In Vox Graculi, 4to. 1623, p. 52, speaking of the sixth of January, the writer tells us, "This day, about the houres of 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10; yea, in some places till midnight well nigh, will be such a massacre of spice-bread, that, ere the next day at noone, a two-penny browne loafe will set twenty poore folkes teeth on edge. Which hungry humour will hold so violent, that a number of good fellowes will not refuse to give a statute marchant of all the lands and goods they enjoy, for halfe-a-crowne's worth of two-penny pasties. On this night much masking in the Strand, Cheapside, Holburne, or Fleet-street."

Waldron, in his Description of the Isle of Man (Works, p. 155), says, "There is not a barn unoccupied the whole twelve days, every parish hiring fiddlers at the public charge. On Twelfth Day the fiddler lays his head in some one of the wenches' laps, and a third person asks who such a maid or such a maid shall marry, naming the girls then present one after another; to which he answers according to his own whim, or agreeable to the intimacies he has taken notice of during this time of merriment. But whatever he says is as absolutely depended on as an couple two people who have an and vexation succeed the mirth. the fiddler's head; for after this year."

oracle; and if he happen to aversion to each other, tears This they call cutting off he is dead for the whole

In a curious collection, entitled Wit a sporting in a pleasant Grove of New Fancies, by H. B. 8vo. Lond. 1657, p. 80, I find the following description of the pleasantries of what is there called

St. Distaff's Day, or the Morrow after Twelfth-Day.

"Partly worke and partly play,

You must on St. Distaff's Day:

From the plough soon free your teame;
Then come home and fother them:

If the maides a spinning goe,
Burne the flax and fire the tow;

Scorch their plackets, but beware
That ye singe no maiden haire.
Bring in pales of water then,
Let the maids bewash the men.

Give St. Distaff all the right:

Then give Christmas-sport good night.
And next morrow every one

To his owne vocation."

[In the parish of Pauntley, a village on the borders of the county of Gloucester, next Worcestershire, and in the neighbourhood, a custom prevails, which is intended to prevent the smut in wheat. On the eve of Twelfth-day, all the servants of every farmer assemble together in one of the fields that has been sown with wheat. At the end of twelve lands, they make twelve fires in a row with straw, around one of which, made larger than the rest, they drink a cheerful glass of cider to their master's health, and success to the future harvest ; then, returning home, they feast on cakes soaked in cider, which they claim as a reward for their past labours in sowing the grain.]

It may rather seem to belong to religious than popular customs to mention, on the authority of the Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1731, p. 25, that at the Chapel-Royal at St. James's, on Twelfth Day that year, "the king and the prince made the offerings at the altar of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, according to custom. At night their majesties, &c., played at hazard for the benefit of the groom-porter."

Feb. 18, 1839, Edward Hawkins, Esq., of the British Museum, showed to the editor (Sir Henry Ellis) a silver token or substitute for money, marked to the amount of ten pounds, which appears to have passed among the players for the groom-porter's benefit at Basset. It is within the size of a half-crown, one inch and a half in diameter. In the centre

L

of the obverse within an inner circle is x: Legend round,

X

AT. THE. GROOM. PORTERS. BASSETT. Mint-mark, a fleur-delis. On the reverse, a wreath issuing from the sides of, and surmounting, a gold coronet: the coronet being of gold let in. Legend, NOTHING. VENTURD. NOTHING. WINNS. Mint-mark, again, a fleur-de-lis. Brand Hollis had one of these pieces. They are of very rare occurrence.

The groom-porter was formerly a distinct officer in the lord-steward's department of the royal household. His

1 This is also in Herrick's Hesperides, p. 374.

business was to see the king's lodgings furnished with tables, chairs, stools, and firing; as also to provide cards, dice, &c., and to decide disputes arising at cards, dice, bowling, &c. From allusions in some of Ben Jonson's and of Chapman's plays, it appears that he was allowed to keep an open gambling table at Christmas; and it is mentioned as still existing in one of Lady Mary Montague's eclogues :

"At the groom-porters batter'd bullies play."

Thursday. Ecl. iv. Dodsley's Collect. i. 107.

This abuse was removed in the reign of George III.; but Bray, in his Account of the Lord of Misrule, in Archæologia, xviii. 317, says, George I. and II. played hazard in public on certain days, attended by the groom-porter. The appellation, however, is still kept up the names of three groom-porters occurring among the inferior servants in the present enumeration of her Majesty's household.

ST. AGNES'S DAY, OR EVE.
JANUARY 21.

ST. AGNES was a Roman virgin and martyr, who suffered in the tenth persecution under the Emperor Dioclesian, A.D. 306. She was condemned to be debauched in the public stews before her execution, but her virginity was miraculously preserved by lightning and thunder from heaven. About eight days after her execution, her parents, going to lament and pray at her tomb, saw a vision of angels, among whom was their daughter, and a lamb standing by her as white as snow, on which account it is that in every graphic representation of her there is a lamb pictured by her side.

On the eve of her day many kinds of divination were practised by virgins to discover their future husbands. [Dreams were the most ordinary media for making the desired discovery, and many allusions to the belief may be traced even in late works. The following notice of it occurs in Poor Robin's Almanack for 1734:

"Saint Agnes Day comes by and by,

When pretty maids do fast to try

Their sweethearts in their dreams to see,
Or know who shall their husbands be.
But some when married all is ore,
And they desire to dream no more,

Or, if they must have these extreams,

Wish all their sufferings were but dreams."

And in the same periodical for the previous year, 1733, we have a similar account :

"Tho' Christmas pleasure now is gone,

St. Agnes' Fast is coming on;

When maids who fain would married be,
Do fast their sweethearts for to see.
This year it has come so about,
That Sunday shoves St. Agnes out:

But lovers who would fortunes tell,

May find her here, and that's as well."]

This is called fasting St. Agnes's Fast. The following lines of Ben Jonson allude to this:

And on sweet St. Anna's night
Please you with the promis'd sight,
Some of husbands, some of lovers,
Which an empty dream discovers.

Aubrey, in his Miscellanies, p. 136, directs that, " Upon St. Agnes's Night, you take a row of pins, and pull out every one, one after another, saying a paternoster, sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him or her you shall

Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (ed. 1660, p. 538), speaks of Maids fasting on St. Agnes's Eve, to know who shall be their first husband. In Cupid's Whirligig, 1616, iii. 1, Pag says, "I could find in my heart to pray nine times

I find the subsequent curious passage concerning St. Agnes, in the Portiforium seu Breviarium Ecclesiæ Sarisburiensis, fol. Par. 1556. Pars. Hyemalis: "Cumque interrogasset præses quis esset sponsus de cujus se Agnes potestate gloriabatur, exstitit quidam ex parasitis qui diceret hanc Christianam esse ab infantia, et magicis artibus ita occupatam, ut dicatur sponsum suum Christum esse. R. Jam corpus ejus corpori meo sociatum est, et sanguis ejus ornavit genas meas. Cujus mater Virgo est, cujus pater feminam nescit. Ipsi sum desponsata cui angeli serviunt, cujus pulchritudinem Sol et Luna mirantur, cujus mater Virgo."

to the moone, and fast three St. Agnes's Eves, so that I might bee sure to have him to my husband."

The following is the account of this festival, as preserved in the Translation of Naogeorgus, f. 46:

"Then commes in place St. Agnes' Day, which here in Germanie
Is not so much esteemde nor kept with such solemnitie:
But in the Popish Court it standes in passing hie degree,
As spring and head of wondrous gaine, and great commoditee.
For in St. Agnes' church upon this day while masse they sing,
Two lambes as white as snowe the nonnes do yearely use to bring
And when the Agnus chaunted is upon the aulter hie,
(For in this thing there hidden is a solemne mysterie)

They offer them. The servants of the pope, when this is done,
Do put them into pasture good till shearing time be come.

Then other wooll they mingle with these holy fleeces twaine,
Wherof, being sponne and drest, are made the pals of passing
gaine."

A passage not unsimilar occurs in The Present State of the Manners, &c. of France and Italy-in Poetical Epistles to Robert Jephson, Esq., 8vo. Lond. 1794, from Rome, February, 14, 1793, p. 58.

St. Agnes's Shrine.

"Where each pretty Ba-lamb most gayly appears,
With ribands stuck round on its tail and its ears;
On gold fringed cushions they're stretch'd out to eat,
And piously ba, and to church-musick bleat;
Yet to me they seem'd crying-alack, and alas !
What's all this white damask to daisies and grass!
Then they're brought to the pope, and with transport
they're kiss'd,

And receive consecration from Sanctity's fist:

To chaste nuns he consigns them, instead of their dams,
And orders the friars to keep them from rams."

["There are two remarkable days this month, and both on the getting hand, which our customers like best. There is St. Agnes's Fast, for the maids to get sweethearts, which happens the twenty-first day; and Term begins on the twenty-third day, for the lawyers to get money, but it is with a difference, and the lawyers in this, as indeed in most other cases, have the advantage. The maids, if they do undergo the mortification of fasting, expect nothing but a dream for their labour; only if they dream of the man that afterwards they are married to, it makes amends. But the lawyer is not buoy'd up with dreams, for he is awake, and will have the money, ipso facto, before he speaks; and if the client lose both cause and money, it will make him awake too."-Poor Robin, 1733.]