Mixed up with these grave and studious persons, gay courtiers and gayer ladies jostled old and severe divines and college heads, and crusty tutors used the sarcasms they had been wont to hurl at their pupils to reprove ladies whose conduct appeared to them at least far from decorous. Christmas interludes were enacted in Hall, and Shakespeare’s plays performed by the King’s players, assisted by amateur performers; and it would have been difficult to say whether the play was performed before the curtain or behind it, or whether the actors left their parts behind them when the performance was over, or then in fact resumed them. The groves and walks of the colleges, and especially Christ Church meadow and the Grove at Trinity, were the resort of this gay and brilliant throng; the woods were vocal with song and music, and love and gallantry sported themselves along the pleasant river banks. The poets and wits vied with each other in classic conceits and parodies, wherein the events of the day and every individual incident were pourtrayed and satirized. Wit, learning, and religion joined hand in hand as in some grotesque and brilliant masque. The most admired poets and players and the most profound mathematicians became "Romancists" and monks, and exhausted all their wit and poetry and learning in furthering their divine mission, and finally, as the last scenes of this strange drama came on, fell fighting on some hardly-contested grassy slope, and were buried on the spot, or in the next village churchyard, in the dress in which they played Philaster, or the Court garb in which they wooed their mistress, or the doctor’s gown in which they preached before the King, or read Greek in the schools. This gaiety was much increased the next year, when the Queen came to Oxford, and the last happy days of the ill-fated monarch glided by. It was really no inapt hyberbole of the classic wits which compared this motley scene to the marriage of Jupiter and Juno of old, when all the Gods were invited to the feast, and many noble personages besides, but to which also came a motley company of mummers, maskers, fantastic phantoms, whifflers, thieves, rufflers, gulls, wizards, and monsters, and among the rest Crysalus, a Persian Prince, bravely attended, clad in rich and gay attire, and of majestic presence, but otherwise an ass; whom the Gods at first, seeing him enter in such pomp, rose and saluted, taking him for one worthy of honour and high place; and whom Jupiter, perceiving what he was, turned with his retinue into butterflies, who continued in pied coats roving about among the Gods and the wiser sort of men. Something of this kind here happened, when wisdom and folly, vice and piety, learning and gaiety, terribly earnest even to death and light frivolity, jostled each other in the stately precincts of Parnassus and Olympus.