Sing hey-trix, trim-go-trix,
Under the mistletoe!"
A menagerie let loose, or the most dyspeptic of after-dinner
dreams, could not be more bewildering than was this motley train
of the Lord of Misrule. Giants and dwarfs, dragons and griffins,
hobby-horses and goblins, Robin Hood and the Grand Turk, bears
and boars and fantastic animals that never had a name, boys and
girls, men and women, in every imaginable costume and
device--around and around the hall they went, still ringing out
the chorus:
"Sing hey-trix, trim-go-trix,
Under the mistletoe!"
Then, standing in the centre of his court, the Lord of Misrule
bade his herald declare that from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Night
he was Lord Supreme; that, with his magic art, he transformed all
there into children, and charged them, on their fealty to act
only as such. "I absolve them all from wisdom," he said; "I bid
them be just wise enough to make fools of themselves, and do
decree that none shall sit apart in pride and eke in
self-sufficiency to laugh at others"; and then the fun commenced.
Off in stately Whitehall, in the palace of the boy king, her
brother, the revels were grander and showier; but to the young
Elizabeth, not yet skilled in all the stiffness of the royal
court, the Yule-tide feast at Hatfield House brought pleasure
enough; and so, seated at her holly-trimmed virginal--that
great-great-grandfather of the piano of to-day,--she, whose rare
skill as a musician has come down to us, would--when wearied with
her "prankes and japes"--"tap through" some fitting Christmas
carol, or that older lay of the Yule-tide "Mumming":
To shorten winter's sadness see where the folks with gladness
Disguised, are all a-coming, right wantonly a-mumming,
Fa-la!
"Whilst youthful sports are lasting, to feasting turn our
fasting:
With revels and with wassails make grief and care our vassals,
Fa-la!"
The Yule-log had been noisily dragged in "to the firing," and as
the big sparks raced up the wide chimney, the boar's head and the
tankard of sack, the great Christmas candle and the Christmas
pie, were escorted around the room to the flourish of trumpets
and welcoming shouts; the Lord of Misrule, with a wave of his
staff, was about to give the order for all to unmask, when
suddenly there appeared in the circle a new character--a great
green dragon, as fierce and ferocious as well could be, from his
pasteboard jaws to his curling canvas tail.
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