In 1910 and 1911 there was the same "sober-minded" Lord Mayor's Day; and the old pantomime procession clearly will never be revived. Perhaps now the English nation is at last "growing up" to be too old for such elemental humours. If so, does the fact speak for good augury or evil augury? I wonder. A well-known Scottish artist of the day, who lives in Paris "because it is the place for all rebels and all ideas," and sells his pictures in London and America, told me once very solemnly, "When the English people get artistic and witty they are going to go down. It is the Philistinism of England that proves her national strength and sanity." I reassured him by telling him that most of the statues erected in England nowadays were those of men in trousers, and we were comforted to think that there was still enough of Philistinism in England to keep her safe and sound. But it does look as though the Englishman were losing his enjoyment of primitive humour when he vetoes Gog and Magog on Lord Mayor's Day. Also he begins to live in hotels and to dine at restaurants when he is not travelling. Yes, on the surface all peoples grow sadly alike, and that charm of travel which comes from the stimulating contact of the mind with the more obvious differences between lands and peoples threatens to vanish in a generation or two, through the fashion of admiring all countries but one's own spreading, and through each country learning to imitate some other. Still, the threat has been often made before without justifying itself. In Shakespeare's time it was Italy Whose manners still our tardy apish nation Limps after in base imitation. But we did not in the end become Italians. In spite of surface imitations the deeper differences which come from the tap-roots of nations remain. The Lord Mayor's Day of the old style of buffoonery is dead. But there is, on the other hand, a movement in England nowadays--a happy and wholesome movement--to revive the festivities of May Day, which once was the great festival of the country-side. The old chronicles in their descriptions of May Day rejoicings provide a very delectable picture. This from Bourne:-- On the calends or first of May, commonly called May Day, the Juvenile part of both sexes were wont to rise a little after midnight and walk to some neighbouring wood accompanied with music and blowing of horns, where they break down branches of trees and adorn them with nosegays and crowns of flowers; when this is done they return homewards about the rising of the sun and make their doors and windows to triumph with their flowery spoils and the after part of the day is chiefly spent in dancing round a tall pole, called a May-pole and being placed in a convenient part of the village stands there, as it were consecrated to the Goddess of Flowers without the least violation being offered to it in the whole circle of the year.