sports, namely, Sathan prince of hel. But the chiefest jewel
they bring from thence is their May-pole, (say rather their
stinking poole,) which they bring home with great veneration."

Who does not remember Lysander's appointment with Hermia:

----"in that wood, a league without the town,
Where I did meet thee once with Helena,
To do observance to a morn of May,
There will I stay for thee."

These passages point us to the time when man and nature met to rejoice
together on May-day: to the time before the days of the workhouse and
factory; when the length and breadth of the land rung to the joyaunce
and glee of the holiday-rejoicing nation, and the gay sounds careered on
fresh breezes even where now the dense atmosphere of Manchester or
Ashton glooms over the dens of torture in which withered and debauched
children are forced to their labour, and the foul haunts under the
shelter of which desperate men hatch plots of rapine and slaughter.

The poem shows that the Romans, like the English of those days,
celebrated the season by betaking themselves to the woods throughout the
night, where they kept a vigil in honour of Venus, to whose guardianship
the month of April was assigned, as being the universal generating and
producing power, and more especially to be adored as such by the Romans,
from having been, through her son Æneas, the author of their race. The
poem seems to have been composed with a view to its being sung by a
choir of maidens in their nocturnal rambles beneath the soft light of an
Italian moon. The delicious balm of that voluptuous climate breathes
through every line of it, and vividly presents to the reader's