ng is to the
Greek of to-day the "anoixis," "the Opening," and it was in spring and
with rites of spring that both Greek and Roman originally began their
year. It was this spring festival that gave to the Greek their god
Dionysos and in part his drama.

* * * * *

In Cambridge on May Day two or three puzzled and weary little boys and
girls are still to be sometimes seen dragging round a perambulator with
a doll on it bedecked with ribbons and a flower or two. That is all that
is left in most parts of England of the Queen of the May and
Jack-in-the-Green, though here and there a maypole survives and is
resuscitated by enthusiasts about folk-dances. But in the days of "Good
Queen Bess" merry England, it would seem, was lustier. The Puritan
Stubbs, in his _Anatomie of Abuses_,[11] thus describes the festival:

"They have twentie or fortie yoke of oxen, every oxe havyng a
sweete nosegaie of flowers tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and
these oxen draw home this Maiepoole (this stinckying idoll rather),
which is covered all over with flowers and hearbes, bound round
aboute with stringes from the top to the bottome, and sometyme
painted with variable colours, with two or three hundred men,
women, and children, following it with great devotion. And thus
beyng reared up, with handkerchiefes and flagges streaming on the
toppe, they strewe the ground about, binde greene boughs about it,
set up summer haules, bowers, and arbours hard by it. And then fall
they to banquet and feast, to leap and daunce aboute it, as the
heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this
is a perfect patterne or rather the thyng itself."

The stern old Puritan was right, the maypole was the perfect pattern of
a heathen "idoll, or rather the thyng itself." He would have
exterminated it root and branch, but other and perhaps wiser divines
took the maypole into the service of the Christian Church, and still[12]
on May Day in Saffron Walden the spring song is heard with its Christian
moral--

"A branch of May we have brought you,
And at your door it stands;
It is a sprout that is well budded out,
The work of our Lord's hands."

The maypole was of course at first no pole cut down and dried. The gist
of it was that it should be a "sprout, well budded out." The object of
carrying in the May was to bring the very spirit o