g to Aubrey, is the
saying, "Round about our coal-fire." Christmas was considered as the
commemoration of a holy festival, to be observed with cheerfulness as
well as devotion. The comforts and personal gratification of their
dependants were provided for by the landlords, their merriment
encouraged, and their sports joined. The working man looked forward to
Christmas as the time which repaid his former toils; and gratitude for
worldly comforts then received caused him to reflect on the eternal
blessings bestowed on mankind by the event then commemorated.

[Illustration: SERVANTS' CHRISTMAS FEAST.]

Of all our English poets, Robert Herrick, a writer of the seventeenth
century, has left us the most complete contemporary picture of the
Christmas season. He was born in Cheapside, London, and received his
early education, it is supposed, at Westminster School, whence he
removed to Cambridge, and after taking his M.A. degree in 1620, left
Cambridge. He afterwards spent some years in London in familiar
intercourse with the wits and writers of the age, enjoying those
"lyric feasts" which are celebrated in his "Ode to Ben Jonson":--

"Ah Ben!
Say how or when
Shall we, thy guests
Meet at those lyric feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun;
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad?
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine."

In 1629 he accepted the living of Dean Prior, in Devonshire, where he
lived as a bachelor Vicar, being ejected by the Long Parliament,
returning on the Restoration under Charles the Second, and dying at
length at the age of eighty-four. He was buried in the Church at Dean
Prior, where a memorial tablet has latterly been erected to his
memory. And it is fitting that he should die and be buried in the
quiet Devonshire hamlet from which he drew so much of his happiest
inspiration, and which will always be associated now with the endless
charm of the "Hesperides."

In "A New Year's Gift, sent to Sir Simeon Steward," included in his
"Hesperides," Herrick refers to the Christmas sports of the time, and
says:--

"No new device or late-found trick

* * * * *

We send you; but here a jolly
Verse crowned with ivy and with holly;
That tells of winter's tales and mirth,
That milk-maids make about the hearth,
Of Christmas sports, the W