It was not so of old. The climate, perhaps, was more severe than
now; the transition from winter to spring more sudden, like that of
Scandinavia now. Clearage of forests and drainage of land have
equalized our seasons, or rather made them more uncertain. More
broken winters are followed by more broken springs; and May-day is no
longer a marked point to be kept as a festival by all childlike
hearts. The merry month of May is merry only in stage songs. The
May garlands and dances are all but gone: the borrowed plate, and
the milkmaids who borrowed it, gone utterly. No more does Mrs. Pepys
go to 'lie at Woolwich, in order to a little ayre and to gather May-
dew' for her complexion, by Mrs. Turner's advice. The Maypole is
gone likewise; and never more shall the puritan soul of a Stubbs be
aroused in indignation at seeing 'against Maie, every parish, towne,
and village assemble themselves together, both men, women, and
children, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodes
and groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night in
pastyme, and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birch
bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. . . .
They have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweete
nosegay of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these draw
home this Maypole (this stincking idol rather) which is covered all
over with flowers and hearbes, with two or three hundred men, women,
and children following it with great devotion. . . And then they
fall to banquet and feast, daunce and leap about it, as the heathen
people did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this is a
perfect pattern, or the thing itself.'

This, and much more, says poor Stubbs, in his 'Anatomie of Abuses,'
and had, no doubt, good reason enough for his virtuous indignation at