PART III. GAMES AND SPORTS OF SEASONS, &c. SUMMER SPORTS. MAY-DAY. PLATE XXIII. THE celebration of May-day has descended co us from the ancients, who observed the last four days in April, and the first of May, in honour of the goddess Flora. At the return of Spring, throughout Attica, in Sparta, and in Arcadia, the youths and maidens, lightly clad, wearing garlands of oak and roses, and new blown flowers in their bosom, traversed the woods, forming pastoral dances. In ancient Italy, on the calends of May, "the juvenile part of both sexes were wont to rise a little after midnight and walk to the neigh bouring woods, accompanied with the sound of rustic instruments, dancing along and gathering green boughs and flowers, which they brought into the city in the same manner. Fathers, mothers, relations and friends attended these troops in the streets, or awaited their return with a well-spread board. All the doors of the houses were then ornamented with these flowery spoils; and for this day all labour was suspended. After the banquet, concerts of music and dancing recommenced; and nothing but pleasure was thought of. The people, magistrates and patricians, united in the general joy, seemed to form as it were but one family. They were all adorned with garlands: to appear without this distinguishing mark of the fete, would have been deemed almost infamous: the senators made it a point of honour to be the first to wear it. This fete was in time extended to late in the night; the rural dances which were at first merely the lively expression of an innocent joy, caused by the return of Spring, degenerated afterwards into amorous dances; and the fete was abolished. But the impressions it had made were too deep; to proscribe it was useless; and, shortly after the promulgation of the law, it reappeared and spread nearly over the whole of Europe. It is the origin of all our May Sports. Stubbs writes thus of May-day in England: "Against Maie-day, Whitsunday, or some other time of the year, every parish, towne, or village, assemble themselves, both men, women, and children; and either all together, or dividing themselves into companies, they goe, some to the woods and groves, some to the hills and mountaines, some to one place, some to another, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return, bringing with them birche boughes and branches of trees to deck their assemblies withal. But their chiefest jewel they bring from thence is the Maiepole, which they bring home with great veneration; as thus- they have twentie or fourtie yoake of oxen, every oxe having a sweete nosegaie of flowers tied to the tip of his hornes, and these oxen drawe home the May-poale, covered all over with flowers and hearbes, bound round with strings from the top to the bottome, and sometimes painted with variable colours, having two or three hundred men, women, and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up, with handkerchiefs and flags streaming on the top, they strew the ground |