We have already shown that so early as the reign of Elizabeth the Puritans had begun to lift up their testimony against the pageantries of the Christmas-tide; and the Lord of Misrule, even in that day of his potential ascendancy, was described as little better than the great Enemy of Souls himself. Our friend Stubs (whose denunciations were directed against _all_ amusements which from long usage and established repetition had assumed anything like a form of ceremonial, and who is quite as angry with those who "goe some to the woodes and groves and some to the hilles and mountaines . . . where they spende all the night in pastymes, and in the mornyng they return bringing with them birch bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assemblies withall," in the sweet month of May, as he could possibly be with the Christmas revellers, although the very language in which he is obliged to state the charge against the former was enough to tempt people out "a Maying," and might almost have converted himself) assures the reader of his "Anatomie" that all who contribute "to the maintenaunce of these execrable pastymes" do neither more nor less than "offer sacrifice to the devill and Sathanas." It is probable, however, that the people of those days, who were a right loyal people and freely acknowledged the claim of their sovereigns to an absolute disposition of all their temporalities (any of the common or statute laws of the land notwithstanding), considered it a part of their loyalty to be damned in company with their sovereigns, too, and resolved that so long as these iniquities obtained the royal patronage it was of their allegiance to place themselves in the same category of responsibility. Or perhaps their notion of regal prerogative, which extended so far as to admit its right to mould the national law at its good pleasure, might go the further length of ascribing to it a controlling power over the moral statutes of right and wrong, and of pleading its sanction against the menaces of Master Stubs. Or it may be that Master Stubs had failed to convince them that they were wrong, even without an appeal to the royal dispensation. Certain it is that, in spite of all that Master Stubs and his brethren could say, the sway of the Lord of Misrule, and the revels of his court continued to flourish with increasing splendor during this reign, and, as we have seen, lost no portion of their magnificence during the two next, although in that time had arisen the great champion of the Puritans, Prynne, and against them and their practices had been directed whole volumes of vituperation, and denounced large vials of wrath.