The 17th of December, 1566, was the christening day of Mary Stuart's infant son. Amongst the festivities arranged in celebration of the event, there was a "great banquet", to which the representatives of foreign sovereigns had been invited, and at which a foremost place had been assigned to Hatton and the Englishmen who had accompanied him to Scotland. To enliven the entertainment, George Buchanan had written a masque, in which the actors were satyrs who, whilst reciting his complimentary verses, were to bring various symbolical gifts to the royal infant. The performance of this interlude had been entrusted to a Frenchman named Bastien. As the meat was being brought through the great hall, on a "trim engine", that seemed to move of itself, he made his appearance with a band of men disguised to represent the mythological monsters, and wearing long tails, in keeping with their assumed character. But he and his associates "were not content only to red roun". Whether merely acting on a mischievous impulse or deliberately carrying out a preconcerted joke, the mummers, as they passed near the English guests, put their hands to their tails and began wagging them. Hatton and his party "daftly apprehending that which they should not seem to have understood", and placing the worst construction on the silly and unseemly trick, chose to believe that it had been planned in derision of them and out of spiteful jealousy "that the Queen made more of them than of the Frenchmen". To mark their sense of the insult offered them, "they all set down upon the bare floor behind the back of the board, that they should not see themselves scorned, as they thought". In relating the incident to Sir James Melville, who records it in his _Memoirs_, Hatton added that, if it had not taken place in the Royal palace and in presence of the Queen herself, he would "have put a dagger to the heart of the French knave Bastien".[291] Coarse and unmannerly as was the satyrs' by-play, it would hardly seem to have deserved to be taken so seriously and so ill by the English guests, if it were not remembered that it expressed in dumb show what had for centuries been looked upon by Englishmen as a deadly insult--a reference to the popular belief that they were distinguished from the natives of other countries by the physical monstrosity of bearing tails. That this was accepted as an actual and disgraceful fact there is abundant evidence to prove. In a medieval Latin poem[292] devoted to an enumeration of the distinctive characteristics of the various nations of Europe, the unflattering lines that fall to the share of the English, jeer at them for this deformity, whilst not omitting to denounce the treachery so commonly and so spitefully attributed to them by their enemies: A brute beast is the Englishman, For he doth bear a tail; Beware, and treat him as a foe, E'en when he bids thee "Hail!"[293]