him to be a squire minstrel, or a minstrel of the superior order. A note in Urry's Chaucer (1721) says: "Minstrels used a red hat." Tom Piper's bonnet is red, faced or turned up with yellow, his doublet blue, the sleeves blue, turned up with yellow, and something like red muffettees at his wrists. Over his doublet is a red garment, like a short cloak with arm-holes, with a yellow cape, his hose red, and garnished across and perpendicularly on the thighs with a narrow yellow lace; and his shoes are brown. THE HOBBY HORSE. Tollet, in his Description of the Morris dancers in his Window, is induced to think the famous hobby horse to be the King of the May, though he now appear as a juggler and a buffoon, from the crimson foot-cloth fretted with gold, the golden bit, the purple bridle, with a golden tassel and studded with gold, the man's purple mantle with a golden border, which is latticed with purple, his golden crown, and purple cap, with a red feather and with a golden knop. "Our Hobby," he adds, "is a spirited horse of paste-board, in which the master dances and displays tricks of legerdemain, such as the threading of the needle, the mimicking of the whigh-hie, and the daggers in the nose, &c., as Ben Jonson acquaints us, and thereby explains the swords in the man's cheeks. What is stuck in the horse's mouth I apprehend to be a ladle, ornamented with a ribbon. Its use was to receive the spectators' pecuniary donations." "The colour of the Hobby Horse is a reddish white, like the beautiful blossom of the peach-tree. The man's coat, or doublet, is the only one upon the window that has buttons upon it, and the right side of it is yellow, and the left red." In Sampson's The Vow-Breaker, or the Fayre Maid of Clifton (1636), is the following dialogue between Miles, the Miller of Ruddington, and Ball, which throws great light upon this now obsolete character: "Ball. But who shall play the Hobby Horse? Master Major? "Miles. I hope I looke as like a Hobby Horse as Master Major. I have not liv'd to these yeares, but a man woo'd thinke I should be old enough and wise enough to play the Hobby Horse as well as ever a Major on 'em all. Let the Major play the Hobby Horse among his brethren, and he will; I hope our towne ladds cannot want a Hobby Horse. Have I practic'd my reines, my carree'res, my pranckers, my ambles, my false trotts, my smooth ambles, and Canterbury paces, and shall Master Major put me besides the Hobby Horse? Have I borrow'd the fore horse-bells, his plumes, and braveries, nay, had his mane new shorne and frizl'd, and shall the Major put me besides the Hobby Horse? Let him hobby-horse at home, and he will. Am I not going to buy ribbons and toyes of sweet Ursula for the Marian, and shall I not play the Hobby Horse? The foot-cloth, however, was used by the fool. Strappado for the Divell we read: "Erect our aged Fortunes make them shine In Brathwaite's "Ball. What shall Joshua doe? "Miles. Not know of it, by any meanes; hee'l keepe more stir with the Hobby Horse then he did with the Pipers at Tedbury Bull-running : provide thou for the Dragon, and leave me for a Hobby-Horse. "Ball. Feare not, I'le be a fiery Dragon." And afterwards, when Boote askes him : "Miles, the Miller of Ruddington, gentleman and souldier, what make you here? "Miles. Alas, Sir, to borrow a few ribbandes, bracelets, eare-rings, wyer-tyers, and silke girdles and hand-kerchers for a Morice, and a show before the Queene. "Boote. Miles, you came to steale my Neece. "Miles. Oh Lord! Sir, I came to furnish the Hobby Horse. "Boote. Get into your Hobby Horse, gallop, and be gon then, or I'le Moris dance you-Mistris, waite you on me. Exit. "Ursula. Farewell, good Hobby Horse.-Weehee." Exit. Douce informs us that the earliest vestige now remaining of the hobby horse is in the painted window at Betley, already described. "The allusions to the omission of the hobby horse are frequent in the old plays, and the line, 'For O, for O, the Hobby Horse is forgot,' is termed by Hamlet an epitaph, which Theobald supposed, with great probability, to have been satirical." A scene in Beaumont and Fletcher's Women Pleased, act iv., best shows the sentiments of the Puritans on this occasion. "Whoever," says Douce, "happens to recollect the manner in which Mr Bayes's troops, in The Rehearsal, are exhibited on the stage, will have a tolerably correct notion of a Morris Hobby Horse. Additional remains of the Pyrrhic, or sword-dance, are preserved in the daggers stuck in the man's cheeks, which constituted one of the hocus-pocus or legerdemain tricks practised by this character, among which were the threading of a needle, and the transferring of an egg from one hand to the other, called by Ben Jonson the travels of the egg. To the horse's mouth was suspended a ladle, for the purpose of gathering money from the spectators. In later times the fool appears to have performed this office, as may be collected from Nashe's play of Summer's Last Will and Testament, where this stage-direction occurs : 'Ver goes in and fetcheth out the Hobby-horse and the Morrice Daunce, who daunce about.' Ver then says: About, about, lively, put your horse to it, reyne him harder, jerke him with your wand, sit fast, sit fast, man; Foole, hold up your ladle there. Will Summers is made to say, 'You friend with the Hobby Horse, goe not too fast, for fear of wearing out my lord's tyle-stones with your hob-nayles.' Afterwards there enter three clowns and three maids, who dance the Morris, and at the same time sing the following song: 'Trip and goe, heave and hoe, Up and downe, to and fro, * Every Man out of his Humour, Act ii. sc. I. From the towne, to the grove, Walpole, in his Catalogue of English Engravers, under the name of Peter Stent, has described two paintings at Lord Fitzwilliam's on Richmond Green, which came out of the old neighbouring palace. They were executed by Vinckenboom about the end of the reign of James I., and exhibit views of the above palace. In one of these pictures a Morris dance is introduced, consisting of seven figures, viz. a fool, a hobby horse, a piper, a Maid Marian, and three other dancers, the rest of the figures being spectators. Of these, the first four and one of the dancers Douce has reduced in a plate from a tracing made by Grose. The fool has an inflated bladder or eel-skin, with a ladle at the end of it, and with this he is collecting money. The piper is pretty much in his original state; but the hobby horse wants the legerdemain apparatus, and Maid Marian is not remarkable for the elegance of her person. A short time before the Revolution in France, according to Douce, the May games and Morris dance were celebrated in many parts of that country, accompanied by a fool and a hobby horse. The latter was termed un chevalet; and, if the authority of Minshew be not questionable, the Spaniards had the same character under the name of tarasca. ST URBAN'S DAY. NDER St Paul's day, we have shown that it is customary in river, if on the day of his feast it happens to be foul weather. Aubanus tells us that "Upon St Urban's Day all the vintners and masters of vineyards set a table either in the market-steed, or in some other open and public place, and covering it with fine napery, and strawing upon it greene leaves and sweete flowers, do place upon the table the image of that holy bishop, and then if the day be cleare and faire, they crown the image with greate store of wine; but if the weather prove rugged and rainie, they cast filth, mire, and puddle water upon it; persuading themselves that, if the day be faire and calme, their grapes, which then begin to flourish, will prove good that year; but if it be stormie and tempestuous, they shall have a bad vintage." The same anecdote is related in the Popish Kingdome of Naogeorgus. 153 Oth ROYAL OAK DAY. N the twenty-ninth of May,* the anniversary of the Restoration of Charles II., it is still customary, especially in the North of England, for the common people to wear in their hats the leaves of the oak, which are sometimes covered on the occasion with leaf-gold. This is done, as everybody knows, in commemoration of the marvellous escape of that monarch from those that were in pursuit of him, who passed under the very oak tree in which he had secreted himself after the decisive battle of Worcester. "It was the custom, some years back," says Caulfield in his Memoirs of Remarkable Persons, "to decorate the monument of Richard Penderell (in the church-yard of St Giles in the Fields, London), on the 29th of May, with oak branches; but, in proportion to the decay of popularity in kings, this practice has declined." Had the writer attributed the decline of this custom to the increasing distance of time from the event that first gave rise to it, he would perhaps have come much nearer to the truth. The boys at Newcastle-upon-Tyne had formerly a taunting rhyme on this occasion, with which they used to insult such persons as they met on this day who had not oak-leaves in their hats "Royal Oak, The Whigs to provoke." There was a retort courteous by others, who contemptuously wore plane-tree leaves, which is of the same homely sort of stuff "Plane-tree leaves; The Church-folk are thieves." Puerile and low as these and such like sarcasms may appear, yet they breathe strongly that party spirit which they were intended to promote, and which it is the duty of every good citizen and real lover of his country to endeavour to suppress. The party spirit on this occasion shewed itself very early for, in The Lord's Loud Call to England (1660), we read of the following judgment, as related by the Puritans, on an old woman for her loyalty "An antient poor woman went from Wapping to London to buy flowers, about the 6th or 7th of May 1660, to make garlands for the "May the 29th, says the author of the Festa Anglo-Romana (1678), is celebrated upon a double account; first, in commemoration of the birth of our soveraign king Charles the Second, the princely son of his royal father Charles the First of happy memory, and Mary the daughter of Henry the Fourth, the French king, who was born the 29th day of May 1630; and also, by Act of Parliament, 12 Car. II. by the passionate desires of the people, in memory of his most happy Restoration to his crown and dignity, after twelve years forced exile from his undoubted right, the crown of England, by barbarous rebels and regicides." day of the king's proclamation (that is, May 8th), to gather the youths together to dance for the garland; and when she had bought the flowers, and was going homewards, a cart went over part of her body, and bruised her for it, just before the doors of such as she might vex thereby. But since, she remains in a great deal of misery by the bruise she had gotten, and cryed out, the devil! saying, the devil had owed her a shame, and now thus he had paid her. It's judged at the writing hereof that she will never overgrow it." It is also stated that soldiers were whipped almost to death, and turned out of the service, for wearing boughs in their hats on the 29th of May 1716. The Royal Oak was standing in Stukeley's time, enclosed with a brick wall, but almost cut away in the middle by travellers, whose curiosity had led them to see it. The king, after the Restoration, reviewing the place, carried some of the acorns, and set them in St James's Park or Garden, and used to water them himself. "A bow-shoot from Boscobel - house," says Stukeley, in his Itinerarium Curiosum, “just by a horse-track passing through the wood, stood the Royal Oak, into which the king and his companion, colonel Carlos, climbed by means of the hen-roost ladder, when they judg'd it no longer safe to stay in the house; the family reaching them victuals with the nut-hook. The tree is now enclosed in with a brick wall, the inside whereof is covered with lawrel, of which we may say, as Ovid did of that before the Augustan palace, 'mediamque tuebere quercum.' Close by its side grows a young thriving plant from one of its acorns.' In Shipman's Carolina, or Loyal Poems (1683), are the following thoughts on this subject "Blest Charles then to an oak his safety owes ; The Royal Oak! which now in songs shall live, Let celebrated wits, with laurels crown'd, And wreaths of bays, boast their triumphant brows; I will esteem myself far more renown'd In being honour'd with these oaken boughs. The Genii of the Druids hover'd here, Who under oaks did Britain's glories sing; Which, since, in Charles completed did appear: They gladly came now to protect their king.” At Tiverton in Devon it was customary on this day for a number of young men, dressed in the style of the seventeenth century, and armed with swords, to parade the streets and gather contributions from the inhabitants. At the head of the procession walked a man called Oliver, dressed in black, with his face and hands besmeared with soot and grease, and his body bound by a strong cord, the end of which was held to prevent his running too far. Next came another troop, similarly arrayed, each man bearing a large branch of oak, while four others, carrying a throne made of oaken boughs on which sat a |