many a time and oft, watched troops of the
Mayers going and coming in the green
country-side with their vernal garlands and
those rites of May since then, as the lawyers
phrase it, fallen into desuetude. Or, culling
a flower of verse from the Hesperides, in
remembrance of the last of the Queens of the
May in England—whoever the pretty damsels
were, now ripened probably into
grandmothers—

      I have beheld when they
      Wilh wicker arks did come
      To kiss and bear away,
      The richer cowslip home.

Nay, beyond even this delectable memory
have I not clearly—marked with a white
stone upon the calendar of childhood—the
recollection of seeing danced by the peasantry
of Gloucestershire that now almost forgotten
Morris for May Day, pronounced by one of
the oracular clowns of Shakespeare to be " as
fit as pancakes for Shrove Tuesday?"
Remembering those mummers vividly, indeed
as though they had capered before me on the
greensward but yesterday. Conspicuous
among them Mad Moll and her madder
husband, with their faces blackened, he with a
besom, both in rags! My Lord with a
stupendous cocked-hat, the very type and
symbol of glorified beadledom! My Lady
tricked out in finery that would have been
(in another sense than that in which the
term is usually applied) the despair of
Almack's! The striplings fluttering all over
with variegated handkerchiefs, the maidens
with many-coloured ribbons. Remembering
the fun, the frolic, the motion, the music, and
the laughter, I do not wonder in the least to
hear Edmund Spenser sing at a glimpse of
the May mummers—

      To see these folks make such jovisaunce,
      Made my heart after the pipe to daunce.

Further back, I fancy, than any one yet
living can well remember, there were stranger
ceremonials even than these to greet the
dawn of May day down in that old western
county, once upon a time the vineyard of
England. As, for example, in the village of
Randwick, hard by the Stroud cloth-mills,
where, at the appointed daybreak, three
cheeses large as cart-wheels, red skin without,
golden marrow within, masterpieces
from some neighbouring dairy, true double
Gloucester to the core—were carried upon a
litter, festooned and garlanded with blossoms,
down to the churchyard; there taken off the
wholesome cloths on which they lay
enthroned, and rolled thrice mystically round
the sacred building; being subsequently
carried back in the same way upon the litter
in triumphal procession, to be cut up on the
village green and distributed piecemeal
among the bystanders. Vanished all these
quaint old local customs, there still remain
to us what drew the Mayers of old into
meadow and woodland — Love and Flowers—
the tender passion and the spring verdure.
Though "the boys doe [not] blow cow-hornes
and hollow canes all night," as honest Aubrey
describes them to have done between the
close of the thirtieth of April and the opening
of May Day, the buds at least blow still as
freshly as ever, thank God! in the grass and
on the thicket. The beechen maypole,
painted spirally in parti-colours of black and
yellow, may never grow again out of the turf
to be danced about, and hung with coronals,
and made love round by grown-up children,
yet those ever-growing-up children will make
love to the last in spite of there being no
maypoles nevertheless. And, knowing this,
may we not without another momentary
qualm of regret, resign the latest vestige of
the neglected rites of May morning to our
friends the London sweeps, as they were
formerly resigned, in what Beau Nash would
have deemed a politer age, to those cherry-
lipped damsels, the pretty London
milkmaids? There, let those last preservers of
the May Day frolic still, as the year comes
round, foot it about their goblin Jack-in-the-
green till they too grow tired out in turn—
" those young Africans of our own growth,"
as dear Eliza loved to call them; " those
almost clergy imps—dim specks, poor blots,
innocent blacknesses! " Reverting, however,
for an instant—as a last souvenir of the
scattered glory of those dead May games—
reverting thus to the recorded fact that upon
one famous May Day Robin Hood was Lord
of the May in London, and Maid Marian his
Lady Queen, I turn now with a zest to the
fresh love and the fresh flowers underlying
all the dust stirred by the footstep of
antiquary.

Wandering along some brown country
highroad, turning down a green lane budding
thickly with leaf and blossom, clambering
over a stile, and so on by another, from
meadow to meadow, have I not the springtime
of the Mayers of the middle ages still
before me as verdurous as ever and as full of
floral luxuriance? There—silver and gold
scattered as abundantly as ever, the largesse
of Nature—

      The daisy and the butter-cup
      For which the laughing children stoop;

as Clare sings prettily, in his Shepherd's
Calendar, of those homeliest of all homely
blooms—

      As if the drops of April showers
      Had wooed the sun and changed to flowers.

Strolling over the field-grass, the sweet
month is still for me what it was for the
bard of Paradise—

      The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
      The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose.

If, pausing for a moment in my wanderings
to pluck one of those greasy slimy stalks of