"Our immense favorite, Grimaldi, under the severe pressure of years and infirmities, is enabled through the good feeling and prompt liberality of Mr. Price, to take a benefit at Drury Lane on Friday next; the last of Joseph Grimaldi! Drury's, Covent Garden's, Sadler's, everybody's Joe! The friend of Harlequin and Farley-kin! the town clown! greatest of fools! daintiest of motleys! the true ami des enfans! The tricks and changes of life, sadder, alas! than those of pantomime, have made a dismal difference between the former flapping, filching, laughing, bounding antic and the present Grimaldi. He has no spring in his foot, no mirth in his eye! The corners of his mouth droop mournfully earthward; and he stoops in the back, like the weariest of Time's porters! L'Allegro has done with him, and Il Penseroso claims him for its own! It is said, besides, that his pockets are neither so large nor so well stuffed as they used to be on the stage: and it is hard to suppose fun without funds, or broad grins in narrow circumstances." The mummers, who still go about at this season of the year in some parts of England, are the last descendants of those maskers, who in former times, as we have shown at length, contributed to the celebrations of the season, at once amongst the highest and lowest classes of the land; as their performances present, also, the last semblances of those ancient Mysteries and Moralities, by which the splendid pageants of the court were preceded. Sir Walter Scott, in a note to "Marmion," seems to intimate that these mummeries are, in fact, the offspring and relics of the old Mysteries themselves. The fact, however, seems rather to be, that these exhibitions existed before the introduction of the Scripture plays; and that the one and the other are separate forms of a practice copied directly from the festival observances of the pagans. Accordingly, Brand speaks of a species of mumming which "consists in changing clothes between men and women who, when dressed in each other's habits go from one neighbor's house to another, partaking of Christmas cheer and making merry with them in disguise;" and which practice he traces directly to the Roman Sigillaria. In various parts of the Continent also, as in France and Germany, certain forms of mumming long existed, which appear to have been originally borrowed from the rites of idolatry: and the Scottish Guisars, or Guisarts, if the very ingenious explanation of their hogmanay cry given by Mr. Repp (and for which we refer our readers to vol. iv., part 1, of the Archæologia Scotica) be correct, connect themselves with the superstitions of the northern nations.