I straight look'd back, and if my eyes speak truth,
With his keen scythe behind me came the youth."
The Spell, line 27.
Another mode, which prevailed in the 16th and 17th centuries, of procuring similar information on this festival, through the medium of dreams, consisted in digging for what was called the plantain
coal; the search was to commence exactly at noon, and the material, when found, to be placed on the pillow at night. Of a wild-goose expedition of this kind Aubrey reports himself to have been a spectator. "The last summer," says he, "on the day of St. John Baptist, 1694, I accidentally was walking in the pasture behind Montague-house: it was twelve o'clock. I saw there about two or three and twenty young women, most of them well habited, on their knees, very busy, as if they had been weeding. I could not presently learn what the matter was; at last, a young man told me that they were looking for a coal under the root of a plantain, to put under their heads that night, and they should dream who would be their husbands: it was to be found that day and hour." He adds, "the women have several magical secrets handed down to them by tradition for this purpose, as, on St. Agnes' night, 21st January, take a row of pins, and pull out every one one after another, saying a paternoster, or 'our father,' sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him or her you shall marry[333:A];" spells to which Ben Jonson alludes, when he says,—
——— "On sweet St. Agnes' night
Please you with the promis'd sight;
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers."[333:B]
That it was the custom, in Elizabeth's and James's days, to tell tales or perform plays and masques on Christmas-Eve, on Twelfth Night, and on Midsummer-Eve, may be drawn from the dramas of Shakspeare, and the masques of Jonson. The Midsummer-Night's Dream of the former, appears to have been so called, because its exhibition was to take place on that night, for the time of action of the piece itself, is the vigil of May-Day, as is that of the Winter's Tale the period of sheep-shearing. It is probable also, as Mr. Steevens has observed, that Shakspeare might have been influenced in his choice of the fanciful machinery of this play, by the recollection of