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When the relations of slave and master seemed as obvious and necessary as seem to us (let us say) the reading of a daily paper or the taking of a train, yet the obvious and necessary routine was broken in midwinter, the slave was the master for a moment and the master a slave.

When the ritual of the Church was as much a commonplace as the ritual of social life is to us to-day, there was a season (it was this season between Christmas and the Epiphany) when the dead weight of order was lifted and a boy was dressed as a bishop or a donkey was put to chaunt the office, and the people sang:—

Plebs autem respondet:

Hé sire Ane, ho! Chantez!

Vous aurez du foin assez

Et de l’avoine à manger!

When the awful authority of civil and hereditary powers was unquestioned they yet set up in English halls Lords of Misrule who governed that season. The Inns of Court, I believe, delighted in them, and certainly till quite late in the seventeenth century the peasantry of the villages.

It has gone. It will return. During its absence (and may that absence not be much prolonged) perhaps one can see its nature the more clearly because one sees it from the outside and as a distant though a desired thing. Perhaps we, living in a very unreasonable age, when realities are forgotten and imaginaries preferred, when we solemnly reiterate impossibilities, affirm our faith in scientific guesswork and our doubts upon the plain rules of arithmetic, can understand why our much more reasonable fathers thirsted for and obtained these feasts of unreason. It seems to have been a little like the natural craving for temporary oblivion (sleep—a chaos) once in every day; a sort of bath in that muddle or nothingness out of which the world was made. Equality, which lies at the base of society, was brought to surface by a paradox and shown at large. Intensity of conviction and of organisation took refuge in the relief of a momentary—and not meant—denial of that conviction and organisation, and the whole of society collectively expanded its soul by one collective foolery at high pressure, as does the healthy individual by one good farce or peal of laughter when occasion serves.