on of the ceremony of electing a boy-bishop, probably
changed at the time of the suppression of the religious festivals at the
Reformation.

One other pageant, more especially connected with the history of a
manufacturing city, is the procession of Bishop Blaize, or St. Blazius,
the great patron saint of wool-combers; in which usually figured Jason,
the hero of the "golden fleece," and forty Argonauts on horseback, the
emblems of the expedition, preceded by Hercules, Peace, Plenty, and
Britannia. These were followed by the bishop, dressed in episcopal
costume, crowned with a mitre of wool, drawn in an open chariot by six
horses, and attended by vergers, bands of music, the city standard, a
chaplain, and orators delivering, at intervals, grandiloquent speeches.
Seven companies of wool-combers on foot, and five on horseback, brought
up the rear; shepherds, shepherdesses, tastefully attired in fancy
costumes, added to the brilliancy of the display. Bishop Blazius, the
principal personage in the festivity, was Bishop of Sebesta, in Armenia,
and the reputed inventor of the art of combing wool. The Romish church
canonized the saint, and attributed to his miraculous interposition many
wondrous miracles. Divers charms, also, for extracting thorns from the
body, or a bone from the throat, were prescribed to be uttered in his
name.

Among the festivals that lay claim to antiquity, of which some faint
traces, at least, are left in the observances of the nineteenth century,
are some few that belong as much to the history of the present as the
past, and must not be omitted in sketches of the characteristic features
of an old city. The Fair--the great annual gatherings of wooden houses
and wooden horses, tin trumpets, and spice nuts, Diss bread, and
gingerbread--menageries of wild natural history, and caravans of tame
_unnatural_ collections, giants, dwarfs, albinos, and _lusus naturae_ of
every conceivable deformity--of things above the earth and under the
earth, in the sea and out of the sea--of panoramas, dioramas--wax-works,
with severable heads and moving countenances--of Egyptian tents, with
glass factories in miniature concealed within their mystic folds, under
the guidance of the glass-wigged alchemist, the presiding
genius--performing canaries, doing the Mr. and Mrs. Caudle, and firing
off pistols--pert hares playing on the tambourine, and targets and guns
to be played with for prizes of nuts, and whirligigs and
rocki