their necessities, and to thank him for his benefits. Thus the
Grecian holidays were celebrated with offerings to Bacchus and Ceres
and other deities, to whose bounty they supposed they were owing for
their corn and wine and other helps of life. And the ancient
Romans, as Horace tells us, paid their thanks to Mother Earth or
Vesta, to Silvanus, and their Genius in the same manner. But as all
festivals have a double reason of their institution--the first of
religion, the other of recreation for the unbending of our minds--so
both the Grecians and Romans agreed (after their sacrifices were
performed) to spend the remainder of the day in sports and
merriments; amongst which songs and dances, and that which they
called wit (for want of knowing better), were the chiefest
entertainments. The Grecians had a notion of Satyrs, whom I have
already described; and taking them and the Sileni--that is, the
young Satyrs and the old--for the tutors, attendants, and humble
companions of their Bacchus, habited themselves like those rural
deities, and imitated them in their rustic dances, to which they
joined songs with some sort of rude harmony, but without certain
numbers; and to these they added a kind of chorus.

The Romans also, as nature is the same in all places, though they
knew nothing of those Grecian demi-gods, nor had any communication
with Greece, yet had certain young men who at their festivals danced
and sang after their uncouth manner to a certain kind of verse which
they called Saturnian. What it was we have no certain light from
antiquity to discover; but we may conclude that, like the Grecian,
it was void of art, or, at least, with very feeble beginnings of it.
Those ancient Romans at these holy days, which were a mixture of
devotion and debauchery, had a custom of reproaching each other with
their faults in a sort of extempore poetry, or rather of tunable