* Diogenes, when he trod with his dirty cobbled shoes on the
beautiful carpets of Plato, exclaimed triumphantly, “I tread
upon the pride of Plato!”—“Yes,” replied Plato, “but with
a greater pride!”
** “A material fool,” as Jacques describes Touchstone. Such
was Dr. Andrew Borde, the well-known progenitor of Merry
Andrews; and the presumed author of the “Merry Tales of the
Wise Men of Gotham,” composed in the early part of the
sixteenth century. “In the time of Henry VIII. and after,”
(says Anthony à Wood,) “it was accounted a book full of wit
and mirth by the scholars and gentlemen.” It is thus
referred to in an old play of 1560:—
“Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
I must needs laughe in my slefe.
The wise men of Gotum are risen againe.”

If merriment sometimes ran riot, it never exhibited itself in those deep-laid villanies so rife among the pretenders to sanctity and mortification. An appeal to “clubs” among the London apprentices; the pulling down of certain mansions of iniquity, of which Mrs. Cole, * in after days, was the devout proprietress; a few broken heads at the Bear Garden; the somewhat opposite sounds of the “belles tolling for the lectorer, and the trumpets sounding to the stages,” ** and sundry minor enormities, were the only terrible results of this national licence. Mark what followed, when masking, morris-dancing, ***

* Foote's “Minor.” Act i. scene 1.
** Harleian MSS. No. 286.
*** The morris-dance was one of the most applauded
merriments of Old England. Robin Hood, Little John, Friar
Tuck, Maid Marian, the Queen or Lady of the May, the fool,
the piper, to which were afterwards added a dragon, and a
hobbyhorse, were the characters that figured away in that
truly ancient and grotesque movement. Will Kempe, “the
comical and conceited jest-monger, and vicegerent to the
ghost of Dicke Tarleton,” who “raised many a roar by making
faces and mouths of all sorts,” danced the morris with his
men of Gotham, in his “Nine daies' wonder from London to
Norwich.” Kempe's “new jigg,” rivalled in popularity his
Peter in Romeo and Juliet; Dogberry, in “Much ado about
nothing;” and
Justice Shallow, of which he was the original performer. In
“Jacke Drum's Entertainment,” 4to. 1601, is the following
song:
ON THE INTRODUCTION OF A WHITSUN MORRIS-DANCE.
“Skip it and trip it nimbly, nimbly,
Tickle it, tickle it lustily,
Strike up the tabour for the wenches' favour,
Tickle it, tickle it, lustily.
Let us be seene on Hygate Greene,
To dance for the honour of Holloway.
Sing we are come hither, let us spare for no leather,
To dance for the honour of Holloway.”

May games, stage-plays, * fairs, and the various pastimes that delighted the commonalty, were sternly prohibited. The heart sickens at the cant and cruelty of these monstrous times, when fanaticism, with a dagger in one hand, and “Hooks and Eyes for an Unbeliever's Breeches,” in the other, revelled in the destruction of all that was intellectual in the land.

* Plays were suppressed by the Puritans in 1633. The actors
were driven off the stage by the soldiers; and the only
pleasantry that Messrs. “Praise-God-Barebones” and “Fight-
the-good-fight,” indulged in, was “Enter red coat, exit hat
and cloak;” a cant phrase in reference to this devout
tyranny. Randolph, in “The Muses' Looking-glass,” makes a
fanatic utter this charitable prayer:
“That the Globe,
Wherein (quoth he) reigns a whole world of vice,
Had been consum'd, the Phoenix burnt to ashes;
The Fortune whipp'd for a blind—Blackfriars!
He wonders how it 'scap'd demolishing I' the time of
Reformation: lastly, he wished The Bull might cross the
Thames to the Bear Gardens, And there be soundly baited.
In 1599 was published “The overthrow of Stage Playes, by way
of controversie betwixt D. Gager and D. Rainolde, where-
in all the Reasons that ean be made for them are notably
refuted, the objections answered, and the case so clear and
resolved as that the judgment of any man that is not froward
and perverse may casilic be satisfied; wherein is
manifestly proved that it is not onely unlawfull to bee an
actor, but a beholder of those vanities, &e. &c.”

When the lute, the virginals, the viol-de-gambo, were hushed for the inharmonious bray of their miserable conventicles, * and the quaintly appropriate signs ** of the ancient taverns and music shops were pulled down to make room for some such horrible effigy as we see dedicated to their high priest, John Knox, on a wall in the odoriferous Canongate of Modern Athens. ***

* “What a poor pimping business is a Presbyterian place of
worship; dirty, narrow and squalid: stuck in the corner of
an old Popish garden such as Linlithgow, and much more,
Melrose.”—Robert Burns.
** Two wooden heads, with this inscription under it: “We
three loggerheads be.” The third was the spectator. The
tabor was the ancient sign of a music shop. Tarleton kept an
eating-house with this sign. Apropos of signs—Two Irishmen
beholding a hatchment fixed against a house, the one
inquired what it was? “It's a bad sign!” replied the other
mysteriously. Paddy being still at fault as to the meaning,
asked for further explanation.—“It's a sign,” cried his
companion with a look of immeasurable superiority, “that
somebody is dead!”
*** Those who would be convinced of the profaneness of the
Cameronians and Covenanters have only to read “Scotch
Presbyterian Eloquence displayed, or the Folly of their
teaching discovered from their Books, Sermons, and Prayers,”
1738,—a volume full of ludicrous impieties. We select one
specimen.
Mr. William Vetch, preaching at Linton, in Tiviotdale, said,
“Our Bishops thought they were very secure this long time.
“Like Willie Willie Wastel,
I am in my castel.
All the dogs in the town
Dare nor ding me down.
“Yea, but there is a doggie in Heaven that has dung them all
down.”

Deep was the gloom of those dismal days! The kitchens were cool; the spits motionless. * The green holly and the mystic mistletoe ** were blooming abominations. The once rosy cheeks of John Bull looked as lean as a Shrove-Tuesday pancake, and every rib like the tooth of a saw.

* “The Lamentable Complaints of Nick Froth the Tapster, and
Ruleroast the Cook,” 4to. 1641.
* The magical properties of the mistletoe are mentioned both
by Virgil and Ovid; and Apuleius has preserved some verses
of the poet Lelius, in which he mentions the mistletoe as
one of the things necessary to make a magician. In the dark
ages a similar belief prevailed, and even to the present day
the peasants of Holstein, and some other countries, call the
mistletoe the “Spectre's Wand,” from a supposition that
holding a branch of mistletoe in the hand will not only
enable a man to see ghosts, but to force them to speak to
him! The mistletoe is peculiar to Christmas.

Rampant were those times, when crop-ear'd Jack Presbyter was as blythe as shepherd at a wake. * Down tumbled the Maypoles **—no more music