TIDINGS I bring you for to tell The Boar's Head in Hand I bring The Boar's Head in Hand bring I watc bell INTRODUCTION.1 Orinel beile OME years ago I walked down to Seven Oaks, in Kent, to enjoy the blessed Christmas. This village is one of a few in the vicinity of London uncontaminated by a railway with its crowd of giddy visitors from the great city. I had just returned from abroad, after a long residence there, and even the minor observances and customs of the season possessed a pleasing novelty and charm. As I passed through Bromley I observed the shops, filled with viands for the great yearly feast, decorated with the emblems of the season. The above representation of a Wassail Bowl is from a carving on a chimney-piece of an old mansion formerly existing at Birling, Kent. The terms Wassail and Drinkhail are both from the Anglo-Saxon. The former is equivalent to the modern phrase, “Your health;" and the latter means, in plain English," Drink health." See under " Festive Carols," page 161. Christmas Carols doubtless had their origin in that celestial music which Milton describes in his " Hymn to the Nativity:" "Such music (as 'tis said) Before was never made But when of old the sons of morning sung, His constellations set." The oldest religious hymns, sung by the early Christians in the centuries immediately following Christ's death, have not been handed down to us. The most ancient Carols that we now possess date from the Middle Ages, and consist generally of portions of miracle plays, religious spectacles, and old religious legends. Thus one miracle play, the most popular, perhaps, of any of these biblical representations, “The Creation of the World," has supplied several Carols. It was acted in London so late as the reign of Queen Anne. The introduction in the same performance of Adam and Eve, Herod, and the Duke of Marlborough, cannot be considered as good taste, however much the blending of antediluvian with current history may have contributed to fill Mr. Heatly's purse. The handbill to the performance reads thus ;—I have italicised those scenes which now form the subject of Carols: |