it was once received has long since passed away. Those "divers plente of plesaunces," in which the genius of mirth exhibited himself,—

"About yule, when the wind blew cule,
And the round tables began,"—

have sent forward to these dull times of ours but few, and those sadly degenerated, representatives. The wild, barbaric splendor; the unbridled "mirth and princely cheare" with which, upon the faith of ancient ballads, we learn that "ages long ago" King Arthur kept Christmas "in merry Carleile" with Queen Guenever, "that bride soe bright of blee;" the wholesale hospitality; the royal stores of "pigs' heads and gammons of bacon" for a Christmas largesse to the poor, at which we get glimpses in the existing records of the not over-hospitable reign of King John; the profuse expenditure and stately ceremonial by which the season was illustrated in the reign of the vain and selfish Elizabeth; and the lordly wassailings and antic mummings, whose universal prevalence, at this period of the year, furnished subjects of such holy horror to the Puritans in the time of the first Charles,—have gradually disappeared before the philosophic pretensions and chilling pedantry of these sage and self-seeking days. The picturesque effects of society—its strong lights and deep shadows—are rapidly passing away; as the inequalities of surface from which they were projected are smoothed and polished down. From a period of high ceremonial and public celebration, which it long continued to be in England, the Christmas-tide has tamed away into a period of domestic union and social festivity; and the ancient observances which covered it all over with sparkling points are now rather perceived—faintly and distantly and imperfectly—by the light of the still surviving spirit of the season than contribute anything to that spirit, or throw as of old any light over that season from themselves.

Of the various causes which contribute to the mingled festival of the Christmas-tide, there are some which have their origin in feelings, and are the remains of observances that existed previously to that event from which the season now derives its name. After the establishment of Christianity, its earliest teachers, feeling the impossibility of replacing at once those pagan commemorations which had taken long and deep root in the constitution of society and become identified with the feelings of nations, endeavored rather to purify them from their uncleanness, and adapt them to the uses of the new religion. By this arrangement, many an object of pagan veneration became an object of veneration to the early Christians; and the polytheism of papal Rome (promoted, in part, by this very compromise, working in the stronghold of the ancient superstition) became engrafted upon the polytheism of the heathen. At a later period, too, the Protestant reformers of that corrupted worship found themselves, from a similar impossibility, under a similar necessity of retaining a variety of Catholic observances; and thus it is that festival customs still exist amongst us which are the direct descendants of customs connected with the classic or druidical superstitions, and sports which may be traced to the celebrations observed of old in honor of Saturn or of Bacchus.

Amongst those celebrations which have thus survived the decay of the religions with which they were connected, by being made subservient to the new faith (or purified forms) which replaced them, that which takes place at the period of the new year—placed as that epoch is in the neighborhood of the winter solstice—stands conspicuous. Bequeathed as this ancient commemoration has been, with many of its forms of rejoicing, by the pagan to the Christian world, it has been by the latter thrown into close association with their own festival observances in honor of the first great event in the history of their revelation; and while the old observances and the feelings in which they originated have thus been preserved to swell the tide of Christian triumph, their pedigree has been overlooked amid the far higher interest of the observances by whose side they stand, and their ancient titles merged in that of the high family into which they have been adopted.

In most nations of ancient or modern times, the period of what is popularly called the winter solstice appears to have been recognized as a season of rejoicing. The deepening gloom and increasing sterility which have followed the downward progress of the sun's place in heaven would generally dispose the minds of men to congratulation at the arrival of that period when, as experience had taught them, he had reached his lowest point of influence with reference to them; and the prospects of renewed light, and warmth, and vegetation offered by what was considered as his returning march, would naturally be hailed by the signs of thanksgiving and the voice of mirth. The Roman Saturnalia, which fell at this period, were accordingly a season of high festivity, honored by many privileges and many exemptions from ill. The spirit of universal mirth and unbounded license was abroad, and had a free charter. Friends feasted together, and the quarrels of foes were suspended. No war was declared and no capital executions were permitted to take place during this season of general good-will; and the very slave, beneath its genial influence, regained for a moment the moral attitude of a man, and had a right to use the tongue which God had given him, for its original purpose of expressing his thoughts. Not only in the spirit of the time but in many of the forms which it took, may a resemblance be traced to the Christmas rejoicings of later days. The hymns in honor of Saturn were the Roman representatives of the modern carol; and presents passed from friend to friend, as Christmas gifts do in our day. (It may be observed here that the interchange of gifts and the offering of donations to the poor appear to have been, at all periods of rejoicing or delivery, from the earliest times, one of the modes by which the heart manifested its thankfulness; and our readers may be referred for a single example, where examples abound, to the directions recorded in the Book of Esther, as given by Mordecai to the Jews in Shushan, for celebrating their escape from the conspiracy of Haman: that on the anniversaries of "the days wherein the Jews rested from their enemies, and the month which was turned unto them from sorrow to joy and from mourning into a good day, they should make them days of feasting and joy, and of sending portions one to another and gifts to the poor.") But a more striking resemblance still between the forms observed during the days of the Saturnalia and those by which the Christmas festival was long illustrated may be noticed in the ruler, or king, who was appointed, with considerable prerogatives, to preside over the sports of the former. He is the probable ancestor of that high potentate who, under the title of Christmas Prince, Lord of Misrule, or Abbot of Unreason, exercised a similar sway over the Christmas games of more recent times, and whose last descendant—the Twelfth-night King—still rules with a diminished glory over the lingering revelries of a single night.

In the Northern nations of ancient Europe the same period of the year was celebrated by a festival in honor of the God Thor, which, like the Roman Saturnalia and the festival of our own times, was illustrated by the song, the dance, and the feast, executed after their barbarous fashion, and mingled with the savage rites of their own religion. The name of this celebration—Yule, Jule, Iul, or Iol—has given rise to many disputes amongst antiquaries as to its derivation, whose arguments, however, we need not report for the benefit of our readers till judgment shall have been finally pronounced. When that time shall arrive, we undertake to publish a new edition of the present work, for the purpose of giving our readers an abstract of the pleadings and acquainting them with the ultimate decision. In the mean time, we will let Sir Walter Scott inform them how—

"The savage Dane,
At Iol, more deep the mead did drain;
High on the beach his galleys drew,
And feasted all his pirate-crew;
Then, in his low and pine-built hall,
Where shields and axes decked the wall,
They gorged upon the half-dressed steer,
Caroused in sea of sable beer,—
While round, in brutal jest, were thrown
The half-gnawed rib and marrow-bone;
Or listened all, in grim delight,
While Scalds yelled out the joys of fight.
Then forth in frenzy would they hie,
While wildly loose their red locks fly,
And, dancing round the blazing pile,
They made such barbarous mirth the while,
As best might to the mind recall
The boisterous joys of Odin's hall."

Amongst other traces of the northern observances which have descended to our times, and of which we shall have occasion hereafter to speak, the name of the festival itself has come down, and is still retained by our Scottish brethren, as well as in some parts of England.

The Christian festival of the Nativity, with which these ancient celebrations have been incorporated, appears to have been appointed at a very early period after the establishment of the new religion. Its first positive footsteps are met with in the second century, during the reign of the Emperor Concordius; but the decretal epistles furnish us with traces of it more remote. At whatever period, however, its formal institution is to be placed, there can be no doubt that an event so striking in its manner and so important in itself would be annually commemorated amongst Christians from the days of the first apostles, who survived our Lord's resurrection. As to the actual year of the birth of Christ, as well as the period of the year at which it took place, great uncertainty seems to exist, and many controversies have been maintained. One of the theories on the subject, held to be amongst the most probable, places that event upwards of five years earlier than the vulgar era, which latter, however, both as regards the year and season of the year, was a tradition of the primitive Church. In the first ages of that Church, and up till the Council of Nice, the celebration of the Nativity and that of the Epiphany were united on the 25th of December, from a belief that the birth of Christ was simultaneous with the appearance of the star in the East which revealed it to the Gentiles. The time of the year at which the Nativity fell has been placed, by contending opinions, at the period of the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, at that of the Passover, and again at that of the Feast of the Expiation, whose date corresponds with the close of our September. Clemens Alexandrinus informs us that it was kept by many Christians in April, and by others in the Egyptian month Pachon, which answers to our May. Amongst the arguments which have been produced against the theory that places its occurrence in the depth of winter, one has been gathered from that passage in the sacred history of the event which states that "there were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night." It is an argument, however, which does not seem very conclusive in a pastoral country and Eastern climate. Besides the employment which this question has afforded to the learned, it has, in times of religious excitement, been debated with much Puritanical virulence and sectarian rancor. For the purposes of commemoration, however, it is unimportant whether the celebration shall fall or not at the precise anniversary period of the event commemorated; and the arrangement which assigns to it its place in our calendar fixes it at a season when men have leisure for a lengthened festivity, and when their minds are otherwise wholesomely acted upon by many touching thoughts and solemn considerations.

From the first introduction of Christianity into these islands, the period of the Nativity seems to have been kept as a season of festival, and its observance recognized as a matter of state. The Wittenagemots of our Saxon ancestors were held under the solemn sanctions and beneficent influences of the time; and the series of high festivities established by the Anglo-Saxon kings appear to have been continued, with yearly increasing splendor and multiplied ceremonies, under the monarchs of the Norman race. From the court the spirit of revelry descended by all its thousand arteries throughout the universal frame of society, visiting its furthest extremities and most obscure recesses, and everywhere exhibiting its action, as by so many pulses, upon the traditions and superstitions and customs which were common to all or peculiar to each. The pomp and ceremonial of the royal observance were imitated in the splendid establishments of the more wealthy nobles, and more faintly reflected from the diminished state of the petty baron. The revelries of the baronial castle found echoes in the hall of the old manor-house; and these were, again, repeated in the tapestried chamber of the country magistrate or from the sanded parlor of the village inn. Merriment was everywhere a matter of public concernment; and the spirit which assembles men in families now congregated them by districts then.

Baronial Hall.—Page 42.

Neither, however, were the feelings wanting which connected the superstitions of the season with the tutelage of the roof-tree, and mingled its ceremonies with the sanctities of home. Men might meet in crowds to feast beneath the banner of the baron, but the mistletoe hung over each man's own door. The black-jacks might go round in the hall of the lord of the manor; but they who could had a wassail-bowl of their own. The pageantries and high observances of the time might draw men to common centres or be performed on a common account, but the flame of the Yule-log roared up all the individual chimneys of the land. Old Father Christmas, at the head of his numerous and uproarious family, might ride his goat through the streets of the city and the lanes of the village, but he dismounted to sit for some few moments by each man's hearth; while some one or another of his merry sons would break away, to visit the remote farm-houses or show their laughing faces at many a poor man's door. For be it observed, this worthy old gentleman and his kind-hearted children were no respecters of persons. Though trained to courts, they had ever a taste for a country life. Though accustomed in those days to the tables of princes, they sat freely down at the poor man's board. Though welcomed by the peer, they showed no signs of superciliousness when they found themselves cheek-by-jowl with the pauper. Nay, they appear even to have preferred the less exalted society, and to have felt themselves more at ease in the country mansion of the private gentleman than in the halls of kings. Their reception in those high places was accompanied, as royal receptions are apt to be, by a degree of state repugnant to their frank natures; and they seem never to have been so happy as when they found themselves amongst a set of free and easy spirits,—whether in town or country,—unrestrained by the punctilios of etiquette, who had the privilege of laughing just when it struck them to do so, without inquiring wherefore, or caring how loud.

Then, what a festival they created! The land rang with their joyous voices, and the frosty air steamed with the incense of the good things provided for their entertainment. Everybody kept holiday but the cooks; and all sounds known to the human ear seemed mingled in the merry pæan, save the gobble of the turkeys. There were no turkeys,—at least they had lost their "most sweet voices." The turnspits had a hard time of it, too. That quaint little book which bears the warm and promising title of "Round about our Coal Fire" tells us that "by the time dinner was over they would look as black and as greasy as a Welsh porridge-pot." Indeed, the accounts of that time dwell with great and savory emphasis upon the prominent share which eating and drinking had in the festivities of the season. There must have been sad havoc made amongst the live-stock. That there are turkeys at all in our days is only to be accounted for upon the supposition of England having been occasionally replenished with that article from the East; and our present possession of geese must be explained by the well-known impossibility of extinguishing the race of the goose. It is difficult to imagine a consumption equal to the recorded provision. Men's gastronomic capacities appear to have been enlarged for the occasion, as the energies expand to meet great emergencies. "The tables," says the same racy authority above quoted, "were all spread from the first to the last; the sirloyns of beef, the minc'd-pies, the plumb-porridge, the capons, turkeys, geese, and plumb-puddings were all brought upon the board; and all those who had sharp stomachs and sharp knives eat heartily and were welcome, which gave rise to the proverb,—

"'Merry in the hall, when beards wag all!'"

Now, all men in those days appear to have had good stomachs, and, we presume, took care to provide themselves with sharp knives. The only recorded instance in which we find a failure of the latter is that portentous one which occurred, many a long day since, in the court of King Arthur, when the Christmas mirth was so strangely disturbed by the mischievous interference of the Boy with the Mantle. Under the test introduced by that imp of discord and which appears to have "taken the shine out of" the monarch's own good sword Excalibur itself, there was found but one knight, of all the hungry knights who sat at that Round Table, whose weapon was sharp enough to carve the boar's head or hand steady enough to carry the cup to his lip without spilling the lamb's wool; and even he had a very narrow escape from the same incapacities. But then, as we have said, this was at court, and under the influence of a spell (with whose nature we take it for granted that our readers are acquainted,—and, if not, we refer them to the Percy Ballads); and it is probable that, in those early as in later days, tests of such extreme delicacy were of far more dangerous introduction in the courts of kings than amongst assemblies of more mirth and less pretension. We could by no means feel sure that the intrusion, in our own times, of a similar test into a similar scene might not spoil the revels.

But to return. The old ballads which relate to this period of the year are redolent of good things, and not to be read by a hungry man with any degree of equanimity. Of course they are ex post facto ballads, and could only have been written under the inspiration of memory, at a time when men were at leisure to devote their hands to some other occupation than that of cooking or carving. But it is very difficult to understand how they ever found—as it appears they did—their mouths in a condition to sing them at the season itself. There is one amongst those ballads, of a comparatively modern date, printed in Evans's collection, which we advise no man to read fasting. It is directed to be sung to the tune of "The Delights of the Bottle," and contains in every verse a vision of good things, summed up by the perpetually recurring burthen of

"Plum-pudding, goose, capon, minc'd-pies, and roast beef."

Enjoying Christmas.—Page 46.

Our readers had better take a biscuit and a glass of sherry before they venture upon the glimpses into those regions of banqueting which we are tempted to lay before them. The ballad opens like the ringing of a dinner-bell, and, we conceive, should be sung to some such accompaniment:—

"All you that to feasting and mirth are inclin'd,
Come here is good news for to pleasure your mind,—
Old Christmas is come for to keep open house,
He scorns to be guilty of starving a mouse:
Then come, boys, and welcome for diet the chief,
Plum-pudding, goose, capon, minc'd-pies, and roast beef."

"Diet the chief!"—by which we are to understand that this promising muster-roll merely includes the names of some of the principal viands,—the high-commissioned dishes of the feast,—leaving the subalterns, and the entire rank and file which complete the goodly array, unmentioned. It must have been a very ingenious or a very strong-minded mouse which could contrive to be starved under such circumstances. The ballad is long, and we can only afford to give our readers "tastings" of its good things. It is everywhere full of most gracious promise:—

"The cooks shall be busied, by day and by night,
In roasting and boiling, for taste and delight,
Their senses in liquor that's nappy they'll steep,
Though they be afforded to have little sleep;
They still are employed for to dress us, in brief,
Plum-pudding, goose, capon, minc'd-pies, and roast beef.
"Although the cold weather doth hunger provoke,
'T is a comfort to see how the chimneys do smoke;
Provision is making for beer, ale, and wine,
For all that are willing or ready to dine:
Then haste to the kitchen for diet the chief,
Plum-pudding, goose, capon, minc'd-pies, and roast beef.
"All travellers, as they do pass on their way,
At gentlemen's halls are invited to stay,
Themselves to refresh and their horses to rest,
Since that he must be old Christmas's guest;
Nay, the poor shall not want, but have for relief
Plum-pudding, goose, capon, minc'd-pies, and roast beef."

And so on, through a variety of joyous and substantial anticipations, from which the writer draws an inference, which we think is most satisfactorily made out:—

"Then well may we welcome old Christmas to town,
Who brings us good cheer, and good liquor so brown;
To pass the cold winter away with delight,
We feast it all day, and we frolick all night."

In Ellis's edition of Brand's "Popular Antiquities" an old Christmas song is quoted from "Poor Robin's Almanack" for 1695, which gives a similar enumeration of Christmas dainties, but throws them into a form calculated for more rapid enunciation, as if with a due regard to the value of those moments at which it was probably usual to sing it. The measure is not such a mouthful as that of the former one which we have quoted. It comes trippingly off the tongue; and it is not impossible that, in those days of skilful gastronomy, it might have been sung eating. We will quote a couple of the verses, though they include the same commissariat truths as that from which we have already extracted; and our readers will observe, from the ill-omened wish which concludes the second of these stanzas, in what horror the mere idea of fasting had come to be held, since it is the heaviest curse which suggested itself to be launched against those who refused to do homage to the spirit of the times:—

"Now thrice welcome Christmas,
Which brings us good cheer,
Minc'd pies and plumb-porridge,
Good ale and strong beer;
With pig, goose, and capon,
The best that may be,
So well doth the weather
And our stomachs agree.
"Observe how the chimneys
Do smoak all about,
The cooks are providing
For dinner no doubt;
But those on whose tables
No victuals appear,
O may they keep Lent
All the rest of the year!"

The same author quotes, from a manuscript in the British Museum, an Anglo-Norman carol of the early date of the thirteenth century, and appends to it a translation by the late Mr. Douce, the following verse of which translation informs us (what, at any rate, might well be supposed, namely) that so much good eating on the part of the ancient gentleman, Christmas, would naturally suggest the propriety of good drinking, too:—

"Lordings, Christmas loves good drinking,
Wines of Gascoigne, France, Anjou,
English ale, that drives out thinking,
Prince of liquors old or new.
Every neighbor shares the bowl,
Drinks of the spicy liquor deep,
Drinks his fill without controul,
Till he drowns his care in sleep."

In a "Christmas Carroll," printed at the end of Wither's "Juvenilia," a graphic account is given of some of the humors of Christmas, among which the labors of the kitchen are introduced in the first verse, with a due regard to their right of precedency, and in words which, if few, are full of suggestion:—

"Lo, now is come our joyful'st feast!
Let every man be jolly.
Each roome with yvie leaves is drest,
And every post with holly.
Now, all our neighbour's chimneys smoke,
And Christmas Blocks are burning;
Their ovens they with bak't-meats choke,
And all their spits are turning."

We must present our readers with another quotation from an old ballad, entitled "Time's Alteration; or, The Old Man's Rehearsal, what brave dayes he knew a great while agone, when his old cap was new," which appears to have been written after the times of the Commonwealth. And this extract we are induced to add to those which have gone before, because, though it deals with precisely the same subjects, it speaks of them as of things gone by, and is written in a tone of lamentation, in which it is one of the purposes of this chapter to call upon our readers to join. We are sorry we cannot give them directions as to the tune to which it should be sung,—further than that it is obviously unsuited to that of the "Delights of the Bottle," prescribed for the joyous ballad from which we first quoted on this subject; and that, whatever may be the tune, we are clear that the direction as to time should be the same as that which Mr. Hood prefixes to his song of the Guildhall Giants; namely, "Dinner-time and mournful":—

"A man might then behold,
At Christmas in each hall,
Good fires to curb the cold,
And meat for great and small;
The neighbours were friendly bidden,
And all had welcome true,
The poor from the gates were not chidden,
When this old cap was new.
"Black-jacks to every man
Were fill'd with wine and beer;
No pewter pot nor can
In those days did appear;
Good cheer in a nobleman's house
Was counted a seemly shew;
We wanted no brawn nor souse,
When this old cap was new."

Can our readers bear, after this sad ditty, to listen to the enumeration of good things described by Whistlecraft to have been served up at King Arthur's table on Christmas day? If the list be authentic, there is the less reason to wonder at the feats of courage and strength performed by the Knights of the Round Table.

"They served up salmon, venison, and wild boars,
By hundreds, and by dozens, and by scores.
"Hogsheads of honey, kilderkins of mustard,
Muttons, and fatted beeves, and bacon swine;
Herons and bitterns, peacocks, swan, and bustard,
Teal, mallard, pigeons, widgeons, and, in fine,
Plum-puddings, pancakes, apple-pies, and custard.
And therewithal they drank good Gascon wine,
With mead, and ale, and cider of our own;
For porter, punch, and negus were not known."

But we cannot pursue this matter further. It is not to be treated with any degree of calmness before dinner, and we have not dined. We must proceed to less trying parts of our subject.

Of the earnest manner in which our ancestors set about the celebration of this festival, the mock ceremonial with which they illustrated it, the quaint humors which they let loose under its inspiration, and the spirit of fellowship which brought all classes of men within the range of its beneficent provisions, we have a large body of scattered evidence, to be gleaned out of almost every species of existing record, from the early days of the Norman dynasty down to the times of the Commonwealth. The tales of chroniclers, the olden ballads, the rolls of courts, and the statute-book of the land, all contribute to furnish the materials from which a revival of the old pageantry must be derived, if men should ever again find time to be as merry as their fathers were.

The numberless local customs of which the still remaining tradition is almost the sole record, and which added each its small contingent to the aggregate of commemoration, would certainly render it a somewhat difficult matter to restore the festival in its integrity; and, to be very candid with our readers, we believe we may as well confess, at the onset, what will be very apparent to them before we have done, that many of the Christmas observances (whether general or local) are to be recommended to their notice rather as curious pictures of ancient manners than as being at all worthy of imitation by us who "are wiser in our generation." Sooth to say, we dare not let our zeal for our subject lead us into an unqualified approbation of all the doings which it will be our business to record in these pages, though they seem to have made all ranks of people very happy in other days;—and that is no mean test of the value of any institution. Really earnest as we are in the wish that the sentiment of the season could be restored in its amplitude, we fear that many of the fooleries by which it exhibited itself could not be gravely proposed as worthy amusements for a nation of philosophers.

Still these very absurdities furnish the strongest evidences of the right good-will with which men—ay, grave and learned men—surrendered themselves to the merry spirit of the time, of that entire abandonment which forgot to make a reservation of their outward dignities and gave them courage to "play the fool." Our readers need scarcely be told that it must be a man of a very strong mind, or a man who could not help it, who should dare to make a jack-pudding of himself in these days, when all his fellows are walking about the world with telescopes in their hands and quadrants in their pockets. No doubt it would have a somewhat ridiculous effect to-day to see the members of the bar dancing a galliard or a coranto, in full costume, before the Benchers, notwithstanding that certain ancient forms are still retained in their halls which have all the absurdity of the exploded ones without any of their fun; and unquestionably we should think it rather strange to see a respectable gentleman capering through the streets on a pasteboard hobby-horse,—in lieu of the figurative hobby-horses on which most men still exhibit,—although even that, we think, would offer an object less ungracious than a child with an anxious brow and "spectacles on nose." The great wisdom of the world is, we presume, one of the natural consequences of its advancing age; and though we are quite conscious that some of its former pranks would be very unbecoming, now that it is getting into years, and "knows so much as it does," yet we are by no means sure that we should not have been well content to have our lot cast in the days when it was somewhat younger. They must have been very pleasant times! Certain it is that the laugh of the humbler classes, and of the younger classes, would be all the heartier, that it was echoed by the powerful and the aged; the mirth of the ignorant more free and genial, that the learned thought no scorn of it. For all that appears, too, the dignities of those days suffered no detriment by their surrender to the spirit of the times, but seem to have resumed all their functions and privileges, when it had exhausted itself, with unimpaired effect. Philosophers had due reverence, without erecting themselves always on stilts for the purpose of attracting it; and names have come down to us which are esteemed the names of grave and learned and wise men,—even in this grave and learned and wise age,—who, nevertheless, appear in their own to have conducted themselves at times very like children.

From the royal Household-Books which exist, and from the Household-Books of noble families (some of which have been printed for better preservation), as also from the other sources to which we have alluded, Mr. Sandys, in the very valuable introduction to his collection of Christmas carols, already mentioned, has brought together a body of valuable information,—both as to the stately ceremonies and popular observances by which the season continued to be illustrated, from an early period up to the time of its decline, amid the austerities of the civil war. To this careful compilation we shall be occasionally indebted for some curious particulars which had escaped ourselves, amid the multiplied and unconnected sources from which our notes for this volume had to be made. To those who would go deeper into the antiquarian part of the subject than suits the purpose of a popular volume, we can recommend that work, as containing the most copious and elaborate synopsis of the existing information connected therewith which we have found in the course of our own researches. It would be impossible, however, in a paper of that length—or, indeed, in a volume of any moderate size—to give an account of all the numerous superstitions and observances of which traces are found, in an extended inquiry, to exist,—throwing light upon each other and contributing to the complete history of the festival. We have therefore gleaned from all quarters those which appear to be the most picturesque and whose relation is the most obvious, with a view, as much as possible, of generalizing the subject and presenting its parts in relation to an intelligible whole.

As we shall have occasion, in our second part, to speak of those peculiar feelings and customs by which each of the several days of the Christmas festival is specially illustrated, we shall not at present pause to go into any of the details of the subject, although continually tempted to do so by their connection with the observations which we are called upon to make. The purpose of the present chapter is rather to insist generally, and by some of its more striking features, upon the high and lengthened festivity with which this portion of the year was so long and so universally welcomed, and to seek some explanation of the causes to which the diminution of that spirit, and the almost total neglect of its ancient forms, are to be ascribed.

As early as the twelfth century we have accounts of the spectacles and pageants by which Christmas was welcomed at the court of the then monarch Henry II.; and from this period the wardrobe rolls and other Household-Books of the English kings furnish continual evidences of the costly preparations made for the festival. Many extracts from these books have been made by Mr. Sandys and others, from which it appears that the mirth of the celebration, and the lavish profusion expended upon it, were on the increase from year to year, excepting during that distracted period of England's history when these, like all other gracious arrangements and social relations, were disturbed by the unholy contests between the houses of the rival roses. There is, however, a beautiful example of the sacred influence of this high festival mentioned by Turner in his History of England, showing that its hallowed presence had power, even in those warlike days, to silence even the voice of war,—of all war save that most impious of (what are almost always impious) wars, civil war. During the siege of Orleans, in 1428, he says: "The solemnities and festivities of Christmas gave a short interval of repose. The English lords requested of the French commanders that they might have a night of minstrelsy, with trumpets and clarions. This was granted; and the horrors of war were suspended by melodies, that were felt to be delightful."

In the peaceful reign of Henry VII., the nation, on emerging from that long and unnatural struggle, appears to have occupied itself, as did the wise monarch, in restoring as far as was possible, and by all means, its disrupted ties, and rebaptizing its apostate feelings; and during this period the festival of Christmas was restored with revived splendor and observed with renewed zeal. The Household-Book of that sovereign, preserved in the chapter-house at Westminster, contains numerous items for disbursements connected with the Christmas diversions, in proof of this fact.

The reign of Henry VIII. was a reign of jousts and pageants till it became a reign of blood; and accordingly the Christmas pageantries prepared for the entertainment of that execrable monarch were distinguished by increased pomp and furnished at a more profuse expenditure. The festivities of Eltham and Greenwich figure in the pages of the old chroniclers; and the account books at the chapter-house abound in payments made in this reign, for purposes connected with the revels of the season.

We shall by and by have occasion to present our readers with some curious particulars, illustrative of the cost and pains bestowed upon this court celebration during the short reign of the young monarch Edward VI.

Not all the gloom and terror of the sanguinary Mary's reign were able entirely to extinguish the spirit of Christmas rejoicing throughout the land, though the court itself was too much occupied with its auto-da-fé spectacles to have much time for pageants of less interest.

Our readers, we think, need scarcely be told that the successor of this stern and miserable queen (and, thank God! the last of that bad family) was sure to seize upon the old pageantries, as she did upon every other vehicle which could in any way be made to minister to her intolerable vanity, or by which a public exhibition might be made, before the slaves whom she governed, of her own vulgar and brutal mind. Under all the forms of ancient festival observance, some offering was presented to this insatiable and disgusting appetite,—and that, too, by men entitled to stand erect, by their genius or their virtues, yet whose knees were rough with kneeling before as worthless an idol as any wooden god that the most senseless superstition ever set up for worship. From all the altars which the court had reared to old Father Christmas of yore, a cloud of incense was poured into the royal closet, enough to choke anything but a woman,—that woman a queen, and that queen a Tudor. The festival was preserved, and even embellished; but the saint, as far as the court was concerned, was changed. However, the example of the festivity to the people was the same; and the land was a merry land, and the Christmas time a merry time, throughout its length and breadth, in the days of Queen Elizabeth.

Nay, out of this very anxiety to minister to the craving vanity of a weak and worthless woman—the devices to which it gave rise and the laborers whom it called into action—have arisen results which are not amongst the least happy or important of those by its connection with which the Christmas festival stands recommended. Under these impulses, the old dramatic entertainments—of which we shall have occasion to speak more at large hereafter—took a higher character and assumed a more consistent form. The first regular English tragedy, called "Ferrex and Porrex," and the entertainment of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," were both productions of the early period of this queen's reign; and amid the crowd of her worshippers (alas that it is so!) rose up—with the star upon his forehead which is to burn for all time—the very first of all created beings, William Shakespeare. These are amongst the strange anomalies which the world, as it is constituted, so often presents, and must present at times, constitute it how we will. Shakespeare doing homage to Queen Elizabeth! The loftiest genius and the noblest heart that have yet walked this earth, in a character merely human, bowing down before this woman with the soul of a milliner and no heart at all! The "bright particular star" humbling itself before the temporal crown! The swayer of hearts, the ruler of all men's minds, in virtue of his own transcendent nature, recognizing the supremacy of this overgrown child, because she presided over the temporalities of a half emancipated nation, by rights derived to her from others and sanctioned by no qualities of her own!

And yet if to the low passions of this vulgar queen, and the patronage which they led her to extend to all who could best minister to their gratification, we owe any part of that development by which this consummate genius expanded itself, then do we stand in some degree indebted to her for one of the greatest boons which has been bestowed upon the human race; and as between her and mankind in general (for the accounts between her and individuals, and still more that between her and God, stand uninfluenced by this item) there is a large amount of good to be placed to her credit. Against her follies of a day there would have to be set her promotion of a wisdom whose lessons are for all time; against the tears which she caused to flow, the human anguish which she inflicted, and the weary, pining hours of the captives whom she made, would stand the tears of thousands dried away, many and many an aching heart beguiled of its sorrow, and many a captive taught to feel that

"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;"

all the chords of human feeling touched with a hand that soothes as did the harp of David, all the pages of human suffering stored with consolations!

To any one who will amuse himself by looking over the Miracle Plays and Masques, which were replaced by the more regular forms of dramatic entertainment, and will then regale himself by the perusal of "Gammer Gurton's Needle" or "Ferrex and Porrex," which came forward with higher pretensions in the beginning of this reign, there will appear reason to be sufficiently astonished at the rapid strides by which dramatic excellence was attained before its close and during the next, even without taking Shakespeare into the account at all. Put when we turn to the marvels of this great magician, and find that in his hands not only were the forms of the drama perfected, but that, without impeding the action or impairing the interest invested in those forms, and besides his excursions into the regions of imagination and his creations out of the natural world he has touched every branch of human knowledge and struck into every train of human thought; that without learning, in the popular sense, he has arrived at all the results and embodied all the wisdom which learning is only useful if it teaches; that we can be placed in no imaginable circumstances and under the influence of no possible feelings of which we do not find exponents,—and such exponents!—"in sweetest music," on his page; and above all, when we find that all the final morals to be drawn from all his writings are hopeful ones, that all the lessons which all his agents—joy or sorrow, pain or pleasure—are made alike to teach are lessons of goodness—it is impossible to attribute all this to aught but a revelation, or ascribe to him any character but that of a prophet. Shakespeare knew more than any other mere man ever knew; and none can tell how that knowledge came to him. "All men's business and bosoms" lay open to him. We should not like to have him quoted against us on any subject. Nothing escaped him, and he never made a mistake (we are not speaking of technical ones). He was the universal interpreter into language of the human mind, and he knew all the myriad voices by which nature speaks. He reminds us of the vizier in the Eastern story, who is said to have understood the languages of all animals. The utterings of the elements, the voices of beasts and of birds, Shakespeare could translate into the language of men; and the thoughts and sentiments of men he rendered into words as sweet as the singing of birds. If the reign of Elizabeth had been illustrated only by the advent of this great spirit, it might itself have accounted for some portion of that prejudice which (illustrated, as in fact it was, by much that was great and noble) blinds men still—or induces them to shut their eyes—to the true personal claims and character of that queen.

But we are digressing, again, as who does not when the image of Shakespeare comes across him? To return:—

The court celebrations of Christmas were observed throughout the reign of the first James; and the Prince Charles himself was an occasional performer in the pageantries prepared for the occasion, at great cost. But at no period do they appear to have been more zealously sought after, or performed with more splendor, than during that which immediately preceded the persecution, from whose effects they have never since recovered into anything like their former lustihood. In the early years of Charles the First's reign, the court pageants of this season were got up with extraordinary brilliancy,—the king with the lords of his court, and the queen with her ladies, frequently taking parts therein. This was the case in 1630-31; and at the Christmas of 1632-33 the queen, says Sandys, "got up a pastoral in Somerset House, in which it would seem she herself took a part. There were masques at the same time, independently of this performance, the cost of which considerably exceeded £2,000, besides that portion of the charge which was borne by the office of the revels and charged to the accounts of that department." In the same year, we learn that a grant of £450 was made to George Kirke, Esq., gentleman of the robes, for the masking attire of the king and his party. In 1637 there is a warrant, under the privy seal, to the same George Kirke for £150, to provide the masking dress of the king; and, in the same year, another to Edmund Taverner for £1,400 towards the expenses of a masque to be presented at Whitehall on the ensuing Twelfth Night. We have selected these from similar examples furnished by Sandys, in order to give our readers some idea of the sums expended in these entertainments, which sums will appear very considerable when estimated by the difference between the value of money in our days and that of two hundred years ago. Several of the masques presented at court during this reign, and the preceding ones, were written by Ben Jonson.

Mummers.—Page 65.

During the whole of this time, the forms of court ceremonial appear to have been aped, and the royal establishments imitated as far as possible, by the more powerful nobles; and the masques and pageantries exhibited for the royal amusement were accordingly reproduced or rivalled by them at their princely mansions in the country. Corporate and other public bodies caught the infection all over the land; and each landed proprietor and country squire endeavored to enact such state in the eyes of his own retainers, as his means would allow. The sports and festivities of the season were everywhere taken under the protection of the lord of the soil; and all classes of his dependants had a customary claim upon the hospitalities which he prepared for the occasion. The masques of the court and of the nobles were imitated in the mummings of the people,—of which we give a representation here, and which we shall have occasion particularly to describe hereafter,—they having survived the costly pageants of which they were the humble representatives. The festival was thus rendered a universal one, and its amusements brought within the reach of the indigent and the remote. The peasant, and even the pauper, were made, as it were, once a year sharers in the mirth of their immediate lord, and even of the monarch himself. The laboring classes had enlarged privileges during this season, not only by custom, but by positive enactment; and restrictive acts of Parliament, by which they were prohibited from certain games at other periods, contained exceptions in favor of the Christmas-tide. Nay, folly was, as it were, crowned, and disorder had a license! Sandys quotes from Leland the form of a proclamation given in his "Itinerary" as having been made by the sheriff of York, wherein it is declared that all "thieves, dice-players, carders" (with some other characters by name that are usually repudiated by the guardians of order) "and all other unthrifty folke, be welcome to the towne, whether they come late or early, att the reverence of the high feast of Youle, till the twelve dayes be passed." The terms of this proclamation were, no doubt, not intended to be construed in a grave and literal sense, but were probably meant to convey something like a satire upon the unbounded license of the season which they thus announce.

There are very pleasant evidences of the care which was formerly taken, in high quarters, that the poor should not be robbed of their share in this festival. The yearly increasing splendor of the royal celebrations appears at one time to have threatened that result, by attracting the country gentlemen from their own seats, and thereby withdrawing them from the presidency of those sports which were likely to languish in their absence. Accordingly, we find an order, in 1589, issued to the gentlemen of Norfolk and Suffolk, commanding them "to depart from London before Christmas, and to repair to their countries, there to keep hospitality amongst their neighbors." And similar orders appear to have been from time to time necessary, and from time to time repeated.

Amongst those bodies who were distinguished for the zeal of their Christmas observances, honorable mention may be made of the two English universities; and we shall have occasion hereafter to show that traces of the old ceremonials linger still in those their ancient haunts. But the reader who is unacquainted with this subject would scarcely be prepared to look for the most conspicuous celebration of these revels, with all their antics and mummeries, in the grave and dusty retreats of the law. Such, however, was the case. The lawyers beat the doctors hollow. Their ancient halls have rung with the sounds of a somewhat barbarous revelry; and the walls thereof, had they voices, could tell many an old tale, which the present occupants might not consider as throwing any desirable light upon the historical dignities of the body to which they belong. Our readers, no doubt, remember a certain scene in "Guy Mannering," wherein the farmer Dinmont and Colonel Mannering are somewhat inconsiderately intruded upon the carousals of Mr. Counsellor Pleydell at his tavern in the city of Edinburgh and find that worthy lawyer in what are called his "altitudes," being deeply engaged in the ancient and not very solemn pastime of "High Jinks." Their memory may probably present the counsellor "enthroned as a monarch in an elbow-chair placed on the dining-table, his scratch-wig on one side, his head crowned with a bottle-slider, his eye leering with an expression betwixt fun and the effects of wine," and recall, assisted by the jingle, some of the high discourse of his surrounding court:—

"Where is Gerunto now? and what's become of him?"
"Gerunto's drowned, because he could not swim," etc.

Now, if our readers shall be of opinion—as Colonel Mannering and the farmer were—that the attitude and the occupation were scarcely consistent with the dignity of a gentleman whom they had come to consult on very grave matters, we may be as much to blame as was the tavern-waiter on that occasion, in introducing them to the revels of the Inns of Court. We will do what we can to soften such censure by stating that there certainly appears at times to have arisen a suspicion, in the minds of a portion of the profession, that the wig and gown were not figuring to the best possible advantage on these occasions. For, in the reign of the first James, we find an order issued by the benchers of Lincoln's Inn, whereby the "under barristers were, by decimation, put out of commons because the whole bar offended by not dancing on Candlemas Day preceding, according to the ancient order of the society, when the judges were present;" and this order is accompanied by a threat "that, if the fault were repeated, they should be fined or disbarred."

There seems to have been a contest between the four Inns of Court as to which should get up these pageantries with the greatest splendor, and occasionally a struggle between the desire of victory and the disinclination, or perhaps inability, to furnish the heavy cost at which that victory was to be secured. Most curious particulars on these subjects are furnished by the accompt-books of the houses: by the "Gesta Grayorum" (which was published for the purpose of describing a celebrated Christmas kept at Gray's Inn in 1594, and had its title imitated from the then popular work called the "Gesta Romanorum"); by Dugdale, in his "Origines Juridiciales,"; and by Nichols, in his "Progresses of Queen Elizabeth." For some time Lincoln's Inn appears to have carried it all its own way, having been first on the ground. The Christmas celebrations seem to have been kept by this society from as early a period as the reign of Henry VI.; although it was not until the reign of Henry VIII. that they began to grow into celebrity, or at least that we have any account of their arrangements. When, however, the societies of the two Temples, and that of Gray's Inn, began, with a laudable jealousy, to contest the palm of splendor, the necessary expenditure appears occasionally to have "given them pause." Accordingly, they held anxious meetings, at the approach of the season, to decide the important question whether Christmas should be kept that year or not; and one of the registers of the society of Lincoln's Inn, bearing date the 27th of November, in the twenty-second year of the reign of Henry VIII. contains the following order: "Yt is agreed that if the two Temples do kepe Chrystemas, then Chrystemas to be kept here; and to know this, the Steward of the House ys commanded to get knowledge, and to advertise my master by the next day at night."

There is a curious story told in Baker's Chronicle of an awkward predicament into which the society of Gray's Inn brought themselves by a play which they enacted amongst their Christmas revels of 1527. The subject of this play was to the effect that "Lord Governance was ruled by Dissipation and Negligence; by whose evil order Lady Public-Weal was put from Governance." Now, if these gentlemen did not intend, by this somewhat delicate moral, any insinuation against the existing state of things (which, being lawyers, and therefore courtiers, there is good motive to believe they did not), it is, at all events, certain that, as lawyers, they ought to have known better how to steer clear of all offence to weak consciences. That respectable minister, Cardinal Wolsey, felt himself (as we think he had good right to do) greatly scandalized at what, if not designed, was, by accident, a palpable hit; and, in order to teach the gentlemen of Gray's Inn that they were responsible for wounds given, if they happened to shoot arrows in the dark, he divested the ingenious author, Sergeant Roe, of his coif, and committed him to the Fleet, together with one of the actors, of the name of Moyle,—in order to afford them leisure for furnishing him with a satisfactory explanation of the matter.

In Dugdale's "Origines Juridiciales," we have an account of a magnificent Christmas which was kept at the Inner Temple, in the fourth year of Queen Elizabeth's reign; at which the Lord Robert Dudley, afterwards Earl of Leicester, presided, under the mock-title of Palaphilos, Prince of Sophie, High Constable Marshal of the Knights Templars, and Patron of the honorable order of Pegasus. A potentate with such a title would have looked very foolish without a "tail;" and accordingly he had for his master of the game no less a lawyer than Christopher Hatton, afterwards Lord Chancellor of England, with four masters of the revels, a variety of other officers, and fourscore persons forming a guard. Gerard Leigh, who was so fortunate as to obtain the dignity of a knight of Pegasus, describes, as an eye-witness, in his "Accidence of Armorie," the solemn fooleries which were enacted on the occasion by these worthies of the sword and of the gown.

Of course, it was not to be expected that such shrewd courtiers as lawyers commonly are, if they had ever kept Christmas at all, should fail to do so during the reign of this virgin queen, when its celebration offered them such admirable opportunities for the administration of that flattery which was so agreeable to her Majesty, and might possibly be so profitable to themselves. We have great pleasure in recording a speech made by her Majesty on one of these occasions, nearly so much as two centuries and a half ago, but which for its great excellence has come down to our days. The gentlemen of Gray's Inn (their wits, probably, a little sharpened by the mistake which they had made in her father's time) had ventured upon a dramatic performance again; and, in the course of a masque which they represented before the queen's Majesty, had administered to her copious draughts of that nectar on which her Majesty's vanity was known to thrive so marvellously. They appear, however, with a very nice tact, to have given her no more of it on this occasion than was sufficient to put her Majesty into spirits, without intoxicating her, for by this period of her life it took a great deal of that sort of thing to intoxicate the queen's Majesty; and the effect was of the pleasantest kind, and could not fail to be most satisfactory to the gentlemen of Gray's Inn. For after the masque was finished (in which we presume there had been a little dancing by the lawyers who, would, as in duty bound, have stood on their wigs to please her Majesty), and on the courtiers attempting, in their turn, to execute a dance, her Majesty was most graciously pleased to exclaim, "What! shall we have bread and cheese after a banquet?"—meaning thereby, we presume, to imply that the courtiers could not hope to leap as high or, in any respect, to cut such capers as the lawyers had done. Now, this speech of the virgin queen we have reported here less for the sake of any intrinsic greatness in the thought or elegance in the form than because, out of a variety of speeches by her Majesty, which have been carefully preserved, we think this is about as good as any other, and has the additional recommendation (which so few of the others have) of exhibiting the virgin queen in a good humor. And, further, because having recorded the disgrace into which the gentlemen of Gray's Inn danced themselves, in the lifetime of her illustrious father, it is but right that we should likewise record the ample indemnification which they must have considered themselves to have received, at the lips of his virgin daughter.

The celebrations at the Inns of Court were from time to time continued, down to the period of the civil troubles which darkened the reign of Charles I.; and so lately as the year 1641, when they had already commenced, we find it recorded by Evelyn, in his Memoirs, that he was elected one of the comptrollers of the Middle Temple revellers, "as the fashion of the young students and gentlemen was, the Christmas being kept this yeare with greate solemnity." During this reign, we discover the several societies lessening their expenses by a very wise compromise of their disputes for supremacy; for in the eighth year thereof the four Inns of Court provided a Christmas masque in conjunction, for the entertainment of the court, which cost the startling sum of £24,000 of the money of that day, and in return King Charles invited one hundred and twenty gentlemen of the four Inns to a masque at Whitehall on the Shrove-Tuesday following.

That our readers may form some idea of the kind of sports which furnished entertainment to men of no less pretension than Hatton and Coke and Crewe, we will extract for them a few more particulars of the ceremonies usually observed at the grand Christmases of the Inner Temple, before quitting this part of the subject.

In the first place, it appears that on Christmas Eve there was a banquet in the hall, at which three masters of the revels were present, the oldest of whom, after dinner and supper, was to sing a carol, and to command other gentlemen to sing with him; and in all this we see nothing which is not perfectly worthy of all imitation now. Then, on each of the twelve nights, before and after supper were revels and dancing; and if any of these revels and dancing were performed in company with the fair sex (which, on the face of the evidence, doth not appear), then we have none of the objections to urge against them which we have ventured to insinuate against the solemn buffooneries, to which the bar was fined for refusing to surrender itself, in the time of James I. Neither do we find anything repugnant to our modern tastes in the announcement that the breakfasts of the following mornings were very substantial ones, consisting of brawn, mustard, and malmsey, which the exhaustion of the previous night's dancing might render necessary; nor that all the courses were served with music, which we intend that some of our own shall be this coming Christmas. But against most of that which follows we enter our decided protest, as not only very absurd in itself, but eminently calculated to spoil a good dinner.

On St. Stephen's Day, we learn that, after the first course was served in, the constable marshal was wont to enter the hall (and we think he had much better have come in, and said all he had to say beforehand) bravely arrayed with "a fair rich compleat harneys, white and bright and gilt, with a nest of fethers, of all colours, upon his crest or helm, and a gilt pole ax in his hand," and, no doubt, thinking himself a prodigiously fine fellow. He was accompanied by the lieutenant of the Tower, "armed with a fair white armour," also wearing "fethers," and "with a like pole ax in his hand," and of course also thinking himself a very fine fellow. With them came sixteen trumpeters, preceded by four drums and fifes, and attended by four men clad in white "harneys," from the middle upwards, having halberds in their hands, and bearing on their shoulders a model of the Tower, and each and every one of these latter personages, in his degree, having a consciousness that he, too, was a fine fellow. Then all these fine fellows, with the drums and music, and with all their "fethers" and finery, went three times round the fire, whereas, considering that the boar's head was cooling all the time, we think once might have sufficed. Then the constable marshal, after three courtesies, knelt down before the Lord Chancellor, with the lieutenant doing the same behind him, and then and there deliberately proceeded to deliver himself of an "oration of a quarter of an hour's length," the purport of which was to tender his services to the Lord Chancellor, which, we think, at such a time he might have contrived to do in fewer words. To this the Chancellor was unwise enough to reply that he would "take farther advice therein," when it would have been much better for him to settle the matter at once, and proceed to eat his dinner. However, this part of the ceremony ended at last by the constable marshal and the lieutenant obtaining seats at the Chancellor's table, upon the former giving up his sword: and then enter, for a similar purpose, the master of the game, apparelled in green velvet, and the ranger of the forest, in a green suit of "satten," bearing in his hand a green bow, and "divers" arrows, "with either of them a hunting-horn about their necks, blowing together three blasts of venery." These worthies, also, thought it necessary to parade their finery three times around the fire; and having then made similar obeisances, and offered up a similar petition in a similar posture, they were finally inducted into a similar privilege.

But though seated at the Chancellor's table, and no doubt sufficiently roused by the steam of its good things, they were far enough as yet from getting anything to eat, as a consequence; and the next ceremony is one which strikingly marks the rudeness of the times. "A huntsman cometh into the hall, with a fox, and a purse-net with a cat, both bound at the end of a staff, and with them nine or ten couple of hounds, with the blowing of hunting-horns. And the fox and the cat are set upon by the hounds, and killed beneath the fire." "What this 'merry disport' signified (if practised) before the Reformation," says a writer in Mr. Hone's Year Book, "I know not. In 'Ane compendious boke of godly and spiritual songs, Edinburgh, 1621, printed from an old copy,' are the following lines, seemingly referring to some such pageant:—

'The hunter is Christ that hunts in haist,
The hunds are Peter and Pawle,
The paip is the fox, Rome is the Rox
That rubbis us on the gall.'"

After these ceremonies, the welcome permission to betake themselves to the far more interesting one of an attack upon the good things of the feast appears to have been at length given; but at the close of the second course the subject of receiving the officers who had tendered their Christmas service was renewed. Whether the gentlemen of the law were burlesquing their own profession intentionally or whether it was only an awkward hit, like that which befell their brethren of Gray's Inn, does not appear. However, the common serjeant made what is called "a plausible speech," insisting on the necessity of these officers "for the better reputation of the Commonwealth;" and he was followed, to the same effect, by the king's serjeant-at-law till the Lord Chancellor silenced them by desiring a respite of further advice, which it is greatly to be marvelled he had not done sooner. And thereupon he called upon the "ancientest of the masters of the revels" for a song,—a proceeding to which we give our unqualified approbation.

So much for the dinner. After supper, the constable marshal again presented himself, if possible finer than before, preceded by drums,—as so fine a man ought to be,—and mounted on a scaffold borne by four men. After again going thrice round the hearth, he dismounted from his elevation, and having set a good example by first playing the figurant himself for the edification of the court, called upon the nobles, by their respective Christmas names, to do the same. Of the styles and titles which it was considered humorous to assume on such occasions, and by which he called up his courtiers to dance, our readers may take the following for specimens:—

"Sir Francis Flatterer, of Fowlehurst, in the county of Buckingham."

"Sir Randle Rackabite, of Rascall Hall, in the county of Rabchell."

"Sir Morgan Mumchance, of Much Monkery, in the county of Mad Popery."

And so on, with much more of the same kind, which we are sure our readers will spare us, or rather thank us for sparing them. The ceremonies of St. John's Day were, if possible, more absurd than those by which St. Stephen was honored; but, that we may take leave of the lawyers on good terms, and with a word of commendation, we will simply add that the concluding one is stated to be that on the Thursday following "the Chancellor and company partook of dinner of roast beef and venison pasties, and at supper of mutton and hens roasted," which we take to have been not only the most sensible proceeding of the whole series, but about as sensible a thing as they or anybody else could well do.

So important were these Christmas celebrations deemed by our ancestors, and such was the earnestness bestowed upon their preparation, that a special officer was appointed for that purpose, and to preside over the festival with large privileges, very considerable appointments, and a retinue which in course of time came to be no insignificant imitation of a prince's. We are of course speaking at present of the officer who was appointed to the superintendence of the Christmas ceremonials at court. The title by which this potentate was usually distinguished in England was that of "Lord of Misrule," "Abbot of Misrule," or "Master of Merry Disports;" and his office was, in fact, that of a temporary "Master of the Revels" (which latter title was formerly that of a permanent and distinguished officer attached to the household of our kings). Accordingly we find that amongst those of the more powerful nobles who affected an imitation of the royal arrangements in their Christmas establishments, this Christmas officer (when they appointed one to preside over their private Christmas celebrations) was occasionally nominated as their "Master of the Revels." In the Household-Book of the Northumberland family, amongst the directions given for the order of the establishment, it is stated that "My lorde useth and accustomyth yerly to gyf hym which is ordynede to be the Master of the Revells yerly in my lordis hous in cristmas for the overseyinge and orderinge of his lordschips Playes, Interludes, and Dresinge that is plaid befor his lordship in his hous in the xijth dayes of Cristenmas, and they to have in rewarde for that caus yerly, xxs." In the Inns of Court, where this officer formed no part of a household, but was a member elected out of their own body for his ingenuity, he was commonly dignified by a title more appropriate to the extensive authority with which he was invested, and the state with which he was furnished for its due maintenance; namely, that of "Christmas Prince," or sometimes "King of Christmas." He is the same officer who was known in Scotland as the "Abbot of Unreason," and bears a close resemblance to the "Abbas Stultorum," who presided over the Feast of Fools in France, and the "Abbé de la Malgourverné," who ruled the sports in certain provinces of that kingdom. In a note to Ellis's edition of Brand's "Popular Antiquities," we find a quotation from Mr. Warton (whose "History of English Poetry" we have not at hand) in which mention is made of an "Abbé de Liesse," and a reference given to Carpentier's Supplement to Du Cange, for the title "Abbas Lætitiæ." We mention these, to enable the antiquarian portion of our readers to make the reference for themselves. Writing in the country, we have not access to the works in question, and could not, in these pages, go farther into the matter if we had.

We have already stated that the "Lord of Misrule" appears to bear a considerable resemblance to that ruler or king who was anciently appointed to preside over the sports of the Roman Saturnalia; and we find on looking farther into the subject, that we are corroborated in this view by one who, of course, asserts the resemblance for the purpose of making it a matter of reproach. The notorious Prynne, in his "Histrio-Mastix," affirms (and quotes Polydore Virgil to the same effect) that "our Christmas lords of Misrule, together with dancing, masques, mummeries, stage-players, and such other Christmas disorders, now in use with Christians, were derived from these Roman Saturnalia and Bacchanalian festivals; which," adds he, "should cause all pious Christians eternally to abominate them." We should not, however, omit to mention that by some this officer has been derived from the ancient ceremony of the Boy-Bishop. Faber speaks of him as originating in an old Persico-Gothic festival in honor of Buddha: and Purchas, in his "Pilgrimage," as quoted in the Aubrey manuscripts, says, that the custom is deduced from the "Feast in Babylon, kept in honour of the goddess Dorcetha, for five dayes together; during which time the masters were under the dominion of their servants, one of which is usually sett over the rest, and royally cloathed, and was called Sogan, that is, Great Prince."

The title, however, by which this officer is most generally known is that of Lord of Misrule. "There was," says Stow, "in the feast of Christmas, in the king's house, wheresoever he was lodged, a Lord of Misrule, or Master of merry Disports; and the like had ye for the house of every nobleman of honour or good worship, were he spiritual or temporal. Among the which the Mayor of London and either of the Sheriffs had their several Lords of Misrule ever contending, without quarrel or offence, which should make the rarest pastimes to delight the beholders."

Of the antiquity of this officer in England, we have not been able to find any satisfactory account; but we discover traces of him almost as early as we have any positive records of the various sports by which the festival of this season was supported. Polydore Virgil speaks of the splendid spectacles, the masques, dancings, etc., by which it was illustrated as far back as the close of the twelfth century; and it is reasonable to suppose that something in the shape of a master of these public ceremonies must have existed then, to preserve order as well as furnish devices, particularly as the hints for the one and the other seem to have been taken from the celebrations of the heathens. As early as the year 1489 Leland speaks of an Abbot of Misrule "that made much sport, and did right well his office." Henry the Seventh's "boke of paymentis," preserved in the Chapter House, is stated by Sandys to contain several items of disbursement to the Lord of Misrule (or Abbot, as he is therein sometimes called) for different years "in rewarde for his besynes in Christenmes holydays," none of which exceeded the sum of £6. 13s. 4d. This sum—multiplied as we imagine it ought to be by something like fifteen, to give the value thereof in our days—certainly affords no very liberal remuneration to an officer whose duties were of any extent; and we mention it that our readers may contrast it with the lavish appointments of the same functionary in after times. Henry, however, was a frugal monarch, though it was a part of his policy to promote the amusements of the people; and from the treasures which that frugality created, his immediate successors felt themselves at liberty to assume a greater show. In the subsequent reign, the yearly payments to the Lord of Misrule had already been raised as high as £15 6s. 8d.; and the entertainments over which he presided were furnished at a proportionably increased cost.

It is not, however, until the reign of the young monarch, Edward the Sixth, that this officer appears to have attained his highest dignities; and during the subsequent reign we find him playing just such a part as might be expected from one whose business it was to take the lead in revels such as we have had occasion to describe; namely, that of arch-buffoon.

In Hollinshed's Chronicle, honorable mention is made of a certain George Ferrers, therein described as a "lawyer, a poet, and an historian," who supplied the office well in the fifth year of Edward the Sixth, and who was rewarded by the young king with princely liberality. This George Ferrers was the principal author of that well-known work, the "Mirrour for Magistrates;" and Mr. Kempe, the editor of the recently published "Loseley Manuscripts," mentions his having been likewise distinguished by military services, in the reign of Henry the Eighth. It appears that the young king having fallen into a state of melancholy after the condemnation of his uncle, the Protector, it was determined to celebrate the approaching Christmas festival with more than usual splendor, for the purpose of diverting his mind; and this distinguished individual was selected to preside over the arrangements.

The publication of the "Loseley Manuscripts" enables us to present our readers with some very curious particulars, illustrative at once of the nature of those arrangements, and of the heavy cost at which they were furnished. By an order in council,—dated the 31st of September, 1552, and addressed to Sir Thomas Cawarden, at that time Master of the King's Revels,—after reciting the appointment of the said George Ferrers, the said Sir Thomas is informed that it is his Majesty's pleasure "that you se hym furneshed for hym and his bande, as well in apparell as all other necessaries, of such stuff as remayneth in your office. And whatsoever wanteth in the same, to take order that it be provided accordinglie by yo^r discretion."

For the manner in which the Lord of Misrule availed himself of this unlimited order, we recommend to such of our readers as the subject may interest a perusal of the various estimates and accounts published by Mr. Kempe from the manuscripts in question. Were it not that they would occupy too much of our space, we should have been glad to introduce some of them here, for the purpose of conveying to the reader a lively notion of the gorgeousness of apparel and appointment exhibited on this occasion. We must, however, present them with some idea of the train for whom these costly preparations were made, and of the kind of mock court with which the Lord of Misrule surrounded himself.

Amongst these we find mention made of a chancellor, treasurer, comptroller, vice-chamberlain, lords-councillors, divine, philosopher, astronomer, poet, physician, apothecary, master of requests, civilian, disard (an old word for clown), gentleman-ushers, pages of honor, sergeants-at-arms, provost-marshal, under-marshal, footmen, messengers, trumpeter, herald, orator; besides hunters, jugglers, tumblers, band, fools, friars (a curious juxtaposition, which Mr. Kempe thinks might intend a satire), and a variety of others. None seem in fact to have been omitted who were usually included in the retinue of a prince; and over this mock court the mock monarch appears to have presided with a sway as absolute, as far as regarded the purposes of his appointment, as the actual monarch himself over the weightier matters of the state. But the most curious part of these arrangements is that by which (as appears from one of the lists printed from these manuscripts) he seems to have been accompanied in his processions by an heir-at-law, and three other children, besides two base sons. These two base sons, we presume, are bastards; and that the establishment of a potentate could not be considered complete without them. The editor also mentions that he was attended by an almoner, who scattered amongst the crowd during his progresses, certain coins made by the wire-drawers; and remarks that if these bore the portrait and superscription of the Lord of Misrule, they would be rare pieces in the eye of a numismatist.

The following very curious letter, which we will give entire, will furnish our readers with a lively picture of the pageantries of that time, and of the zeal with which full-grown men set about amusements of a kind which are now usually left to children of a smaller growth. Playing at kings is in our day one of the sports of more juvenile actors. The letter is addressed by Master George Ferrers to Sir Thomas Cawarden; and gives some account of his intended entry at the court at Christmas, and of his devices for furnishing entertainment during the festival.

Sir,—Whereas you required me to write, for that y^r busynes is great, I have in as few wordes as I maie signefied to you such things as I thinke moste necessarie for my purpose.

ffirst, as towching my Introduction. Whereas the laste yeare my devise was to cum of oute of the mone (moon) this yeare I imagine to cum oute of a place called vastum vacuum, the great waste, as moche to saie as a place voide or emptie w^thout the worlde, where is neither fier, ayre, nor earth; and that I have bene remayning there sins the last yeare. And, because of certaine devises which I have towching this matter, I wold, yf it were possyble, have all myne apparell blewe, the first daie that I p'sent my self to the King's Ma^tie; and even as I shewe my self that daie, so my mynd is in like order and in like suets (suits) to shew myself at my comyng into London after the halowed daies.

Againe, how I shall cum into the Courte, whether under a canopie, as the last yeare, or in a chare triumphall, or uppon some straunge beaste,—that I reserve to you; but the serpente with sevin heddes, cauled hidra, is the chief beast of myne armes, and wholme[2] (holm) bushe is the devise of my crest, my worde[3] is semper ferians, I alwaies feasting or keping holie daies. Uppon Christmas daie I send a solempne ambassad^e to the King's Ma^ie by an herrald, a trumpet, an orator speaking in a straunge language, an interpreter or a truchman with hym, to which p'sons ther were requiset to have convenient farnyture, which I referre to you.

I have provided one to plaie uppon a kettell drom with his boye, and a nother drome w^th a fyffe, whiche must be apparelled like turkes garments, according to the paternes I send you herewith. On St. Stephen's daie, I wold, if it were possyble, be with the King's Ma^tie before dynner. Mr. Windham, being my Admyrall, is appointed to receive me beneth the bridge with the King's Brigandyne, and other vessells apointed for the same purpose; his desire is to have the poope of his vessell covered w^th white and blew, like as I signefie to you by a nother l^re.

Sir George Howard, being my M^r. of the Horsis, receiveth me at my landing at Grenwiche with a spare horse and my pages of hono^r, one carieng my hed pece, a nother my shelde, the thirde my sword, the fourth my axe. As for their furniture I know nothing as yet provided, either for my pages or otherwise, save a hed peece that I caused to be made. My counsailo^rs, with suche other necessarie psons y^t attend uppon me that daie, also must be consydered. There maie be no fewer than sixe counsailo^rs at the least; I must also have a divine, a philosopher, an astronomer, a poet, a phisician, a potecarie, a m^r of requests, a sivilian, a disard, John Smyth, two gentlemen ushers, besides juglers, tomblers, fooles, friers, and suche other.

The residue of the wholie daies I will spend in other devises: as one daie in feats of armes, and then wolde I have a challeng pformed with hobbie horsis, where I purpose to be in pson. Another daie in hunting and hawking, the residue of the tyme shalbe spent in other devisis, which I will declare to you by mouth to have yo^r ayde and advice therin.

S^r, I know not howe ye be provided to furnish me, but suer methinks I shold have no lesse than five suets of apparell, the first for the daie I come in, which shall also serve me in London, and two other suets for the two halowed daies folowing, the fourth for newe yeares daie, and the fifte for XII^th daie.

Touching my suet of blew, I have sent you a pece of velvet which hath a kinde of powdered ermaines in it, vearie fytt for my wering, yf you so thynke good. All other matters I referre tyll I shall speake with you.

George Ferrers.

In other letters from this Lord of Misrule to the Master of the Revels he applies for eight visors for a drunken masque, and eight swords and daggers for the same purpose; twelve hobby-horses, two Dryads, and Irish dresses for a man and woman; and seventy jerkins of buckram, or canvas painted like mail, for seventy "hakbuturs," or musketeers of his guard.

Such are some of the testimonies borne by the parties themselves to their own right pleasant follies, and the expense at which they maintained them; and to these we will add another, coming from an adverse quarter, and showing the light in which these costly levities had already come to be regarded by men of sterner minds so early as the reign of Elizabeth. The following very curious passage is part of an extract made by Brand, from a most rare book entitled "The Anatomie of Abuses,"—the work of one Phillip Stubs, published in London in 1585,—and gives a quaint picture of the Lord of Misrule and his retainers, as viewed through Puritan optics.

"Firste," says Master Stubs, "all the wilde heades of the parishe conventynge together, chuse them a grand Capitaine (of mischeef) whom they innoble with the title of my Lorde of Misserule, and hym they crown with great solemnitie, and adopt for their kyng. This kyng anoynted, chuseth for the twentie, fourtie, three score, or a hundred lustie guttes like to hymself, to waite uppon his lordely majestie, and to guarde his noble persone. Then every one of these his menne he investeth with his liveries of greene, yellowe or some other light wanton colour. And as though that were not (baudie) gaudy enough I should saie, they bedecke themselves with scarffes, ribons, and laces, hanged all over with golde rynges, precious stones, and other jewelles: this doen, they tye about either legge twentie or fourtie belles with rich handkercheefes in their handes, and sometymes laied acrosse over their shoulders and neckes, borrowed for the moste parte of their pretie Mopsies and loovyng Bessies, for bussyng them in the darcke. Thus thinges sette in order, they have their hobbie horses, dragons, and other antiques, together with their baudie pipers, and thunderyng drommers, to strike up the Deville's Daunce withall" (meaning the Morris Dance), "then marche these heathen companie towardes the church and churche yarde, their pipers pipyng, drommers thonderyng, their stumppes dauncyng, their belles iynglyng, their handkerchefes swyngyng about their heades like madmen, their hobbie horses and other monsters skyrmishyng amongst the throng: and in this sorte they goe to the churche (though the minister bee at praier or preaçhyng) dauncyng and swingyng their handkercheefes over their heades, in the churche, like devilles incarnate, with suche a confused noise that no man can heare his owne voice. Then the foolishe people, they looke, they stare, they laugh, they fleere, and mount upon formes and pewes, to see these goodly pageauntes, solemnized in this sort."

At the Christmas celebration held at Gray's Inn in 1594, to which we have already alluded, the person selected to fill the office of Christmas Prince was a Norfolk gentleman of the name of Helmes, whose leg, like that of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, appears "to have been formed under the star of a galliard." He is described as being "accomplished with all good parts, fit for so great a dignity, and also a very proper man in personage, and very active in dancing and revelling." The revels over which this mock monarch presided were, as our readers will remember, exhibited before Queen Elizabeth; and it was the exquisite performance of this gentleman and his court which her Majesty described as bearing the same relation for excellence to those of her own courtiers which a banquet does to bread and cheese. We must refer such of our readers as are desirous of informing themselves as to the nature and taste of the devices which could make her Majesty so eloquent, to the "Gesta Grayorum;" contenting ourselves with giving them such notion thereof, as well as of the high dignities which appertained to a Lord of Misrule, as may be conveyed by a perusal of the magnificent style and titles assumed by Mr. Henry Helmes on his accession. They were enough to have made her Majesty jealous, if she had not been so good-natured a queen; for looking at the philosophy of the thing, she was about as much a mock monarch as himself, and could not dance so well. To be sure, she was acknowledged by this potentate as Lady Paramount; and to a woman like Elizabeth, it was something to receive personal homage from—

"The High and Mighty Prince Henry, Prince of Purpoole, Archduke of Stapulia and Bernardia; Duke of High and Nether Holborn; Marquis of St. Giles and Tottenham; Count Palatine of Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell; Great Lord of the Cantons of Islington, Kentish Town, Paddington, and Knightsbridge; Knight of the most Heroical Order of the Helmet, and Sovereign of the same"!

It is admitted that no man can be a great actor who has not the faculty of divesting himself of his personal identity, and persuading himself that he really is, for the time, that which he represents himself to be; his doing which will go far to persuade others into the same belief. Now as her Majesty has pronounced upon the excellence of Mr. Henry Helmes's acting, and if we are therefore to suppose that that gentleman had contrived to mystify both himself and her, she would naturally be not a little vain of so splendid a vassal. But seriously, it is not a little amusing to notice the good faith with which these gentlemen appear to have put on and worn their burlesque dignities, and the real homage which they not only expected, but actually received. If the tricks which they played during their "brief authority," were not of that mischievous kind which "make the angels weep," they were certainly fantastic enough to make those who are "a little lower than the angels" smile. A Lord Mayor in his gilt coach seems to be a trifle compared with a Lord of Misrule entering the city of London in former days; and the following passage from Warton's "History of English Poetry," exhibits amusingly enough the sovereign functions seriously exercised by this important personage, and the homage, both ludicrous and substantial, which he sometimes received:—

"At a Christmas celebrated in the hall of the Middle Temple, in the year 1635, the jurisdiction privileges and parade of this mock monarch are thus circumstantially described. He was attended by his Lord Keeper, Lord Treasurer with eight white staves, a Captain of his Band of Pensioners and of his guard, and with two Chaplains who were so seriously impressed with an idea of his regal dignity that, when they preached before him on the preceding Sunday in the Temple Church, on ascending the pulpit they saluted him with three low bows. He dined both in the Hall and in his Privy Chamber under a cloth of Estate. The pole-axes for his Gentlemen Pensioners were borrowed of Lord Salisbury. Lord Holland, his temporary justice in Eyre, supplies him with venison on demand; and the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of London with wine. On Twelfth-day, at going to Church, he received many petitions which he gave to his Master of Requests; and like other kings he had a favourite, whom—with others, gentlemen of high quality—he knighted at returning from Church."

The Christmas Prince on this occasion was Mr. Francis Vivian, who expended from his own private purse the large sum of £2,000 in support of his dignities. Really, it must have tried the philosophy of these gentlemen to descend from their temporary elevation, into the ranks of ordinary life. A deposed prince like that high and mighty prince, Henry, Prince of Purpoole, must have felt, on getting up on the morrow of Candlemas-day, some portion of the sensations of Abou Hassan on the morning which succeeded his Caliphate of a day, when the disagreeable conviction was forced upon him that he was no longer Commander of the Faithful, and had no further claim to the services of Cluster-of-Pearls, Morning-Star, Coral-Lips or Fair-Face. In the case, however, of Mr. Francis Vivian, it is stated that after his deposition he was knighted by the king,—by way, we suppose, of breaking his fall.

In Wood's "Athenæ Oxonienses," mention is made of a very splendid Christmas ceremonial observed at St. John's College, Oxford, in the reign of our first James, which was presided over by a Mr. Thomas Tooker, whom we elsewhere find called "Tucker." From a manuscript account of this exhibition, Wood quotes the titles assumed by this gentleman in his character of Christmas Prince; and we will repeat them here, for the purpose of showing that the legal cloisters were not the only ones in which mirth was considered as no impeachment of professional gravity, and that humor (such as it is) was an occasional guest of the wisdom which is proverbially said to reside in wigs—of all denominations. From a comparison of these titles with those by which Mr. Henry Helmes illustrated his own magnificence at Gray's Inn, our readers may decide for themselves upon the relative degrees of the wit which flourished beneath the shelter of the respective gowns. Though ourselves a Cantab, we have no skill in the measurement of the relations of small quantities. Of the hearty mirth in each case there is little doubt; and humor of the finest quality could have done no more than produce that effect, and might probably have failed to do so much. The appetite is the main point. "The heart's all," as Davy says. A small matter made our ancestors laugh, because they brought stomachs to the feast of Momus. And, Heaven save the mark! through how many national troubles has that same joyous temperament (which is the farthest thing possible from levity,—one of the phases of deep feeling,—) helped to bring the national mind! The "merry days" of England were succeeded by what may be called her "age of tears,"—the era of the sentimentalists, when young gentlemen ceased to wear cravats, and leaned against pillars in drawing-rooms in fits of moody abstraction or under the influence of evident inspiration, and young ladies made lachrymatories of their boudoirs, and met together to weep, and in fact went through the world weeping. Amid all its absurdity, there was some real feeling at the bottom of this too; and therefore it, too, had its pleasure. But there is to be an end of this also. Truly are we falling upon the "evil days" of which we may say we "have no pleasure in them." Men are neither to laugh nor smile, now, without distinctly knowing why. We are in the age of the philosophers.—All this time, however, Mr. Thomas Tucker is waiting to have his style and titles proclaimed; and thus do we find them duly set forth:—

"The most magnificent and renowned Thomas, by the favor of Fortune, Prince of Alba Fortunata, Lord of St. John's, High Regent of the Hall, Duke of St. Giles's, Marquis of Magdalen's, Landgrave of the Grove, Count Palatine of the Cloysters, Chief Bailiff of Beaumont, High Ruler of Rome, Master of the Manor of Walton, Governor of Gloucester Green, sole Commander of all Titles, Tournaments, and Triumphs, Superintendent in all Solemnities whatever."

From these titles,—as well as from those which we have already mentioned as being assumed by the courtiers of the illustrious Prince of Sophie, our readers will perceive that alliteration was an esteemed figure in the rhetoric of the revels.

In order to give our readers a more lively idea of this potentate, we have, as the frontispiece to our second part, introduced a Lord of Misrule to preside over the Christmas sports therein described. Although the titles with which we have there invested him are taken from the "Gesta Grayorum," the dress in which the artist has bestowed him is not copied from any one of the particular descriptions furnished by the different records. He is intended to represent the ideal of a Christmas prince, and not the portrait of any particular one of whom we have accounts. The artist's instructions were therefore confined to investing him with a due magnificence (referring to the records only so far as to keep the costume appropriate) and with a complacent sense of his own finery and state, and we think that Mr. Seymour has succeeded very happily in catching and embodying the mock heroic of the character. The Prince of Purpoole, or His Highness of Sophie, must have looked just such a personage as he has represented.

We must not omit to observe that a corresponding officer appears to have formerly exercised his functions at some of the colleges at Cambridge, under the more classical title of Imperator. And we must further state that at Lincoln's-Inn, in the early times of their Christmas celebrations, there appear to have been elected (besides the Lord of Misrule, and, we presume, in subordination to him) certain dignitaries exercising a royal sway over the revelries of particular days of the festival. In the account given by Dugdale of the Christmas held by this society in the ninth year of the reign of Henry VIII., mention is made—besides the Marshal and (as he is there called) the Master of the Revels—of a King chosen for Christmas day, and an officer for Childermas day having the title of King of the Cockneys. A relic of this ancient custom exists in the Twelfth Night King, whom it is still usual to elect on the festival of the Epiphany, and of whom we shall have occasion to speak at length in his proper place.

The length of the period over which the sway of this potentate extended does not seem to be very accurately defined, or rather it is probable that it varied with circumstances. Strictly speaking, the Christmas season is in our day considered to terminate with Twelfth Night, and the festival itself to extend over that space of time of which this night on one side and Christmas eve on the other are the limits. In ancient times, too, we find frequent mention of the twelve days of Christmas. Thus the George Ferrers of whom we have spoken, is appointed "to be in his hyness household for the twelve days;" and he dates one of his communications to Sir Thomas Cawarden, "From Greenwich y^e second of January and y^e ix^th day of o^r rule." In the extract from the Household-Book of the Northumberland family which we have already quoted, mention is also made of the "Playes, Interludes and Dresinge that is plaid befor his lordship in his hous in the xijth dayes of Christenmas." Stow, however, says that "these Lords beginning their rule at Allhallond Eve, continued the same till the morrow after the Feast of the Purification, commonly called Candlemas day;" and that during all that time there were under their direction "fine and subtle disguisings, masks and mummeries, with playing at cards for counters, nayles and points in every house, more for pastimes than for gaine." This would give a reign of upwards of three months to these gentlemen. Dugdale, in describing the revels of the Inner Temple speaks of the three principal days being All-hallows, Candlemas, and Ascension days,—which would extend the period to seven months; and the masque of which we have spoken as forming the final performance of the celebrated Christmas of 1594, described in the "Gesta Grayorum," is stated to have been represented before the queen at Shrovetide. At the Christmas exhibition of St. John's college, Oxford, held in 1607, Mr. Thomas Tucker did not resign his office till Shrove-Tuesday; and the costly masque of which we have spoken as being presented by the four Inns of Court to Charles I., and whose title was "The Triumph of Peace," was exhibited in February of 1633. In Scotland, the rule of the Abbot of Unreason appears to have been still less limited in point of time; and he seems to have held his court and made his processions at any period of the year which pleased him. These processions, it appears, were very usual in the month of May (and here we will take occasion to observe parenthetically, but in connection with our present subject, that the practice at all festival celebrations of selecting some individual to enact a principal and presiding character in the ceremonial is further illustrated by the ancient May King, and by the practice, not yet wholly forgotten, of crowning on the first of that month a Queen of the May. This subject we shall have occasion to treat more fully when we come to speak in some future volume of the beautiful customs of that out-of-doors season).

From what we have stated, it appears probable that the officer who was appointed to preside over the revels so universally observed at Christmas time, extended, as a matter of course, his presidency over all those which—either arising out of them or unconnected therewith—were performed at more advanced periods of the succeeding year; that in fact, the Christmas prince was, without new election, considered as special master of the revels till the recurrence of the season. It is not necessary for us to suppose that the whole of the intervals lying between such stated and remote days of celebration were filled up with festival observances; or that our ancestors, under any calenture of the spirits, could aim at extending Christmas over the larger portion of the year. It is, however, apparent that although the common observances of the season were supposed to fall within the period bounded by the days of the Nativity and the Epiphany, the special pageantries with a view to which the Lords of Misrule were appointed in the more exalted quarters were in years of high festival spread over a much more extended time, and that their potential dignities were in full force, if not in full display, from the eve of All-hallows to the close of Candlemas day. It is stated in Drake's "Shakspeare and his Times," that the festivities of the season, which were appointed for at least twelve days, were frequently extended over a space of six weeks; and our readers know from their own experience that, even in these our days of less prominent and ceremonial rejoicing, the holiday-spirit of the season is by no means to be restrained within the narrower of those limits. The Christmas feeling waits not for Christmas day. The important preparations for so great a festival render this impossible. By the avenues of most of the senses, the heralds of old Father Christmas have long before approached to awake it from its slumber. Signal notes which there is no mistaking, have been played on the visual and olfactory organs for some time past, and the palate itself has had foretastes of that which is about to be. From the day on which his sign has been seen in the heavens, the joyous influences of the star have been felt and the moment the school-boy arrives at his home he is in the midst of Christmas. And if the "coming events" of the season "cast their shadows before," so, amid all its cross-lights it would be strange if there were no reflections flung behind. The merry spirit which has been awakened and suffered to play his antics so long is not to be laid by the exorcism of a word. After so very absolute and unquestioned a sway, it is not to be expected that Momus should abdicate at a moment's notice. Accordingly, we find that, any thing enacted to the contrary notwithstanding, the genial feelings of the time and the festivities springing out of them contrive to maintain their footing throughout the month of January; and Christmas keeps lingering about our homes till he is no longer answered by the young glad voices to whom he has not as yet begun to utter his solemn warnings and expound his sterner morals, and for whom his coming is hitherto connected with few memories of pain. Till the merry urchins have gone back to school there will continue to be willing subjects to the Lord of Misrule.

In Scotland, the Abbot of Unreason was frequently enacted by persons of the highest rank; and James V. is himself said to have concealed his crown beneath the mitre of the merry abbot. As in England, his revels were shared by the mightiest of the land; but they appear to have been of a less inoffensive kind and to have imitated more unrestrainedly the license of the Roman Saturnalia than did the merry-makings of the South. The mummeries of these personages (a faint reflection of which still exists in the Guisars whom we shall have to mention hereafter), if less costly than those of their brethren in England, were not less showy; and though much less quaint, were a great deal more free. "The body-guards of the Abbot of Unreason were all arrayed in gaudy colors bedecked with gold or silver lace, with embroidery and silken scarfs, the fringed ends of which floated in the wind. They wore chains of gold or baser metal gilt and glittering with mock jewels. Their legs were adorned and rendered voluble by links of shining metal hung with many bells of the same material twining from the ankle of their buskins to their silken garters, and each flourished in his hand a rich silk handkerchief brocaded over with flowers. This was the garb of fifty or more youths, who encircled the person of the leader. They were surrounded by ranks, six or more in depth, consisting of tall, brawny, fierce-visaged men covered with crimson or purple velvet bonnets, and nodding plumes of the eagle and the hawk, or branches of pine, yew, oak, fern, boxwood, or flowering heath. Their jerkins were always of a hue that might attract the eye of ladies in the bower or serving-damsels at the washing-green. They had breeches of immense capacity so padded or stuffed as to make each man occupy the space of five in their natural proportions; and in this seeming soft raiment they concealed weapons of defence or offence, with which to arm themselves and the body-guard if occasion called for resistance. To appearance, they had no object but careless sport and glee,—some playing on the Scottish harp, others blowing the bagpipes or beating targets for drums, or jingling bells. Whenever the procession halted they danced, flourishing about the banners of their leader. The exterior bands perhaps represented in dumb show or pantomime the actions of warriors or the wildest buffoonery; and these were followed by crowds who, with all the grimaces and phrases of waggery, solicited money or garniture from the nobles and gentry that came to gaze upon them. Wherever they appeared, multitudes joined them, some for the sake of jollity, and not a few to have their fate predicted by spae-wives, warlocks, and interpreters of dreams, who invariably were found in the train of the Abbot of Unreason."

In England, not only was this merry monarch appointed over the revelries of the great and the opulent, but—as of most of the forms of amusement over which he presided, so of the president himself—we find a rude imitation in the Christmas celebrations of the commonalty. Nor was the practice confined to towns or left exclusively in the hands of corporate or public bodies. The quotation which we have already made from Stubs's "Anatomie of Abuses," refers to a rustic Lord of Misrule; and while the antics which took place under his governance do not seem to have risen much above the performances of the morris-dancers, the gaudiness of the tinsel attire paraded by him and his band forms an excellent burlesque of the more costly finery of their superiors. Nay, the amusements themselves exhibit nearly as much wisdom as those of the court (with less of pretension), and we dare say created a great deal more fun at a far less cost. As to the Scottish practices, our readers will not fail to observe from our last quotation that the lordly Abbot and his train were little better than a set of morris-dancers themselves, and that so much of their practices as was innocent differed nothing from those which Stubs and his brother Puritans deemed so ridiculous in a set of parish revellers. In fact, the Lord of Misrule seems to have set himself up all over the land; and many a village had its master Simon who took care that the sports should not languish for want of that unity of purpose and concentration of mirth to which some directing authority is so essential.

We have already stated, and have made it quite apparent in our descriptions, that the Christmas celebrations of the more exalted classes are not put forward for the consideration of our readers on the ground of any great wisdom in the matter or humor in the manner of those celebrations themselves. But we claim for them serious veneration, in right of the excellence of the spirit in which they originated, and the excellence of the result which they produced. The very extravagance of the court pageantries—their profuse expenditure and grotesque displays—were so many evidences of the hearty reception which was given to the season in the highest places, and so many conspicuous sanctions under which the spirit of unrestrained rejoicing made its appeals in the lowest. This ancient festival of all ranks, consecrated by all religious feelings and all moral influences; this privileged season of the lowly; this Sabbath of the poor man's year,—was recognized by his superiors with high observance and honored by his governors with ceremonious state. The mirth of the humble and uneducated man received no check from the assumption of an unseasonable gravity or ungenerous reserve on the part of those with whom fortune had dealt more kindly, and to whom knowledge had opened her stores. The moral effect of all this was of the most valuable kind. Nothing so much promotes a reciprocal kindliness of feeling as a community of enjoyment; and the bond of good will was thus drawn tighter between those remote classes, whose differences of privilege, of education, and of pursuit, are perpetually operating to loosen it, and threatening to dissolve it altogether. There was a great deal of wisdom in all this; and the result was well worth producing even at the cost of much more folly than our ancestors expended on it. We deny that spectacles and a wig are the inseparable symbols of sapience; and we hold that portion of the world to be greatly mistaken which supposes that wisdom may not occasionally put on the cap and bells, and under that disguise be wisdom still! The ancient custom which made what was called a fool a part of the establishment of princes, and gave him a right in virtue of his bauble to teach many a wise lesson and utter many a wholesome truth—besides its practical utility, contained as excellent a moral and was conceived in as deep a spirit as the still more ancient one of the skeleton at a feast. "Cucullus non facit monachum," says one of those privileged gentry, in the pages of one who, we are sure, could have enacted a Christmas foolery with the most foolish, and yet had "sounded all the depths and shallows" of the human mind, and was himself the wisest of modern men. "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit." There is a long stride from the wisdom of that sneering philosopher who laughed at his fellows to his who on proper occasions can laugh with them; and in spite of all that modern philosophy may say to the contrary, there was in the very extravagances of Coke and Hatton, and other lawyers and statesmen of past times—if they aimed at such a result as that which we have mentioned, and in so far as they contributed thereto—more real wisdom than all which they enunciated in their more solemn moods, or have put upon record in their books of the law.

In the same excellent spirit, too, everything was done that could assist in promoting the same valuable effect; and while the pageantries which were prepared by the court and by other governing bodies furnished a portion of the entertainments by which the populace tasted the season in towns, and sanctioned the rest, care was taken in many ways (of which we have given an example) that the festival should be spread over the country, and provision made for its maintenance in places more secluded and remote. A set of arrangements sprang up which left no man without their influence; and figuratively and literally, the crumbs from the table of the rich man's festival were abundantly enjoyed by the veriest beggar at his gate. The kindly spirit of Boaz was abroad in all the land, and every Ruth had leave to "eat of the bread and dip her morsel in the vinegar." At that great harvest of rejoicing, all men were suffered to glean; and they with whom at most other seasons the world had "dealt very bitterly"—whose names were Mara, and who ate sparingly of the bread of toil—gleaned "even among its sheaves," and no man reproached them. The old English gentleman, like the generous Bethlehemite in the beautiful story, even scattered that the poor might gather, and "commanded his young men saying, . . . 'Let fall also some of the handfuls of purpose for them and leave them, that they may glean them, and rebuke them not.'" And the prayer of many a Naomi went up in answer, "Blessed be he that did take knowledge of thee;" "blessed be he of the Lord!"

Gate of the "Old English Gentleman."—Page 109.

In a word, the blaze of royal and noble celebration was as a great beacon to the land, seen afar off by those who could not share in its warmth or sit under the influence of its immediate inspirations. But it was answered from every hill-top and repeated in every valley of England; and each man flung the Yule log on his own fire at the cheering signal. The hearth, according to Aubrey, at the first introduction of coals, was usually in the middle of the room; and he derives from thence the origin of the saying, "round about our coal fire." But whether the huge fagot crackled and flustered within those merry circles or flared and roared up the ample chimneys,—all social feelings, and all beautiful superstitions and old traditions and local observances awoke at the blaze; and from their thousand hiding-places crept out the customs and ceremonials which crowd this festal period of the year, and of which it is high time that we should proceed to give an account in these pages. The charmed log that (duly lighted with the last year's brand, which, as we learn from Herrick, was essential to its virtue) scared away all evil spirits, attracted all beneficent ones. The 'squire sat in the midst of his tenants as a patriarch might amid his family, and appears to have had no less reverence, though he compounded the wassail-bowl with his own hands and shared it with the meanest of his dependants. The little book from which we have more than once quoted by the title of "Round about our Coal-fire," furnishes us with an example of this reverence too ludicrous to be omitted. Its writer tells us that if the 'squire had occasion to ask one of his neighbors what o'clock it was, he received for answer a profound bow and an assurance that it was what o'clock his worship pleased,—an answer, no doubt, indicative of profound respect, but not calculated to convey much useful information to the inquirer. In fine, however, while the glad spirit of the season covered the land, hospitality and harmony were everywhere a portion of that spirit. The light of a common festival shone for once upon the palace and the cottage, and the chain of a universal sympathy descended unbroken through all ranks, from the prince to the peasant and the beggar.

"The damsel donned her kirtle sheen;
The hall was dress'd with holly green;
Forth to the wood did merry men go,
To gather in the misletoe.
Then opened wide the baron's hall,
To vassall, tenant, serf and all;
Power laid his rod of rule aside,
And ceremony doffed his pride.
The heir, with roses in his shoes,
Those nights might village partner chuse;
The lord, underogating, share
The vulgar game of 'post-and-pair.'
. . . .
The fire with well-dried logs supplied,
Went roaring up the chimney wide;
The huge hall-table's oaken face,
Scrubbed till it shone, the time to grace,
Bore then upon its massive board
No mark to part the 'squire and lord.
Then was brought in the lusty brawn,
By old blue-coated serving-man;
Then the grim boar's head frowned on high,
Crested with bays and rosemary.
Well can the green-garbed ranger tell,
How, when, and where, the monster fell;
What dogs, before his death, he tore,
And all the batings of the boar.
The wassail round, in good brown bowls,
Garnished with ribbons, blithely trowls.
There the huge sirloin reeked; hard by
Plumb-porridge stood, and Christmas pye;
Nor failed old Scotland to produce,
At such high-tide, her savoury goose.
Then came the merry masquers in,
And carols roared with blithesome din;
If unmelodious was the song,
It was a hearty note, and strong.
Who lists may, in their mumming, see
Traces of ancient mystery;
White shirts supplied the masquerade,
And smutted cheeks the visors made:
But, Oh! what masquers, richly dight,
Can boast of bosoms half so light?
England was merry England, when
Old Christmas brought his sports again.
'Twas Christmas broached the mightiest ale,
'Twas Christmas told the merriest tale,
A Christmas gambol oft would cheer
The poor man's heart through half the year."

The ceremonies and superstitions and sports of the Christmas season are not only various in various places, but have varied from time to time in the same. Those of them which have their root in the festival itself are for the most part common to all, and have dragged out a lingering existence even to our times. But there are many which, springing from other sources, have placed themselves under its protection or, naturally enough, sought to associate themselves with merry spirits like their own. Old Father Christmas has had a great many children in his time, some of whom he has survived; and not only so, but in addition to his own lawful offspring the generous old man has taken under his patronage and adopted into his family many who have no legitimate claim to that distinction by any of the wives to whom he has been united,—neither by the Roman lady, his lady of the Celtic family, nor her whom he took to his bosom and converted from the idolatry of Thor. His family appears to have been generally far too numerous to be entertained at one time in the same establishment, or indeed by the same community, and to have rarely travelled therefore in a body.

In Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, to which we have already alluded, the old gentleman is introduced "attired in round hose, long stockings, a close doublet, a high-crowned hat with a broach, a long thin beard, a truncheon, little ruffs, white shoes, his scarfs and garters tied cross, and his drum beaten before him," and is accompanied by the following members of his fine family: Miss-rule, Caroll, Minced-pie, Gamboll, Post-and-Pair (since dead), New Year's Gift, Mumming, Wassail, Offering, and Baby-Cake,—or Baby-Cocke, as we find him elsewhere called, but who we fear is dead too, unless he may have changed his name, for we still find one of the family bearing some resemblance to the description of him given by Ben Jonson.

In the frontispiece to this volume the artist has represented the old man like another magician, summoning his spirits from the four winds for a general muster; and we hope that the greater part of them will obey his conjuration. The purpose, we believe, is to take a review of their condition and see if something cannot be done to amend their prospects,—in which it is our purpose to assist him. Already some of the children have appeared on the stage; and the rest, we have no doubt, are advancing in all directions. We are glad to see amongst the foremost, as he ought to be, Roast Beef,—that English "champion bold" who has driven the invader hunger from the land in many a well-fought fray, and for his doughty deeds was created a knight banneret on one of his own gallant fields so long ago as King Charles's time. We suppose he is the same worthy who, in the Romish calendar, appears canonized by the title of Saint George, where his great adversary Famine is represented under the figure of a dragon. Still following Roast Beef, as he has done for many a long year, we perceive his faithful 'squire (bottle-holder if you will) Plum Pudding, with his rich round face and rosemary cockade. He is a blackamoor, and derives his extraction from the spice lands. His Oriental properties have however received an English education and taken an English form, and he has long ago been adopted into the family of Father Christmas. In his younger days his name was "Plumb-Porridge": but since he grew up to be the substantial man he is, it has been changed into the one he now bears, as indicative of greater consistency and strength. His master treats him like a brother; and he has, in return, done good service against the enemy in many a hard-fought field, cutting off all straggling detachments or flying parties from the main body, which the great champion had previously routed. Both these individuals, we think, are looking as vigorous as they can ever have done in their lives, and offer in their well-maintained and portly personages a strong presumption that they at least have at no time ceased to be favorite guests at the festivals of the land.

Near them stands, we rejoice to see, their favorite sister Wassail. She was of a slender figure in Ben Jonson's day, and is so still. If the garb in which she appears has a somewhat antiquated appearance, there is a play of the lip and a twinkle of the eye which prove that the glowing and joyous spirit which made our ancestors so merry "ages long ago," and helped them out with so many a pleasant fancy and quaint device, is not a day older than it was in the time of King Arthur. How should she grow old who bathes in such a bowl? It is her fount of perpetual youth! Why, even mortal hearts grow younger, and mortal spirits lighter, as they taste of its charmed waters. There it is, with its floating apples and hovering inspirations! We see too, that the "tricksy spirit," whose head bears it (and that is more than every head could do) has lost none of his gambols, and that he is still on the best of terms with the Turkey who has been his playfellow at these holiday-times for so many years. The latter, we suppose, has just come up from Norfolk, where Father Christmas puts him to school; and the meeting on both sides seems to be of the most satisfactory kind.

Mumming also, we see, has obeyed the summons, although he looks as if he had come from a long distance and did not go about much now. We fancy he has become something of a student. Misrule too, we believe, has lost a good deal of his mercurial spirit, and finds his principal resource in old books. He has come to the muster, however, with a very long "feather in his cap," as if he considered the present summons portentous of good fortune. He looks as if he were not altogether without hopes of taking office again. We observe with great satisfaction, that the Lord of Twelfth Night has survived the revolutions which have been fatal to the King of the Cockneys and so many of his royal brethren; and that he is still "every inch a king." Yonder he comes under a state-canopy of cake, and wearing yet his ancient crown. The lady whom we see advancing in the distance we take to be Saint Distaff. She used to be a sad romp; but her merriest days we fear are over, for she is looking very like an old maid. Not far behind her we fancy we can hear the clear voice of Caroll singing as he comes along; and if our ears do not deceive us, the Waits are coming up in another direction. The children are dropping in on all sides.

But what is he that looks down from yonder pedestal in the back-ground upon the merry muster, with a double face? And why, while the holly and the mistletoe mingle with the white tresses that hang over the brow of the one, is the other hidden by a veil? The face on which we gaze is the face of an old man, and a not uncheerful old man,—a face marked by many a scar, by the channels of tears that have been dried up and the deep traces of sorrows past away. Yet does it look placidly down from beneath its crown of evergreens on the joyous crew who are assembled at the voice of Christmas. But what aspect hath that other face which no man can see? Why doth our flesh creep and the blood curdle in our veins as we gaze? What awful mystery doth that dark curtain hide? What may be written on that covered brow, that the old man dare not lift the veil and show it to those laughing children? Much, much, much that might spoil the revels. Much that man might not know and yet bear to abide. That twin face is Janus, he who shuts the gates upon the old year and opens those of the new, he who looks into the past and into the future, and catches the reflections of both, and has the tales of each written on his respective brows. For the past, it is known and has been suffered; and even at a season like this we can pause to retrace the story of its joys and of its sorrows as they are graven on that open forehead,—and from that retrospect, glancing to the future for hope, can still turn to the present for enjoyment. But oh, that veil and its solemn enigmas! On that other brow may be written some secret which, putting out the light of hope, should add the darkness of the future to the darkness of the past, until, amid the gloom before and the gloom behind, the festal lamps of the season, looked on by eyes dim with our own tears, should show as sad as tapers lighted up in the chamber of the dead. God in mercy keep down that veil!

"Such foresight who on earth would crave,
Where knowledge is not power to save?"

It will be our business to introduce to our readers each of the children of old Christmas as they come up in obedience to the summons of their father, reserving to ourselves the right of settling the order of their precedence; and we will endeavor to give some account of the part which each played of old in the revelries of the season peculiarly their own, and of the sad changes which time has made in the natural constitutions, or animal spirits, of some of them. Preparatory, however, to this we must endeavor to give a rapid glance at the causes which contributed to the decay of a festival so ancient and universal and uproarious as that which we have described, and brought into the old man's family that disease to which some of them have already fallen victims, and which threatens others with an untimely extinction.

We have already shown that so early as the reign of Elizabeth the Puritans had begun to lift up their testimony against the pageantries of the Christmas-tide; and the Lord of Misrule, even in that day of his potential ascendancy, was described as little better than the great Enemy of Souls himself. Our friend Stubs (whose denunciations were directed against all amusements which from long usage and established repetition had assumed anything like a form of ceremonial, and who is quite as angry with those who "goe some to the woodes and groves and some to the hilles and mountaines . . . where they spende all the night in pastymes, and in the mornyng they return bringing with them birch bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assemblies withall," in the sweet month of May, as he could possibly be with the Christmas revellers, although the very language in which he is obliged to state the charge against the former was enough to tempt people out "a Maying," and might almost have converted himself) assures the reader of his "Anatomie" that all who contribute "to the maintenaunce of these execrable pastymes" do neither more nor less than "offer sacrifice to the devill and Sathanas." It is probable, however, that the people of those days, who were a right loyal people and freely acknowledged the claim of their sovereigns to an absolute disposition of all their temporalities (any of the common or statute laws of the land notwithstanding), considered it a part of their loyalty to be damned in company with their sovereigns, too, and resolved that so long as these iniquities obtained the royal patronage it was of their allegiance to place themselves in the same category of responsibility. Or perhaps their notion of regal prerogative, which extended so far as to admit its right to mould the national law at its good pleasure, might go the further length of ascribing to it a controlling power over the moral statutes of right and wrong, and of pleading its sanction against the menaces of Master Stubs. Or it may be that Master Stubs had failed to convince them that they were wrong, even without an appeal to the royal dispensation. Certain it is that, in spite of all that Master Stubs and his brethren could say, the sway of the Lord of Misrule, and the revels of his court continued to flourish with increasing splendor during this reign, and, as we have seen, lost no portion of their magnificence during the two next, although in that time had arisen the great champion of the Puritans, Prynne, and against them and their practices had been directed whole volumes of vituperation, and denounced large vials of wrath.

In Scotland, however, where the reformation took a sterner tone than in the southern kingdom, and where, as we have said, the irregularities committed under cover of the Christmas and other ceremonials laid them more justly open to its censure, the effect of this outcry was earlier and far more sensibly felt; and even so early as the reign of Queen Mary an act passed the Scottish Parliament whereby the Abbot of Unreason and all his "merrie disports" were suppressed.

In England, it is true that, according to Sandys, an order of the common council had issued as early as the beginning of our Mary's reign prohibiting the Lord Mayor or Sheriffs from entertaining a Lord of Misrule in any of their houses; but this appears to have been merely on financial grounds, with a view of reducing the corporation expenditure, and to have extended no further.

It was not, however, until after the breaking out of the Civil War that the persecution of the Puritans (who had long and zealously labored not only to resolve the various ceremonials of the season into their pagan elements, but even to prove that the celebration of the Nativity at all was in itself idolatrous) succeeded to any extent in producing that result which the war itself and the consequent disorganization of society must in a great measure have effected even without the aid of a fanatical outcry. In the very first year of that armed struggle the earliest successful blow was struck against the festivities with which it had been usual to celebrate this period of the year, in certain ordinances which were issued for suppressing the performance of plays and other diversions; and in the following year some of the shops in London were for the first time opened on Christmas day, in obedience to the feelings which connected any observance of it with the spirit of popery. By the year 1647 the Puritans had so far prevailed that in various places the parish officers were subjected to penalties for encouraging the decking of churches and permitting divine service to be performed therein on Christmas morning; and in the same year the observance of the festival itself, with that of other holidays, was formally abolished by the two branches of the legislature.

It was found impossible, however, by all these united means, to eradicate the Christmas spirit from the land; and many of its customs and festivities continued to be observed, not only in obscure places, but even in towns, in spite of prohibition and in spite of the disarrangement of social ties. The contest between the Puritan spirit and the ancient spirit of celebration led to many contests; and we have an account—in a little book of which we have seen a copy in the British Museum, entitled "Canterbury Christmas, or a True Relation of the Insurrection in Canterbury"—of the disturbances which ensued in that city upon the Mayor's proclamation, issued in consequence of that Parliamentary prohibition at the Christmas which followed. This said proclamation, it appears, which was made by the city crier, was to the effect "that Christmas day and all other superstitious festivals should be put downe and that a market should be kept upon Christmas day." This order, it goes on to state, was "very ill taken by the country," the people of which neglected to bring their provisions into the town, and gave other tokens of their displeasure of a less negative kind. For, a few of the shopkeepers in the city, "to the number of twelve at the most," having ventured to open their shops in defiance of the general feeling, "they were commanded by the multitude to shut up again; but refusing to obey, their ware was thrown up and down and they at last forced to shut in."

Nor were the revilings of the Puritans against the lovers of Christmas observances suffered to remain unanswered. Many a squib was directed against the Roundheads; and the popular regret for the suppression of their high festival was skilfully appealed to by Royalist politicians and favorers of the ancient religion. The connection between the new condition of things in Church and State and the extinction of all the merriment of the land was carefully suggested in publications that stole out in spite of penalties and were read in defiance of prohibitions. As an example, that curious little tract from which we have more than once quoted under the title of "An Hue and Cry after Christmas," bears the date of 1645; and we shall best give our readers an idea of its character by setting out that title at length, as the same exhibits a tolerable abstract of its contents. It runs thus: "The arraignment, conviction, and imprisoning of Christmas on St. Thomas day last, and how he broke out of prison in the holidayes and got away, onely left his hoary hair and gray beard sticking between two iron bars of a window. With an Hue and Cry after Christmas, and a letter from Mr. Woodcock, a fellow in Oxford, to a malignant lady in London. And divers passages between the lady and the cryer about Old Christmas; and what shift he was fain to make to save his life, and great stir to fetch him back again. Printed by Simon Minc'd Pye for Cissely Plum-Porridge, and are to be sold by Ralph Fidler Chandler at the signe of the Pack of Cards in Mustard Alley in Brawn Street." Besides the allusions contained in the latter part of this title to some of the good things that follow in the old man's train, great pains are taken by the "cryer" in describing him, and by the lady in mourning for him, to allude to many of the cheerful attributes that made him dear to the people. His great antiquity and portly appearance are likewise insisted upon. "For age this hoarie-headed man was of great yeares, and as white as snow. He entered the Romish Kallendar, time out of mind, as old or very neer as Father Mathusalem was,—one that looked fresh in the Bishops' time, though their fall made him pine away ever since. He was full and fat as any divine doctor on them all; he looked under the consecrated lawne sleeves as big as Bul-beefe,—just like Bacchus upon a tunne of wine, when the grapes hang shaking about his eares; but since the Catholike liquor is taken from him he is much wasted, so that he hath looked very thin and ill of late." "The poor," says the "cryer" to the lady, "are sory for" his departure; "for they go to every door a-begging, as they were wont to do (good Mrs., Somewhat against this good time); but Time was transformed, Away, be gone; here is not for you." The lady, however, declares that she for one will not be deterred from welcoming old Christmas. "No, no!" says she; "bid him come by night over the Thames, and we will have a back-door open to let him in;" and ends by anticipating better prospects for him another year.

And by many a back-door was the old man let in to many a fireside during the heaviest times of all that persecution and disgrace. On the establishment of the Commonwealth, when the more settled state of things removed some of the causes which had opposed themselves to his due reception, the contests of opposition between the revived spirit of festival and the increased sectarian austerity became more conspicuous. There is an order of the Parliament in 1652 again prohibiting the observance of Christmas day, which proves that the practice had revived; and there are examples of the military having been employed to disperse congregations assembled for that purpose. In the "Vindication of Christmas," published about this time, the old gentleman, after complaining bitterly of the manner in which he was "used in the city, and wandering into the country up and down from house to house, found small comfort in any," asserts his determination not to be so repulsed: "Welcome or not welcome," says he, "I am come." In a periodical publication of that day entitled "Mercurius Democritus, or a True and Perfect Nocturnall, communicating many strange wonders out of the World in the Moon, etc.," the public are encouraged to keep Christmas, and promised better days. No. 37 contains some verses to that effect, of which the following are the first two:—

"Old Christmass now is come to town,
Though few do him regard;
He laughs to see them going down,
That have put down his Lord.
"Cheer up, sad heart, crown Christmass bowls,
Banish dull grief and sorrow;
Though you want cloaths, you have rich souls,
The sun may shine to-morrow."

And again in No. 38:—

"A gallant crew, stir up the fire,
The other winter tale,
Welcome, Christmass, 'tis our desire
To give thee more spic'd ale."

On the return of the royal family to England, the court celebrations of Christmas were revived both there and at the Inns of Court; and the Lord of Misrule came again into office. We have allusions to the one and the other in the writings of Pepys and of Evelyn. The nobles and wealthy gentry, too, once more at their country-seats, took under their protection such of the ancient observances as had survived the persecution, and from time to time stole out of their hiding-places under the encouragement of the new order of things. But in none of its ancient haunts did the festival ever again recover its splendor of old. The condition of Charles's exchequer, and the many charges upon it,—arising as well out of the services of his adherents as from his own dissolute life,—left him little chance of imitating the lavish appointments of the court pageantries in the days of Elizabeth and James; and the troubles out of which the nation had emerged had made changes as well in the face of the country as in the condition and character of society, alike opposed to anything like a general and complete revival of the merry doings of yore. In the country, estates had passed into new hands, and the immemorial ties between the ancient families and the tenants of the soil had been rudely severed. Many of the old establishments in which these celebrations had been most zealously observed, were finally broken up; and friends who had met together from childhood around the Christmas fire, and pledged each other year by year in the wassail-bowl, were scattered by the chances of war. But out of this disturbance of the old localities and disruption of the ancient ties of the land, a result still more fatal to these old observances had arisen, promoted besides by the dissipation of manners which the restored monarch had introduced into the country. Men rooted out from their ancestral possessions and looking to a licentious king for compensation, became hangers-on about the court; and others who had no such excuse, seduced by their example and enamoured of the gayeties of the metropolis and the profligacies of Whitehall, abandoned the shelter of the old trees beneath whose shade their fathers had fostered the sanctities of life, and from "country gentlemen" became "men about town." The evils of this practice, at which we have before hinted as one of those to which the decay of rural customs is mainly owing, began to be early felt, and form the topic of frequent complaint and the subject of many of the popular ballads of that day. The song of the "Old and Young Courtier" was written for the purpose of contrasting the good old manners with those of Charles's time; and the effects of the change upon the Christmas hospitalities has due and particular notice therein. We extract it from the Percy collection for our readers, as appropriate to our subject and a sample of the ballads of the time:—

THE OLD AND YOUNG COURTIER.

An old song made by an aged old pate,
Of an old worshipful gentleman who had a greate estate,
That kept a brave old house at a bountifull rate,
And an old porter to relieve the poor at his gate;
Like an old courtier of the Queen's,
And the Queen's old courtier.
With an old lady, whose anger one word assuages;
They every quarter paid their old servants their wages,
And never knew what belong'd to coachmen, footmen, nor pages,
But kept twenty old fellows with blue coats and badges;
Like an old courtier, etc.
With an old study fill'd full of learned old books,
With an old reverend chaplain,—you might know him by his looks,—
With an old buttery hatch worn quite off the hooks,
And an old kitchen, that maintained half-a-dozen old cooks;
Like an old courtier, etc.
With an old hall, hung about with pikes, guns, and bows,
With old swords, and bucklers that had borne many shrewde blows,
And an old frize coat, to cover his worship's trunk hose,
And a cup of old sherry to comfort his copper nose;
Like an old courtier, etc.
With a good old fashion, when Christmasse was come,
To call in all his old neighbours with bagpipe and drum,
With good chear enough to furnish every old room,
And old liquor able to make a cat speak, and man dumb;
Like an old courtier, etc.
With an old falconer, huntsman, and a kennel of hounds,
That never hawked, nor hunted, but in his own grounds,
Who, like a wise man, kept himself within his own bounds,
And when he dyed gave every child a thousand good pounds;
Like an old courtier, etc.
But to his eldest son his house and land he assign'd,
Charging him in his will to keep the old bountifull mind,
To be good to his old tenants, and to his neighbours be kind;
But in the ensuing ditty you shall hear how he was inclined;
Like a young courtier, etc.
Like a flourishing young gallant, newly come to his land,
Who keeps a brace of painted madams at his command,
And takes up a thousand pound upon his father's land,
And gets drunk in a tavern, till he can neither go nor stand;
Like a young courtier, etc.
With a new-fangled lady, that is dandy, nice, and spare,
Who never knew what belong'd to good housekeeping or care,
Who buys gaudy-color'd fans to play with wanton air,
And seven or eight different dressings of other women's hair;
Like a young courtier, etc.
With a new-fashion'd hall, built where the old one stood,
Hung round with new pictures, that do the poor no good,
With a fine marble chimney, wherein burns neither coal nor wood,
And a new smooth shovelboard, whereon no victuals ne'er stood;
Like a young courtier, etc.
With a new study, stuff'd full of pamphlets and plays,
And a new chaplain, that swears faster than he prays,
With a new buttery-hatch that opens once in four or five days,
And a new French cook, to devise fine kickshaws and toys;
Like a young courtier, etc.
With a new fashion, when Christmasse is drawing on,
On a new journey to London straight we all must begone,
And leave none to keep house, but our new porter John,
Who relieves the poor with a thump on the back with a stone;
Like a young courtier, etc.
With a new gentleman usher, whose carriage is compleat,
With a new coachman, footmen, and pages to carry up the meat,
With a waiting-gentlewoman, whose dressing is very neat,
Who when her lady has din'd, lets the servants not eat;
Like a young courtier, etc.
With new titles of honour bought with his father's old gold,
For which sundry of his ancestors' old manors are sold;
And this is the course most of our new gallants hold,
Which makes that good housekeeping is now grown so cold,
Among the young courtiers of the King,
Or the King's young courtiers.

In a word, the old English feeling seemed nearly extinct for a time; and the ancient customs which had connected themselves therewith, one by one fell more or less into disuse. The chain of universal sympathy and general observance, which had long kept the festival together in all its parts, was broken; and the parts fell asunder, and were by degrees lost or overlooked. Let no man say that this is scarcely worth lamenting! Let none imagine that, in the decay of customs useless or insignificant in themselves, there is little to regret! "The affections," says Sterne, "when they are busy that way, will build their structures, were it but on the paring of a nail;" and there is no practice of long observance and ancient veneration—whether among nations or individuals—round which the affections have not in some degree twined themselves, and which are not therefore useful as supports and remembrancers to those affections. There are few of the consequences springing from civil war more lamentable than the disturbance which it gives to the social arrangements, were it but to the meanest of them. It is impossible that customs long identified with the feelings should perish without those feelings (though from their own eternal principle they will ultimately revive and find new modes of action) suffering some temporary injury. It was a beautiful assertion of Dr. Johnson that his feelings would be outraged by seeing an old post rooted up from before his door which he had been used to look at all his life,—even though it might be an incumbrance there. How much more would he have grieved over the removal of a village Maypole, with all its merry memories and all its ancient reverence!

The Christmas festival has languished from those days to this, but never has been, and never will be extinct. The stately forms of its celebration in high places have long since (and, in all probability, forever) passed away. The sole and homely representative of the gorgeous Christmas prince is the mock-monarch of the Epiphany,—the laureate of our times, with his nominal duties, in the last faint shadow of the court bards and masque-makers of yore; and the few lingering remains of the important duties once confided to the master of the royal revels are silently and unostentatiously performed in the office of the Lord Chamberlain of to-day. But the spirit of the season yet survives, and, for reasons which we shall proceed to point out, must survive. True, the uproarious merriment, the loud voice which it sent of old throughout the land, have ceased; and while the ancient sports and ceremonies are widely scattered, many of them have retreated into obscure places, and some perhaps are lost. Still, however, this period of commemoration is everywhere a merry time; and we believe, as we have already said, that most of the children of Father Christmas are yet wandering up and down in one place or another of the land. We call upon all those of our readers who know anything of the "old, old, very old, gray-bearded gentleman" or his family to aid us in our search after them; and with their good help we will endeavor to restore them to some portion of their ancient honors in England.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The evergreen holly is meant, a bearing peculiarly appropriate to the lord of Christmas sports.

[3] His motto or impress.

FEELINGS OF THE SEASON.

Family Congratulation.—Page 134.

Of all the festivals which crowd the Christian calendar there is none that exercises an influence so strong and universal as that of Christmas; and those varied superstitions, and quaint customs, and joyous observances, which once abounded throughout the rural districts of England, are at no period of the year so thickly congregated or so strongly marked as at this season of unrestrained festivity and extended celebration. The reasons for this are various and very obvious. In the case of a single celebration, which has to support itself by its own solitary influence long, perchance, after the feeling in which it originated has ceased to operate, whose significance is perhaps dimly and more dimly perceived (through the obscurity of a distance, year after year receding further into shadow) by its own unaided and unreflected light, the chances are many that the annually increasing neglect into which its observance is likely to fall, shall finally consign it to an entire obliteration. But a cluster of festivals, standing in a proximate order of succession, at once throwing light upon each other and illustrated by a varied and numerous host of customs, traditions, and ceremonies,—of which, as in a similar cluster of stars, the occasional obscuration of any one or more would not prevent their memory being suggested and their place distinctly indicated by the others,—present greatly multiplied probabilities against their existence being ever entirely forgotten or their observation wholly discontinued. The arrangement by which a series of celebrations—beautiful in themselves, and connected with the paramount event in which are laid the foundations of our religion—are made to fall at a period otherwise of very solemn import (from its being assumed as the close of the larger of those revolutions of time into which man measures out the span of his transitory existence), and the chance which has brought down to the same point and thrown together the traces of customs and superstitions both of a sacred and secular character, uniting with the crowd of Catholic observances, off-shoots from the ancient Saturnalia, remains of old Druidical rites, and glimpses into the mythology of the Northern nations, have written a series of hieroglyphics upon that place of the calendar, which, if they cannot be deciphered in every part, are still, from their number and juxtaposition, never likely to be overlooked.

But though these causes are offered as accounting for the preservation of many customs which, without them, would long since have passed into oblivion, which exist by virtue of the position they occupy on the calendar, yet the more conspicuous celebrations of this season need no such aid and no such arguments. Nothing can be added to their intrinsic interest, and they are too closely connected with the solemn warnings of man's temporal destiny, and linked with the story of his eternal hopes, ever to lose any portion of that influence, a share of which (without thereby losing, as light is communicated without diminution) they throw over all the other celebrations that take shelter under their wing.

In every way, and by many a tributary stream, are the holy and beneficent sentiments which belong to the period increased and refreshed. Beautiful feelings, too apt to fade within the heart of man amid the chilling influences of worldly pursuit, steal out beneath the sweet religious warmth of the season, and the pure and holy amongst the hopes of earth assemble, to place themselves under the protection of that eternal hope whose promise is now, as it were, yearly renewed. Amid the echoes of that song which proclaimed peace on earth and good-will towards men, making no exclusions, and dividing them into no classes, rises up a dormant sense of universal brotherhood in the heart; and something like a distribution of the good things of the earth is suggested in favor of those, destitute here, who are proclaimed as joint participators in the treasure thus announced from heaven. At no other period of the year are the feeling of a universal benevolence and the sense of a common Adam so widely awakened; at no season is the predominant spirit of selfishness so effectually rebuked; never are the circles of love so largely widened.

The very presence of a lengthened festivity—for festivity can never be solitary—would, apart from its sacred causes, promote these wholesome effects. The extended space of time over which this festival is spread, the protracted holiday which it creates, points it out for the gathering together of distant friends whom the passing nature of an occasional and single celebration would fail to collect from their scattered places of the world. By this wise and beautiful arrangement the spell of home is still made to cast its sweet and holy influence along the sterile regions as along the bright places of after-life, and from the dark valleys and the sunny hilltops of the world to call back alike the spoiled of fortune and the tired and travel-stained to refresh themselves again and again at the fountain of their calmer hopes and purer feelings. A wise and beautiful arrangement this would be, in whatever season of the year it might be placed! Wise and beautiful is any institution which sets up a rallying-place for the early affections and re-awakens the sacred sympathies of youth,—which, from that well-head of purity and peace, sends forth, as it were, a little river of living waters, to flow with revivifying freshness and soothing murmur along the wastes and wildernesses of after years; which makes of that spring-time of the heart a reservoir of balm, to which in hours of sorrow it can return for joy, and in years of guilt for regeneration; and which, like the widow's cruse of oil, wasteth not in all the ages of the mind's dearth. But how greatly are the wisdom and the beauty of this arrangement increased by the sacred season at which it has been placed! Under the sanctions of religion the covenants of the heart are renewed. Upon the altars of our faith the lamps of the spirit are rekindled. The loves of earth seem to have met together at the sound of the "glad tidings" of the season, to refresh themselves for the heaven which those tidings proclaim. From "Abana and Pharpar" and all the "rivers of Damascus" the affections are returned to bathe in "the waters of Israel." In many a peaceful spot and lowly home,

"Wi' joy unfeigned, brothers and sisters meet,
An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers;"

and as the long-separated look once more into the "sweet, familiar faces," and listen in that restored companionship to strains such as "once did sweet in Zion glide" (even as they listened long ago, and, it may be, with some who are gone from them for ever),—

"Hope springs, 'exulting on triumphant wing'
That thus they all shall meet in future days,
There ever bask in uncreated rays,
No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear,
Together hymning their Creator's praise
In such society, yet still more dear,
While ceaseless time moves round in an eternal sphere."

To this tone of feeling the services of the Church have for some time previously been gradually adapting the mind. During the whole period of Advent a course of moral and religious preparation has been going on, and a state of expectation is by degrees excited, not unlike that with which the Jews were waiting for the Messiah, of old. There is, as it were, a sort of watching for the great event, a questioning where Christ shall be born, and an earnest looking out for his star in the East that we may "come to worship him." The feeling awakened by the whole series of these services—unlike that suggested by some of those which commemorate other portions of the same sacred story—is entirely a joyous one. The lowly manner of the Saviour's coming, the exceeding humiliation of his appointments, the dangers which beset his infancy, and his instant rejection by those to whom he came, are all forgotten in the fact of his coming itself, in the feeling of a mighty triumph and the sense of a great deliverance, or only so far remembered as to temper the triumph and give a character of tenderness to the joy. "The services of the Church about this season," says Washington Irving, "are extremely tender and inspiring. They dwell on the beautiful story of the origin of our faith, and the pastoral scenes that accompanied its announcement. They gradually increase in fervor and pathos during the season of Advent, until they break forth in full jubilee on the morning that brought 'peace and good-will to men.'" "I do not know," he adds, "a grander effect of music on the moral feelings than to hear the full choir and the pealing organ performing a Christmas anthem in a cathedral, and filling every part of the vast pile with triumphant harmony." We confess that, for ourselves, very sensible as we are to the grander and more complicated effects of harmony, we have, on the occasion in question, been more touched by the simple song of rejoicing as it rang in its unaided sweetness through the aisles of some village church. We have felt ourselves more emphatically reminded, amid pastoral scenes and primitive choirs, of the music of congratulation which was uttered through the clear air to men "abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night,"—

"The hallowed anthem sent to hail
Bethlehem's shepherds in the lonely vale
When Jordan hushed his waves, and midnight still
Watched on the holy towers of Zion's hill."

Nor is the religious feeling which belongs to this season suffered to subside with the great event of the nativity itself. The incidents of striking interest which immediately followed the birth of the Messiah, the persecutions which were directed against his life, and the starry writing of God in the sky, which, amid the rejection of "his own," drew to him witnesses from afar, all contribute to keep alive the sense of a sacred celebration to the end of the period usually devoted to social festivity, and send a wholesome current of religious feeling through the entire season, to temper its extravagancies and regulate its mirth. The worship of the shepherds; the lamentation in Rama, and the weeping of Rachel for the murder of the innocents; the miraculous escape from that massacre of the Saviour, and the flight of his parents into Egypt with the rescued child; and the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles, which is indeed the day of his nativity to us,—are all commemorated in the Christian Church, and illustrated by the series of services distributed through that period of religious worship which bears the general title of Christmas.

There is, too, in the lengthened duration of this festival a direct cause of that joyous and holiday spirit which, for the most part (after the first tenderness of meeting has passed away, and a few tears perhaps been given, as the muster-roll is perused, to those who answer to their names no more), pervades all whom that same duration has tempted to assemble.

Regrets there will no doubt, in most cases, be, for these distant and periodical gatherings together of families but show more prominently the blanks which the long intervals have created; this putting on anew, as it were, of the garment of love but exposes the rents which time has made since it was last worn; this renewing of the chain of our attachments but displays the links that are broken! The Sybil has come round again, as year by year she comes, with her books of the affections; but new leaves have been torn away. "No man," says Shakspeare, "ever bathed twice in the same river;" and the home-Jordan to which the observers of the Christmas festival come yearly back to wash away the leprous spots contracted in the world never presents to them again the identical waters in which last they sported, though it be Jordan still. Amid these jubilant harmonies of the heart there will be parts unfilled up, voices wanting. "This young gentlewoman," says the Countess of Rousillon to Lafeu, "had a father (oh that had! how sad a passage 'tis!)." And surely with such changes as are implied in that past tense some of the notes of life's early music are silenced forever. "Would they were with us still!" says the old ballad; and in the first hour of these reunions many and many a time is the wish echoed in something like the words! And if these celebrations have been too long disused, and the wanderer comes rarely back to the birthplace of the affections, the feeling of sadness may be too strong for the joyous influences of the season,—

"A change" he may find "there, and many a change!
Faces and footsteps and all things strange!
Gone are the heads of the silvery hair,
And the young that were, have a brow of care,
And the place is hushed where the children played!"

till, amid the bitter contrasts of the past with the present, and thoughts of "the loved, the lost, the distant, and the dead," something like

"A pall,
And a gloom o'ershadowing the banquet-hall,
And a mark on the floor as of life-drops spilt,"

may spoil his ear for the voice of mirth, and darken all the revels of the merry Christmas-tide.

To few assemblages of men is it given to come together in the scene of ancient memories without having to "remember such things were that were most precious." But excepting in those cases in which the suffering is extreme or the sorrow immediate, after a few hours given to a wholesome and perhaps mournful retrospect, the mind readjusts itself to the tone of the time, and men for the most part seem to understand that they are met for the purpose of being as merry as it is in their natures to be. And to the attainment of this right joyous frame of mind we have already said that a sense of the duration of the festival period greatly contributes. In the case of a single holiday the mind has scarcely time to take the appropriate tone before the period of celebration has passed away; and a sense of its transitoriness tends often to prevent the effort being made with that heartiness which helps to insure success.

But when the holiday of to-day terminates only that it may make way for the holiday of to-morrow, and gladness has an ancient charter in virtue of which it claims dominion over a series of days so extended that the happy school-boy (and some who are quite as happy as school-boys, and as merry too) cannot see the end of them for the blaze of joyous things that lies between,—then does the heart surrender itself confidently to the genius of the time, and lets loose a host of cheerful and kindly feelings, which it knows will not be suddenly thrown back upon it, and heaps up pleasant devices upon the glowing flame of mirth, as we heap up logs on the roaring fire, laying them decently aside at the end of the season, as we lay aside the burned-out brand of the Yule log to re-kindle the Christmas fire and the Christmas feeling of another year.

But there is yet another reason, in aid of those which we have enumerated, accounting for an observance of the Christmas festivities more universal, and a preservation of its traditions more accurate and entire, than are bestowed in England upon the festival customs of any other period of the year. This reason, which might not at first view seem so favorable to that end as in truth it is, is to be found in the outward and natural aspects of the season. We have been watching the year through the period of its decline, are arrived at the dreary season of its old age, and stand near the edge of its grave. We have seen the rich sunshines and sweet but mournful twilights of autumn, with their solemn inspirations, give place to the short days and gloomy evenings which usher in the coming solstice. One by one the fair faces of the flowers have departed from us, and the sweet murmuring of "shallow rivers, by whose falls melodious birds sing madrigals," has been exchanged for the harsh voice of the swollen torrent and the dreary music of winds that "rave through the naked tree." Through many a chilling sign of "weary winter comin' fast," we have reached the

"Last of the months, severest of them all.
. . . .
For lo! the fiery horses of the Sun
Through the twelve signs their rapid course have run;
Time, like a serpent, bites his forked tail,
And Winter, on a goat, bestrides the gale;
Rough blows the North-wind near Arcturus' star,
And sweeps, unreined, across the polar bar."

The halcyon days, which sometimes extend their southern influence even to our stern climate, and carry an interval of gloomy calm into the heart of this dreary month, have generally ere its close given place to the nipping frosts and chilling blasts of mid-winter. "Out of the South" hath come "the whirlwind, and cold out of the North." The days have dwindled to their smallest stature, and the long nights, with their atmosphere of mist, shut in and circumscribe the wanderings of man. Clouds and shadows surround us. The air has lost its rich echoes, and the earth its diversified aspects; and to the immediate threshold of the house of feasting and merriment we have travelled through those dreary days which are emphatically called "the dark days before Christmas." Of one of the gloomy mornings that usher in these melancholy days Ben Jonson gives the following dismal description:—

"It is, methinks, a morning full of fate!
It riseth slowly, as her sullen car
Had all the weights of sleep and death hung at it!
She is not rosy-fingered, but swoln black!
Her face is like a water turned to blood,
And her sick head is bound about with clouds,
As if she threatened night, ere noon of day!
It does not look as it would have a hail
Or health wished in it—as of other morns!"

And the general discomforts of the season are bemoaned by old Sackville, with words that have a wintry sound, in the following passage, which we extract from "England's Parnassus:"—

"The wrathfull winter, proching on a pace,
With blustring blast had all ybard the treene;
And old Saturnus, with his frosty face,
With chilling cold had pearst the tender greene;
The mantle rent wherein inwrapped beene
The gladsome groves that now lay over-throwne,
The tapers torne, and every tree downe blowne;
The soyle, that erst so seemely was to seeme,
Was all dispoiled of her beauties hewe,
And stole fresh flowers (wherewith the Somer's queene
Had clad the earth), now Boreas blast downe blew;
And small fowles flocking, in their songs did rew
The Winter's wrath, where with each thing defast,
In wofull wise bewayl'd the Sommer past:
Hawthorne had lost his motley liverie,
The naked twigs were shivering all for cold,
And, dropping down the teares aboundantlie,
Each thing, methought, with weeping eye me told
The cruell season, bidding me withhold
Myselfe within."

The feelings excited by this dreary period of transition, and by the desolate aspect of external things to which it has at length brought us, would seem, at first view, to be little in harmony with a season of festival, and peculiarly unpropitious to the claims of merriment. And yet it is precisely this joyless condition of the natural world which drives us to take refuge in our moral resources, at the same time that it furnishes us with the leisure necessary for their successful development. The spirit of cheerfulness which, for the blessing of man, is implanted in his nature, deprived of the many issues by which, at other seasons, it walks abroad and breathes amid the sights and sounds of Nature, is driven to its own devices for modes of manifestation, and takes up its station by the blazing hearth. In rural districts, the varied occupations which call the sons of labor abroad into the fields are suspended by the austerities of the time; and to the cottage of the poor man has come a season of temporal repose, concurrently with the falling of that period which seals anew for him, as it were, the promises of an eternal rest. At no other portion of the year, could a feast of equal duration find so many classes of men at leisure for its reception.

"With his ice, and snow, and rime,
Let bleak winter sternly come!
There is not a sunnier clime
Than the love-lit winter home."

Amid the comforts of the fireside, and all its sweet companionships and cheerful inspirations, there is something like the sense of a triumph obtained over the hostilities of the season. Nature, which at other times promotes the expansion of the feelings and contributes to the enjoyments of man, seems here to have promulgated her fiat against their indulgence; and there is a kind of consciousness of an inner world created, in evasion of her law,—a tract won by the genius of the affections from the domain of desolation, spots of sunshine planted by the heart in the very bosom of shadow, a pillar of fire lit up in the darkness. And thus the sensation of a respite from toil, the charms of renewed companionship, the consciousness of a general sympathy of enjoyment running along all the links of the social chain, and the contrasts established within to the discomforts without, are all components of that propitious feeling to which the religious spirit of the season, and all its quaint and characteristic observances, make their appeal.

There is, too (connected with these latter feelings, and almost unacknowledged by the heart of man), another moral element of that cheerful sentiment which has sprung up within it. It consists in the prospect, even at this distant and gloomy period, of a coming spring. This is peculiarly the season of looking forward. Already, as it were, the infant face of the new year is perceived beneath the folds of the old one's garment. The business of the present year has terminated, and along the night which has succeeded to its season of labor have been set up a series of illuminations, which, we know, will be extinguished only that the business of another seed-time may begin.

Neither, amid all its dreary features, is the natural season without its own picturesque beauty, nor even entirely divested of all its summer indications of a living loveliness, or all suggestions of an eternal hope. Not only hath it the peculiar beauties of old age, but it hath besides lingering traces of that beauty which old age hath not been able wholly to extinguish, and which come finely in aid of the moral hints and religious hopes of the season.

The former—the graces which are peculiar to the season itself—exist in many a natural aspect and grotesque effect, which is striking both for the variety it offers and for its own intrinsic loveliness.

"We may find it in the wintry boughs, as they cross the cold blue sky,
While soft on icy pool and stream the pencilled shadows lie,
When we look upon their tracery, by the fairy frost-work bound,
Whence the flitting red-breast shakes a shower of blossoms to the ground."

The white mantle which the earth occasionally puts on with the rapidity of a spell, covering, in the course of a night and while we have slept, the familiar forms with a sort of strangeness that makes us feel as if we had awakened in some new and enchanted land; the fantastic forms assumed by the drifting snow; the wild and fanciful sketching of old winter upon the "frosty pane;" the icicles that depend like stalactites from every projection, and sparkle in the sun like jewels of the most brilliant water; and, above all, the feathery investiture of the trees above alluded to, by which their minute tracery is brought out with a richness shaming the carving of the finest chisel,—are amongst the features which exhibit the inexhaustible fertility of Nature in the production of striking and beautiful effects. Hear how one of our best poetesses, Mary Howitt, sings of these graces:—

"One silent night hath passed, and lo,
How beautiful the earth is now!
All aspect of decay is gone,
The hills have put their vesture on,
And clothed is the forest bough.
"Say not 'tis an unlovely time!
Turn to the wide, white waste thy view;
Turn to the silent hills that rise
In their cold beauty to the skies,
And to those skies intensely blue.
. . . .
"Walk now among the forest trees:
Saidst thou that they were stripped and bare?
Each heavy bough is bending down
With snowy leaves and flowers,—the crown
Which Winter regally doth wear.
"'Tis well; thy summer garden ne'er
Was lovelier, with its birds and flowers,
Than is this silent place of snow,
With feathery branches drooping low,
Wreathing around thee shadowy bowers!"

While on the subject of the natural beauties of this season, we must introduce our readers to some admirable verses which have been furnished to us by our friend Mr. Stoddart, the author of that fine poem the "Death-Wake," and in which its peculiar aspects are described with a very graphic pen:

A WINTER LANDSCAPE.

The dew-lark sitteth on the ice, beside the reedless rill;
The leaf of the hawthorn flutters on the solitary hill;
The wild lake weareth on its heart a cold and changed look,
And meets, at the lip of its moon-lit marge, the spiritual brook.
Idly basks the silver swan, near to the isle of trees,
And to its proud breast come and kiss the billow and the breeze;
They wash the eider as they play about the bird of grace,
And boom, in the same slow mood, away, to the moveless mountain-base.
The chieftain-deer, amid the pines, his antlered forehead shows,
And scarcely are the mosses bent where that stately one arose;
His step is as the pressure of a light beloved hand,
And he looketh like a poet's dream in some enchanted land!
A voice of Winter, on the last wild gust of Autumn borne,
Is hurried from the hills afar, like the windings of a horn;
And solemnly and heavily the silver birches groan,
And the old ash waves his wizard hand to the dim, mysterious tone.
And noiselessly, across the heaven, a gray and vapory shred
Is wandering, fed by phantom clouds that one by one are led
Out of the wide North, where they grow within the aged sea,
And in their coils the yellow moon is laboring lazily!
She throws them from her mystic urn, as they were beckoned back
By some enchantress, working out her spells upon their track;
Or gathers up their fleecy folds, and shapes them, as they go,
To hang around her beautiful form a tracery of snow.
Lo, Winter cometh!—and his hoar is heavy on the hill,
And curiously the frostwork forms below the rimy rill;
The birth of morn is a gift of pearl to the heath and willow-tree,
And the green rush hangs o'er its water-bed, shining and silvery.
From the calm of the lake a vapor steals its restless wreath away,
And leaves not a crisp on the quiet tarn but the wake of the swan at play;
The deer holds up the glistening heath, where his hoof is lightly heard,
And the dew-lark circleth to his song,—sun-lost and lonely bird!

But the season hath other striking aspects of its own. Pleasant, says Southey,—

"To the sobered soul,
The silence of the wintry scene;
When Nature shrouds her in her trance,
In deep tranquillity.
"Not undelightful now to roam
The wild heath sparkling on the sight;
Not undelightful now to pace
The forest's ample rounds,
"And see the spangled branches shine,
And snatch the moss of many a hue,
That varies the old tree's brown bark,
Or o'er the gray-stone spreads."

Mr. Southey might have mentioned, too,—as belonging to the same class of effects with those produced by the mosses "of many a hue" that "vary the old tree's brown bark,"—those members of the forest which retain their dead and many tinted leaves till the ensuing spring, hanging occasional wreaths of strange and fantastic beauty in the white tresses of winter, together with the rich contrast presented by the red twigs of the dog-wood amid the dark colors of the surrounding boughs. The starry heavens, too, at this period of the year, present an occasional aspect of extraordinary brilliancy; and the long winter nights are illustrated by a pomp of illumination, presenting magnificent contrasts to the cold and cheerless earth, and offering unutterable revelations at once to the physical and mental eye.

Amongst the traces of a former beauty not utterly extinguished, and the suggestions of a summer feeling not wholly passed away, we have those both of sight and scent and sound. The lark, "all independent of the leafy spring," as Wordsworth says, has not long ceased to pour his anthem through the sky. In propitious seasons, such as we have enjoyed for some years past, he is almost a Christmas-carol singer. The China-roses are with us still, and under proper management will stay with us till the snowdrops come. So will the anemones and the wallflowers; and the aconite may be won to come, long "before the swallow dares, and take the winds of January with beauty." The cold air may be kept fragrant with the breath of the scented coltsfoot, and the lingering perfume of the mignonette. Then we have rosemary, too, "mocking the winter of the year with perfume,"—

"Rosemary and rue, which keep
Seeming and savor all the winter long."

"It looks," says Leigh Hunt, pleasantly, "as if we need have no winter, if we choose, as far as flowers are concerned." "There is a story," he adds, "in Boccaccio, of a magician who conjured up a garden in winter-time. His magic consisted in his having a knowledge beyond his time; and magic pleasures, so to speak, await on all who choose to exercise knowledge after his fashion."

But what we would allude to more particularly here are the evergreens, which, with their rich and clustering berries, adorn the winter season, offering a provision for the few birds that still remain, and hanging a faint memory of summer about the hedges and the groves. The misletoe with its white berries, the holly (Virgil's acanthus) with its scarlet berries and pointed leaves, the ivy whose berries are green, the pyracanthus with its berries of deep orange, the arbutus exhibiting its flowers and fruit upon adjacent boughs, the glossy laurel and the pink-eyed laurestine (not to speak of the red berries of the May-bush, the purple sloes of the blackthorn, or others which show their clusters upon leafless boughs, nor of the evergreen trees,—the pine, the fur, the cedar, or the cypress), are all so many pleasant remembrancers of the past, and so many types to man of that which is imperishable in his own nature. And it is probably both because they are such remembrancers of what the heart so much loves, and such types of what it so much desires, that they are gathered about our doors and within our homes at this period of natural decay and religious regeneration, and mingle their picturesque forms and hopeful morals with all the mysteries and ceremonies of the season.

Country Carol Singers.—Page 157.

SIGNS OF THE SEASON.

We have said that the coming festivities of the season "fling their shadows" long before: the avant-couriers of the old man are to be seen advancing in all directions. At home and abroad, in town and in country, in the remote farmstead and on the king's highway, we are met by the symptoms of his approach, and the arrangements making for his reception.

We will not dwell here on the domestic operations which are so familiar to all,—the ample provision for good cheer, which has long been making in every man's home who can at any time afford to make good cheer at all. We need not remind our town readers of the increased activity visible in all the interior departments of each establishment, and the apparent extent and complication of its foreign relations; the councils held with the housekeeper and cook; the despatches to the butcher, baker, poulterer, and confectioner, which are their consequence; and the efficient state of preparation which is arising out of all these energetic movements. To our country readers we need not dwell upon the slaughter of fowls in the poultry-yard, and game in the field, or the wholesale doings within doors for the manufacture of pastry of all conceivable kinds and in all its conceivable forms. And to neither the one nor the other is it necessary that we should speak of the packages, in every shape and size, which both are getting ready, for the interchange between friends of the commodities of their respective positions. Here, however, the town has clearly the advantage in point of gain, and the country in point of character,—the former having little besides barrels of oysters and baskets of Billingsgate fish to furnish to the country larders in return for the entire range of the products of the dairy, farmyard, and game-field.

But however lightly we may allude to the other articles which enter into the charge of the commissariat department, and have no distinctive character, at this particular season, beyond their unimaginable abundance, we are by no means at liberty, without a more special notice, to pass over the mystery of Mince-pie! We speak not here of the merits of that marvellous compound; because a dish which has maintained without impeachment, since long before the days of honest old Tusser (who calls these marvels shred-pies), the same supreme character which it holds amongst the men of these latter days, may very well dispense with our commendation; and every school-boy knows, from his own repeated experience, the utter inadequacy of language to convey any notion of the ineffable flavor of this unapproachable viand. The poverty of speech is never so conspicuous as when even its richest forms are used for the purpose of describing that which is utterly beyond its resources; and we have witnessed most lamentable, although ludicrous, failures, on the part of eloquent but imprudent men, in their ambitious attempts to give expression to their sensations under the immediate influence of this unutterable combination. It is therefore to other properties than those which make their appeal to the palate that we must confine ourselves in our mention of mince-pie.

The origin of this famous dish, like that of the heroic in all kinds and classes, is involved in fable. By some it has been supposed, from the Oriental ingredients which enter into its composition, to have a reference (as probably had also the plum-porridge of those days) to the offerings made by the wise men of the East; and it was anciently the custom to make these pies of an oblong form, thereby representing the manger in which, on that occasion, those sages found the infant Jesus. Against this practice—which was of the same character with that of the little image called the Yule Dough, or Yule Cake, formerly presented by bakers to their customers at the anniversary of the Nativity—the Puritans made a vehement outcry, as idolatrous; and certainly it appears to us somewhat more objectionable than many of those which they denounced, in the same category. Of course it was supported by the Catholics with a zeal the larger part of which (as in most cases of controversy where the passions are engaged) was derived from the opposition of their adversaries; and the latter having pronounced the mince-pie to be an abomination, the eating thereof was immediately established as a test of orthodoxy by the former. Sandys mentions that even when distressed for a comfortable meal they would refuse to partake of this very tempting dish, when set before them, and mentions John Bunyan when in confinement as an example. He recommends that under such extreme circumstances they should be eaten with a protest, as might be done by a lawyer in a similar case.

In a struggle like this, however, it is clear that the advocates of mince-pie were likely to have the best of it, through the powerful auxiliary derived to their cause from the savoriness of the dish itself. The legend of the origin of eating roast-pig, which we have on the authority of Charles Lamb, exhibits the rapid spread of that practice, against the sense of its abomination, on the strength of the irresistible appeals made to the palate by the crackling. And accordingly, in the case of mince-pie we find that the delicious compound has come down to our days, stripped of its objectionable forms and more mystic meanings, from the moment when they ceased to be topics of disputation, and is freely partaken of by the most rigid Presbyterian, who raises "no question" thereon "for conscience' sake."

It may be observed, however, that relics of the more recondite virtues ascribed to this dish by the Catholics, in the days of its sectarian persecution, still exist in the superstitions which attach certain privileges and promises to its consumption. In some places the form of this superstition, we believe, is, that for every house in which a mince-pie shall be eaten at the Christmas season, the eater shall enjoy a happy month in the coming year. As, however, this version would limit the consumption, as far as any future benefit is attached to it, to the insufficient number of twelve, we greatly prefer an edition of the same belief which we have met with elsewhere, and which promises a happy day for every individual pie eaten during the same period,—thereby giving a man a direct and prospective interest in the consumption of as large a number out of three hundred and sixty-five as may happen to agree with his inclination.