Warton[47] mentions that, "in an original draught of the Statutes of Trinity College, at Cambridge, founded in 1546, one of the chapters is entitled _De Praefecto Ludorum qui Imperator dicitur_, under whose direction and authority Latin Comedies and Tragedies are to be exhibited in the hall at Christmas. With regard to the peculiar business and office of Imperator it is ordered that one of the Masters of Arts shall be placed over the juniors, every Christmas, for the regulation of their games and diversions at that season of festivity. At the same time, he is to govern the whole society in the hall and chapel, as a republic committed to his special charge by a set of laws which he is to frame in Latin and Greek verse. His sovereignty is to last during the twelve days of Christmas, and he is to exercise the same power on Candlemas." His fee amounted to forty shillings. Similar customs were observed at other colleges during Christmastide. In a subsequent chapter of this work will be found an account of a grand exhibition of the Christmas Prince, at St. John's College, Oxford, in the year 1607. [Illustration: BRINGING IN THE BOAR'S HEAD WITH MINSTRELSY.] CHRISTMAS AT THE INNS OF COURT AND GREAT HOUSES. In the time of Henry the Eighth the Christmases at the Inns of Court became celebrated, especially those at Lincoln's Inn, which had kept them as early as the reign of Henry VI. The Temples and Gray's Inn afterwards disputed the palm with it. Every Corporation appointed a Lord of Misrule or Master of Merry Disports, and, according to Stow, there was the like "in the house of every nobleman of honour or good worship, were he spiritual or temporal." And during the period of the sway of the Lord of Misrule, "there were fine and subtle disguisings, masks, and mummeries, with playing at cards for counters, nails, and points in every house, more for pastime than for gain." Town and country would seem to have vied with each other as to which should exhibit the greatest extravagance in the Christmas entertainments, but (as in the days of Massinger the poet), the town carried off the palm:-- "Men may talk of country Christmasses-- Their thirty-pound buttered eggs, their pies of carps' tongues, Their pheasants drenched with ambergris, the carcases Of three fat wethers bruised for gravy; to Make sauce for a single peacock; yet their feasts Were fasts, compared with the city's."