He appears only in picture, in poetry, and in dramatic pieces specially got up for the holidays. In the latter he has played an important part from a very early period. The most famous of such pieces was a “masque” written by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend and rival, and produced at the court of King James I in the year 1616. That, by the way, is the very year of Shakespeare’s death. Christmas festivities at that time were frowned down upon by many of the more zealous Protestants--just then beginning to earn the name of “Puritans”--who fancied that these mummeries and rejoicings smacked too strongly of “Papist” or Roman Catholic tendencies. Indeed many fanatics had striven to abolish Christmas altogether, and had partly succeeded in doing so, at least among the people who believed as they did. But James I, though a foolish person in some respects, was a learned man and a great lover of the traditions of the past. It is in allusion to the Puritan attempt to suppress him altogether that Ben Jonson’s Father Christmas utters these words as he makes his entrance upon the stage: “Why, gentlemen, do you know what you do? Ha! would you have kept me out? CHRISTMAS!--Old Christmas--Christmas of London, and Captain Christmas! Pray you let me be brought before my Lord Chamberlain; I’ll not be answered else. ‘_’Tis merry in hall, when beards wag all._’ I have seen the time you have wished for me, for a merry Christmas, and now you have me, they would not let me in: _I must come another time!_ A good jest--as if I could come more than once a year. Why, I am no dangerous person, and so I told my friends of the guard. I am old Gregory Christmas, still, and, though I come out of the Pope’s Head-alley, as good a Protestant as any in my parish.” He must have been a quaint looking figure, this same Father Christmas, for we are told that his costume consisted of “round hose, long stockings, close doublet, high-crowned hat, with a brooch, long, thin beard, truncheon, little ruffs, white shoes, with his scarfs and garters tied cross, and his drum beaten before him,” [Illustration: Father Christmas. Drawn by Kenny Meadows. From the Illustrated London News, December, 1847.] And now, to the sound of the drum, in troop all his merry family--sons and daughters and nephews and nieces. Among them are the Lord of Misrule, who in old days directed the Christmas revels; Roast Beef, “that English Champion bold,” who has saved many a sturdy Englishman from starvation; Plum Pudding, a blackamoor, with rich round face and rosemary cockade; and Minced Pie, and Baby Cake, and Mumming and Wassail and Offering and Carol, and New Year’s Gift, and others too numerous to mention. Many members of this robust family will be recognized as contributors to the Christmas cheer of to-day. Others have disappeared forever.