"Old Christmass now is come to town, Though few do him regard; He laughs to see them going down, That have put down his Lord. "Cheer up, sad heart, crown Christmass bowls, Banish dull grief and sorrow; Though you want cloaths, you have rich souls, The _sun_ may shine to-morrow." And again in No. 38:-- "A gallant crew, stir up the fire, The other winter tale, Welcome, Christmass, 'tis our desire To give thee more spic'd ale." On the return of the royal family to England, the court celebrations of Christmas were revived both there and at the Inns of Court; and the Lord of Misrule came again into office. We have allusions to the one and the other in the writings of Pepys and of Evelyn. The nobles and wealthy gentry, too, once more at their country-seats, took under their protection such of the ancient observances as had survived the persecution, and from time to time stole out of their hiding-places under the encouragement of the new order of things. But in none of its ancient haunts did the festival ever again recover its splendor of old. The condition of Charles's exchequer, and the many charges upon it,--arising as well out of the services of his adherents as from his own dissolute life,--left him little chance of imitating the lavish appointments of the court pageantries in the days of Elizabeth and James; and the troubles out of which the nation had emerged had made changes as well in the face of the country as in the condition and character of society, alike opposed to anything like a general and complete revival of the merry doings of yore. In the country, estates had passed into new hands, and the immemorial ties between the ancient families and the tenants of the soil had been rudely severed. Many of the old establishments in which these celebrations had been most zealously observed, were finally broken up; and friends who had met together from childhood around the Christmas fire, and pledged each other year by year in the wassail-bowl, were scattered by the chances of war. But out of this disturbance of the old localities and disruption of the ancient ties of the land, a result still more fatal to these old observances had arisen, promoted besides by the dissipation of manners which the restored monarch had introduced into the country. Men rooted out from their ancestral possessions and looking to a licentious king for compensation, became hangers-on about the court; and others who had no such excuse, seduced by their example and enamoured of the gayeties of the metropolis and the profligacies of Whitehall, abandoned the shelter of the old trees beneath whose shade their fathers had fostered the sanctities of life, and from "country gentlemen" became "men about town." The evils of this practice, at which we have before hinted as one of those to which the decay of rural customs is mainly owing, began to