intellectual pleasures. Our minds have been stirred mightily, and, like animals that during their wintry torpor feel no hunger, yet feel it keenly the moment they are awake, they have become hungry for congenial aliment. We have fed on much knowledge, and are no longer children, but full-grown men, with manly appetites and experienced tastes. Could we now sit, as our ancestors did, for nine hours together at a mystery? Could we endure to read through the chronicles and romances of the middle ages,-books which spun out their recitals to the most extraordinary length, and were never too long; for books then were few? If we could not, so neither could the simple pleasures and rural festivities satisfy the peasantry of this. We are the creatures of new circumstances, and of a higher reach of knowledge. A combination of causes, too puissant to be resisted, has made hopeless all return to the juvenilities of the past. And after all, happiness —of which the people, however unwisely, are always in quest, does not consist in booths and garlands, drums and horns, or in capering round a May-pole. Happiness is a fire-side thing. It is a thing of grave and earnest tone; and the deeper and truer it is, the more is it removed from the riot of mere merriment :

The highest mood allowed

To sinful creatures, for all happiness

Worthy that holy name, seems steeped in tears,
Like flowers in dew, or tinged with misty hues,
Like stars in halo.

John Wilson.

And the more our humble classes come to taste of the pleasures of books and intellect, and the deep fireside affections which grow out of the growth of heart

and mind, the less charms will the outward forms of rejoicing have for them. Beautiful and poetical, I grant, are many of the old rites and customs of which we have been speaking; but they are beautiful and poetical as belonging to their own times,-and many of them, I am inclined to believe, as seen in the distance; for, seen at hand, there is a vulgarity in most popular customs that offends invariably our present tastes. Nor do I mean to say that our present population cannot be cheerful. A more truly cheerful people never existed; and they can dance and be merry too when they will; as Christmas, and Whitsuntide, and their annual village feasts, and their harvest-homes can testify. Since the Reformation, the saints of the calendar having become mere names in this country, their festivals have accordingly died away. Whitsuntide, Easter, and Christmas seem almost all that have maintained their stand; and of these we will speak a little; but in the first place, let us have a few words on May-day.

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CHAPTER III.

MAY-DAY.

MAY-DAY was celebrated with a gaiety and poetical grace far beyond all other festivals. It had come down from the pagan times with all its Arcadian beauty, and seemed to belong to those seasons more than to any Christian occasions. It is one that the poets have all combined to lavish their most delicious strains upon. The time of the year was itself so inspiring, with all its newness of feeling, its buds and blossoms and smiling skies. It seemed just the chosen period for heaven and earth and youth to mingle their gladness together. There is no festivity that is so totally gone! Washington Irving, in his very interesting account of his visit to Newstead Abbey, takes the opportunity to say, that he had been accused by the critics of describing in his Sketch Book popular manners and customs that had gone by, but that he had found those very customs existing in this neighbourhood. That those who doubted the accuracy of his statements must come north of the Trent. That here he found May-poles standing in the old

fashioned villages, and a band of plough-bullocks even came to the abbey while he was there.

Washington Irving certainly seemed most agreeably impressed with the primitive air of this part of Nottinghamshire, and it is interesting to see the effect which places most familiar to you, produce on the minds of strangers of taste and poetical feeling. His delight at finding himself in old Sherwood, the haunt of Robin Hood; in hearing the bells of Mansfield at a distance; and his remarking the names of Wagstaff, Hardstaff, Beardall, as names abounding about the forest, naturally suggesting the character of those who first bore them-names so common to our eyes as never to have awakened any such idea. All this is very agreeable; but let no lover of ancient customs come hither on the strength of Washington Irving's report, unless he means to travel much farther north of the Trent than Newstead. There is certainly a May-pole standing in the village of Linby near Newstead, and there is one in the village of Farnsfield near Southwell; but I have been endeavouring to recollect any others for twenty miles round, and cannot do it, and though garlands are generally hung on these poles on May-day, wreathed by the hands of some fair damsel who has a lingering affection for the olden times, and carried up by some adventurous lad, alas! the dance beneath it, where is it? In the dales of Derbyshire, May-poles are more frequent, but the dancing I never saw. In my own recollection, the appearance of morris-dancers, guisers, plough-bullocks, and Christmas carollers, has become more and more rare, and to find them we must go into the retired hamlets of Staffordshire, and the dales of Yorkshire and Lancashire.

One would have thought that the May-day fête would have outlasted all others, except it were Christmas, on the strength of the poetical wealth of heart and fancy woven with it through our literature. Every writer of any taste and fancy has referred with enthusiasm to May-day. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Fletcher, Milton, Browne, Herrick, and all our later poets, have sung of it with all their hearts. Chaucer, in Palamon and Arcite, describes Arcite going to the woods for garlands on May morning, according to the old custom. He

Is risen, and looketh on the merry day;
And for to do his observance to May,
Remembering on the point of his desire,
He on the courser, starting as the fire,
Is risen to the fieldés him to playe;
Out of the court were it a mile or tway:
And to the grove of which that I you told,
By Aventine his way began to hold,
To maken him a garland of the greves,
Were it of woodbine, or of hawthorn leaves,
And loud he sung, against the sunny sheen:
"Oh May, with all thy flowers and thy green,
Right welcome be thou, fairé, freshé May;
I hope that I some green here getten may."
And from his courser with a lusty heart,
Into the grove full hastily he start,

And in a path he roamed up and down.

Milton has many beautiful glances at it, and Shakspeare touches on it in a hundred places, as in "The Midsummer Night's Dream :"

If thou lovest me then,

Steal forth thy father's house to-morrow night;

And in a wood, a league without the town,

Where I did meet thee once with Helena,

To do observance to a morn of May,

There will I stay for thee.