rank; and as their masters attended
them, whenever it happened that these performed their offices clumsily,
doubtless with some recollections of their own similar misdemeanors, the
slave made the master leap into the water head-foremost. No one was
allowed to be angry, and he who was played on, if he loved his own
comfort, would be the first to laugh. Glasses of all sizes were to be
ready, and all were to drink when and what they chose; none but the most
skilful musicians and tumblers were allowed to perform, for those people
are worth nothing unless exquisite, as the Saturnalian laws decreed.
Dancing, singing, and shouting, and carrying a female musician thrice
round on their shoulders, accompanied by every grotesque humour they
imagined, were indulged in that short week, which was to repay the many
in which the masters had their revenge for the reign of this pretended
equality. Another custom prevailed at this season: the priests performed
their sacrifices to Saturn bare-headed, which Pitiscus explains in the
spirit of this extraordinary institution, as designed to show that time
discovers, or, as in the present case of the bare-headed priests,
uncovers, all things.

Such was the Roman Saturnalia, the favourite popular recreations of
Paganism; and as the sports and games of the people outlast the date of
their empires, and are carried with them, however they may change their
name and their place on the globe, the grosser pleasures of the
Saturnalia were too well adapted to their tastes to be forgotten. The
Saturnalia, therefore, long generated the most extraordinary
institutions among the nations of modern Europe; and what seems more
extraordinary than the unknown origin of the parent absurdity itself,
the Saturnalia crept into the services and offices of the Christian
church. Strange it is to observe at the altar the rites of religion
burlesqued, and all its offices performed with the utmost buffoonery. It
is only by tracing them to the Roman Saturnalia that we can at all
account for these grotesque sports--that extraordinary mixture of
libertinism and profaneness, so long continued under Christianity.

Such were the feasts of the ass, the feast of fools or madmen, _fete des
fous_--the feast of the bull--of the Innocents--and that of the
_soudiacres_, which, perhaps, in its original term, meant only
sub-deacons, but their conduct was expressed by the conversion of a pun
into _saoudiacres_ or _diacres saouls_, drunk