With these seasons, observed from ancient times, various recreations had become connected in the middle ages. Many of them survived the fall of Popery, and with exceptions and changes, came once more, at the Restoration, into general fashion and indulgence. To say the least, they brought around sacred things the strangest and most incongruous associations. Some, indeed, were very much worse than strange and incongruous. Christmas Eve shone with the blaze of the Yule log, and its bountiful accompaniments of good cheer. The Christmas carol echoed through the family hall with gay music from the minstrels’ gallery. The Christmas hobby-horse cut strange capers, and Christmas-boxes were given freely to young and old. The Lord of misrule, the foot plough, and the sword dance, Yule doughs, mince-pies, Christmas-pies and plum-puddings added to the tide of fellowship and pleasure at that mid-winter season. All the glories of Twelfth night, which threw old men and old women, as well as little children, into ecstasies of merriment, were engrafted on the feast of Epiphany. Easter holidays, Easter liftings, Easter eggs, and all sorts of Easter fun, gathered in strange, grotesque, often revolting, contrast round the professed acknowledgment of the greatest of the redemptive miracles of Christianity. Rogation Week, with Ascension Day in its centre, had long been the chosen time for sacred processions and litanies, and now again in England, on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of that week, parochial perambulations revived; charity children carried flowers; the clergy with singing men and boys, all in sacred vestments, and with churchwardens and parishioners, beat the bounds of the parish, and under Gospel oaks, and other Gospel trees, the Incumbent read the Gospel, according to an old custom, in which had originated these familiar appellations. The idea of such perambulations, sanctioned by the Church, was--that processional worship should be offered to the Almighty, that thanks should be given to Him for the promise of a good crop, or that prayer should be offered for His mercy on the prospect of a bad harvest. But the gathering together of all sorts of idle people, and the habit of drinking which obtained amongst them, led to most deplorable excesses. Superstitious and absurd practices cropped up profusely on St. Mark’s Eve. With St. John’s Day was coupled the use, in decoration, of the birch, the lily, and St. John’s wort, and at night bonfires illuminated the villages of “Merrie England.” St. Peter’s Day had similar illuminations; St. James’ Day was a time for eating oysters, and Allhallow Even was devoted to nut-cracking, apple-catching, and the ancient game of quintain. The feasts of the consecration of churches degenerated into rush bearings, hoppings, and all kinds of rustic amusements, in which, as Bishop Hall observed in his _Triumph of Pleasure_ “you may well say no Greek can be merrier than they.”