“Like prince and king he leads the ring; Right merrily we go. Sing hey-trix, trim-go-trix, Under the mistletoe!”
A menagerie let loose, or the most dyspeptic of after-dinner dreams, could not be more bewildering than was this motley train of the Lord of Misrule. Giants and dwarfs, dragons and griffins, hobby-horses and goblins, Robin Hood and the Grand Turk, bears and boars and fantastic animals that never had a name, boys and girls, men and women, in every imaginable costume and device--around and around the hall they went, still ringing out the chorus:
“Sing hey-trix, trim-go-trix, Under the mistletoe!”
Then, standing in the centre of his court, the Lord of Misrule bade his herald declare that from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Night he was Lord Supreme; that, with his magic art, he transformed all there into children, and charged them, on their fealty to act only as such. “I absolve them all from wisdom,” he said; “I bid them be just wise enough to make fools of themselves, and do decree that none shall sit apart in pride and eke in self-sufficiency to laugh at others”; and then the fun commenced.
Off in stately Whitehall, in the palace of the boy king, her brother, the revels were grander and showier; but to the young Elizabeth, not yet skilled in all the stiffness of the royal court, the Yule-tide feast at Hatfield House brought pleasure enough; and so, seated at her holly-trimmed virginal--that great-great-grandfather of the piano of to-day,--she, whose rare skill as a musician has come down to us, would--when wearied with her “prankes and japes”--“tap through” some fitting Christmas carol, or that older lay of the Yule-tide “Mumming”:
To shorten winter’s sadness see where the folks with gladness Disguised, are all a-coming, right wantonly a-mumming,
Fa-la! “Whilst youthful sports are lasting, to feasting turn our fasting: With revels and with wassails make grief and care our vassals, Fa-la!”
The Yule-log had been noisily dragged in “to the firing,” and as the big sparks raced up the wide chimney, the boar’s head and the tankard of sack, the great Christmas candle and the Christmas pie, were escorted around the room to the flourish of trumpets and welcoming shouts; the Lord of Misrule, with a wave of his staff, was about to give the order for all to unmask, when suddenly there appeared in the circle a new character--a great green dragon, as fierce and ferocious as well could be, from his pasteboard jaws to his curling canvas tail. The green dragon of Wantley! Terrified urchins backed hastily away from his horrible jaws, and the Lord of Misrule gave a sudden and visible start. The dragon himself, scarce waiting for the surprise to subside, waved his paw for silence, and said, in a hollow, pasteboardy voice: