Another dish, common in Shakespeare's day, which added at least to the show of the feast, was the "stately pye," that is, a peacock or pheasant pie. In the days of chivalry the knights took their vows at a solemn feast, on presentation of a roasted peacock in a golden dish. This custom was kept up at Christmas by the bringing in, on the most magnificent dish the house could afford, of a peacock in a pie, preserving as much as possible the form of the bird, with the head elevated above the crust, the beak richly gilt, and the beautiful tail spread out to its full extent. It was from this superb dish that the oath came, "By cock and pye, sir." At the supper two servants attended bearing fair torches of wax next before the musicians and the trumpeters, and they stood above the fire (the fire of sea-coal being originally in the middle of the room) with the musicians till the first course was served, when they retired, with the music, to the buttery. After supper, as well as before, there were revels and dancing during the twelve days of Christmas, and games in which all classes joined. One of the favorite games was known as snapdragon. Brandy was set on fire, and raisins thrown into it. The diversion consisted of adventures to pluck out the raisins. The Master of the Revels sang a song or carol, in which the gentlemen took part at his command.

The requisites for good Christmas fare were plenty of good drink, a blazing fire in the hall, brawn, pudding, and souse, and mustard with all (mustard is your great provoker of a noble thirst), beef, mutton, and pork, shred or minced pies of the best, pig, veal, goose, capon, turkey, cheese, apples, and nuts, with jolly carols. When the company tired of games and romping sports, it gathered about the ruddy fire, and had tales of legendary lore, adventures of knights and ladies and friars, of strange apparitions and ghosts, of coaches on lonely moors drawn by a team of headless horses driven by a headless coachman, with grave-yard passengers, of wonderful portents in nature, stories of true love wrapped in mystery and ending in grief, and all sorts of ghostly reminiscences, which seemed as real as the dancing shadows which the light of the Yulelog cast upon the dusky timbers of the hall. Such tales, we read, formed a principal part of the rural conversation at all such assemblies as this at Christmas-time.

So abundant has been the Christmas literature in the past dozen years, and so fully have the chief ancient Christmas customs and sports been described over and over again in the newspapers, that it is unnecessary to more than allude to them in this paper. The use of the Christmas tree, with its fruit of presents, is recent in England, and was introduced from Germany a few years ago. There is great dispute about its origin, whether in India, or whether it does not represent the tree Yggdrasil, or world tree-the ashtree of existence of Scandinavian mythology. But the use of evergreens in England is as old as the days when the Druids brought the mistletoe from the woods with solemn ceremony. In Stowe's time every man's house, and also the parish churches, were decked with holm, ivy, bays, and whatever the season of the year afforded to be green, and the conduits and standards in the streets (a hint for the present telegraph companies) were likewise garnished. In the year 1444 he says there was on the 1st of February a great tempest of thunder and lightning, which set Paul's steeple on fire; and at Leadenhall, in Cornhill, a standard of wood which was set up in the pavement and nailed full of holm and ivy was torn up and cast down, by the malignant spirit (as was thought). On Christmas-eve, at the time the Yule-log was brought in and lighted with the last year's brand, it was customary to decorate the windows of every house, in cottage and hall, with bay, laurel, ivy, and holly leaves. An English gypsy told Mr. Charles G. Leland the reason for using evergreens on Christmas. It is this: "The ivy and holly and pine-tree never told a word where our Saviour was hiding Himself, and so they keep alive all winter, and look green all the year. But the ash, like the oak, told of Him when He was hiding, so they have to remain dead through the winter. And so we gypsies always burn an ash fire every Great Day."

The custom of decoration by green plants and flowers in all sorts of festivals is as old as history, and of course the use of evergreens at Christmas needs no explanation, nor is the custom any less Christian because it is of immemorial use among pagan nations. The mistletoe, however, had a unique place. The Celtic peoples and the Druids held it in the same veneration that the Romans did. It was used by the Romans in religious.

ceremonies, and it may have been the "golden bough" of the infernal regions. The Druids gathered it against the festival of the winter solstice with great solemnity, the prince of the Druids cutting it himself with a golden sickle. It was used as a charm against evil spirits, and excellent medical properties are ascribed to it. It was supposed to possess the power to preserve from poison, and the mystic property of giving fertility. "Kissing under the mistletoe" may have had reference to this ancient belief. There was a tradition that the maid who was not kissed under a bough of mistletoe at Christmas would not be married during the following year. There was once a notion that its heathen origin should exclude it from the Christmas decorations; but this found no favor with the young people at any period. On the contrary, they took good care that it should be hung, and that it should have plenty of berries, for the ceremony under it was not duly performed if a berry was not plucked off with each kiss, and consequently the supply of berries determined the number of kisses. It did not need the Roman use of the plant to recommend such a preventive of the state of oldmaidism. Some trace the use of green bush decoration to the original branches of vervain amongst the Romans. Romans and Druids the vervain was a panacea for every ill, and they believed, above all, that it "conciliated hearts which were at variance"-another good office of any plant in the Christmas sea

son.

With

The Druids only venerated the mistletoe that grew on the oak, but the common mistletoe (Viscus album), with its pearly berries, is gathered from the hawthorn, the old apple-tree, the lime, and the fir, and from other trees. Of late years this parasite has been scarcer than for merly, and efforts have been made to propagate it. This is done by cleaning off the bark under any joint of a young tree with the moistened thumb, and then pressing the glutinous berry on the cleaned place till it adheres to the bark; it will begin to show growth in about fifteen months. It is an obvious suggestion that in sections of the country where the statistics show a falling off in marriages this plant ought not to be let die out.

The carols which were sung all through the Christmas season were of two kinds, Scriptural and convivial; the first was sung morning and evening until the

twelfth day, and the latter at the feasts and carouses. The pious chansons contained some Scriptural history thrown into loose rhymes, and in Shakespeare's day were sung every night about the streets, and were the pretext for collecting money from house to house. One of the best of the carols, and one of the most ancient, is of Scottish origin:

ANE SANG OF THE BIRTH OF CHRIST.
WITH THE TUNE OF BAW LULA LAW.
(Angelus, ut opinor, loquitur.)

"I come from hevin to tell
The best nowellis that ever befell;
To yow this tythinges trew I bring,
And I will of them say and sing.

This day to yow is borne ane childe
Of Marie meike and Virgine mylde,
That blessit barne, bining and kynde,
Sall yow rejoyce baith heart and mynd.
"My saull and lyfe, stand up and see
Quba lyes in ane cribe of tree,
Quhat babe is that, so gude and faire?
It is Christ, God's sonne and aire.
"O God, that made all creature,

How art Thow becum so pure,
That on the hay and stray will lye,
Amang the asses, oxin, and kye!

"O my deir hert, young Jesus sweit,
Prepare Thy creddill in my spreit,
And I sall rocke Thee in my hert,
And never mair from Thee depart.
"But I sall praise Thee evermoir,
With sangs sweit unto Thy gloir,
The knees of my hert sall I bow,
And sing that right Balululow."

During the sixteenth century carols of this sort were sung through every town and village in the kingdom. It was a very early practice for itinerant minstrels to go about to the houses of the wealthy in this season and sing drinking or wassail songs. The earliest preserved is in Norman French, and insists upon the love that Christmas has for the "jolly crew" that "drain the flowing bowl." Indeed, it would appear from the chronicles that Christmas, ivy-crowned, with song and games and license generally, went reeling around from dinner to dinner for twelve mortal days of jollity. But they were days. of some profit to the poor and to the Church. The object of the common people in chanting the nightly carols was to collect money, or "Christmas - boxes." This term was derived from the usage of the priests, who ordered masses at times to be made to the saints for the sins of the people. The mass was called Christ mass, and the

boxes in which the money was collected to pay for it were called Christmas-boxes. The people were permitted to gather this money in order to be able to free themselves from the consequences of the debaucheries in which the hospitality of the rich at this season enabled them to indulge. Thus the same charity that led a man into the sin of over-indulgence provided him the means of wiping out the score against his soul. In time "Christmas-box" came to mean any gift to a dependent or poor person, and was distinguished until a recent period from the gifts exchanged between equals. In consequence of the multiplicity of business on Christmas-day, the giving of the Christmas-boxes was postponed to the 26th, St. Stephen's Day, which became the established Boxing-day. It was a privileged day for all sorts of beggars, when the bellmen, the beadles, the street-sweepers, the chimney sweeps, the charity-boys, the lamp-lighters, and the waits-singers of more or less doleful carols-went about to all doors and rapped for a Christmas-box. Old Pepys relates (1668) that he was called up by drums and trumpets. "These things and boxes," he adds, "have cost me much money this Christmas, and will do more."

In the north of England the Christmas pie was made of goose. The Christmas pie, which was about the only sort of dessert attainable during this barren season, when there was a scarcity of fruit and milk to make tarts, custards, and such like trifles, was a "pye of abomination" to the Puritans, probably because it had a sort of religious association with the festival, like the ivy and mistletoe; and the good Quakers, who distinguished their feasts by a heretical sort of pudding known by their name, inveighed against it as an invention of the scarlet woman of Babylon, a hotchpotch of superstition, popery, the devil, and all his works. There might be a dietetic reason for this prejudice, for a person who indulges in this luxury at night sometimes thinks he has taken the devil to bed with him. But the famous Bickerstaff rose up in his wrath against those who would cut off this sweet morsel from the clergy (like those to-day who insist that the brandy peach, with its juice, is the natural food of the Christian minister), "the Christmas pye, which is in its own nature a kind of consecrated cake, and a badge of distinction." This pie was baked in a "coffin"-a dish in shape long, in imitation of the "cratch," that is, the manger

in which the infant Jesus was laid. It was this sort of dish that Jack Horner held on his knee when he got the selfmade reputation of being a good boy. The same religious spirit that dictated the form of this consecrated cake fashioned the Yule dough into a kind of baby or little image of paste; in some places these cakes had the image of the infant Jesus stamped on them. One of the characters in Ben Jonson's Masque is the Babie Cake. At a dinner on St. Stephen's Day in the Inner Temple, amongst a great deal of dreary mummery and solemn tomfoolery, was this "merry disport," which may or may not have been typical of the lawyers' practice in those days. When the company was seated at the Chancellor's table "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 these nine or ten couple of hounds, with the blowing of hunting-horns. And the fox and cat are set upon by the hounds, and killed beneath the fire." There is a quatrain of an old spiritual song that probably refers to this ceremony:

"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."

A conspicuous character in these days of ancient festivity was the Lord of Misrule, or Abbot of Unreason, who perform ed during the season, for the King and the great nobles and societies, the office of a master of revels, and had for the time almost unlimited power, aping the state of royalty, and leading in all the mummeries and dissipations of the day. The university of Cambridge had its Imperator, one of the Masters of Arts, who was placed over the juniors for the regulation of their games and diversions, and exercised his sovereignty for twelve days, receiving a fee of forty shillings. Oxford also had a Christmas Prince, or Lord of Misrule. The King appointed his Lord of Misrule, or Master of Merry Disport, as did the Lord Mayor and each of the sheriffs of London. These lords began their rule, or misrule, on All-hallow Eve, and continued it till Candlemas-day. The lord was the promoter of Bacchanalian rites and preposterous disorders-masking and mumming and dancing. "A dance about the calfe," says an old Puritan, rather than such a dance as David danced before the arke with spiritual rejoicing in God's mercies." The

performance of this lord during the twelve days of his license of disorder recalls in many points the feasts of Saturn, called Saturnalia, which the Puritans insisted were copied in the English Christmas. The master and all his household must obey the Lord of Misrule as the Romans obeyed the masters of the feasts of Saturn, and there was the same equality of servants with their masters that characterized the days of license and revelry during the Roman Saturnalia. "Christmas," says Selden, in his Table-Talk, "succeeds the Saturnalia-the same time, the same number of holy days; then the master waited on the servant like the Lord of Misrule." "If we compare," says William Prynne, in his Histrio-Mastix, "our Bacchanalian Christmas and New-Year's tides with these Saturnalia and feasts of Janus, we shall find such near affinitye betweene them both in regard of time (they being both in the end of December and on the first of January), and in their manner of solemnizing (both being spent in revelling, epicurisme, wantonnesse, idleness, dancing, drinking, stage-plaies, masques, and carnall pomps and jollity), that we must needes conclude the one to be but the ape or issue of the other. Hence Polydore Vergil affirmes in express terms that our Christmas Lords of Misrule, which custom, saith he, is cheefly observed in England, together with dancing, masques, mummeries, stage-playes, and such other Christmas disorders now in use with Christians, were derived from the Roman Saturnalia and Bacchanalian festivities, which (concludes he) should cause all pious Christians to abominate them."

At the Christmas season of 1635 there was a Lord of Misrule in the Middle Temple, a mock-monarch attended with great parade, followed by a lord keeper, a lord treasurer, eight white staves, a captain of his band of pensioners, and two chaplains, who preached before him on the preceding Sunday in Temple Church, and gravely saluted him (as is done in the chapel royal on preaching before the King) on ascending the pulpit. The pole-axes for his gentlemen pensioners were borrowed from Lord Salisbury; Lord Holland, his temporary justice in eyre, supplied him with venison; the Lord Mayor and sheriffs of London with wine. On Twelfth-day, on going to church, he received many petitions, which he handed over to his master of requests; and, like other kings, he had