dy
embraced over and over again with a terrible energy, that they came
through it all with whole ribs is as near to being a miracle as anything
that has happened in modern times!

Gradually the storm subsided--though not without some fierce
after-gusts--and at last worked itself off harmlessly in song: as we
returned to the ritual of the evening and took to the singing of
noels--the Christmas canticles which are sung between the ending of the
Great Supper and the beginning of the midnight mass.

XIV

The Provencal noels--being some real, or some imagined, incident of the
Nativity told in verse set to a gay or tender air--are the creche
translated into song. The simplest of them are direct renderings of the
Bible narrative. Our own Christmas hymn, "While shepherds watched their
flocks by night," is precisely of this order; and, indeed, is of the
very period when flourished the greatest of the Provencal noel writers:
for the Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, whose laurel this hymn keeps green,
was born in the year 1652 and had begun his mildly poetic career while
Saboly still was alive.

But most of the noels--_nouve_, they are called in Provencal--are purely
imaginative: quaintly innocent stories created by the poets, or taken
from those apocryphal scriptures in which the simple-minded faithful of
Patristic times built up a warmly coloured legend of the Virgin's life
and of the birth and childhood of her Son. Sometimes, even, the writers
stray away entirely from a religious base and produce mere roistering
catches or topical songs. Such are those Marseille noels which are
nothing more than Pantagruelian lists of succulent dishes proper to
Christmas time--frankly ending, in one case, with the materialistic
query: "What do I care for the future, now that my belly is well lined?"
It was against such "bacchanals of noel" that the worthy Father Cotton
preached in Marseille in the year 1602: but the flesh and the devil
always have had things pretty much their own way in that gay city, and
he preached in vain. And at Aix-en-Provence the most popular noel of all
that were sung in the cathedral was a satirical review of the events of
the year: that as time went on grew to be more and more of a scandal,
until at last the Bishop had to put a stop to it in the year 1653.

The Provencaux have been writing noels for more than four hundred years.
One of the oldest belongs to the first half of the fifteenth century and
is ascribed to Ra