t their dazzling gifts. Truly these old miracle-plays, and the
carved work of cunning hands that they inspired, are worth to us
more than all the delicate creations of Italian pencils. Our homely
Northern churches still retain, for the child who reads their bosses
and their sculptured fronts, more Christmas poetry than we can find
in Fra Angelico's devoutness or the liveliness of Giotto. Not that
Southern artists have done nothing for our Christmas. Cimabue's
gigantic angels at Assisi, and the radiant seraphs of Raphael or of
Signorelli, were seen by Milton in his Italian journey. He gazed in
Romish churches on graceful Nativities, into which Angelico and
Credi threw their simple souls. How much they tinged his fancy we
cannot say. But what we know of heavenly hierarchies we later men
have learned from Milton; and what he saw he spoke, and what he
spoke in sounding verse lives for us now and sways our reason, and
controls our fancy, and makes fine art of high theology.

Thus have I attempted rudely to recall a scene of mediaeval
Christmas. To understand the domestic habits of that age is not so
easy, though one can fancy how the barons in their halls held
Christmas, with the boar's head and the jester and the great
yule-log. On the dais sat lord and lady, waited on by knight and
squire and page; but down the long hall feasted yeomen and hinds and
men-at-arms. Little remains to us of those days, and we have outworn
their jollity. It is really from the Elizabethan poets that our
sense of old-fashioned festivity arises. They lived at the end of
one age and the beginning of another. Though born to inaugurate the
new era, they belonged by right of association and sympathy to the
period that was fleeting fast away. This enabled them to represent
the poetry of past and present. Old customs and old states of
feeling, when they are about to perish, pass into the realm of art.
For art is like a flower, which consummates the plant and ends its
growth, while it translates its nature into loveliness. Thus Dante
and Lorenzetti and Orcagna enshrined mediaeval theology in works of
imperishable beauty, and Shakspere and his fellows made immortal the
life and manners that were decaying in their own time. Men do not
reflect upon their mode of living till they are passing from one
state to another, and the consciousness of art implies a beginning
of new things. Let one who wishes to appreciate the ideal of an
English Christmas read Shaksp