f the time. Christmas Day was the morning of the
season; New Year's Day the middle of it, or noon; Twelfth Night is
the night, brilliant with innumerable planets of Twelfth-cakes. The
whole island keeps court; nay, all Christendom. All the world are
|338| kings and queens. Everybody is somebody else, and learns at
once to laugh at, and to tolerate, characters different from his own,
by enacting them. Cakes, characters, forfeits, lights, theatres,
merry rooms, little holiday-faces, and, last not least, the painted
sugar on the cakes, so bad to eat but so fine to look at, useful
because it is perfectly useless except for a sight and a moral--all
conspire to throw a giddy splendour over the last night of the
season, and to send it to bed in pomp and colours, like a
Prince."{2}

* * * * *

For seventeenth-century banqueting customs and the connection of the cake
with the "King of the Bean" Herrick may be quoted:--

"Now, now the mirth comes
With the cake full of plums,
Where bean's the king of the sport here;
Besides we must know,
The pea also
Must revel as queen in the court here.

Begin then to choose
This night as ye use,
Who shall for the present delight here
Be a king by the lot,
And who shall not
Be Twelfth-day queen for the night here

Which known, let us make
Joy-sops with the cake;
And let not a man then be seen here,
Who unurg'd will not drink,
To the base from the brink,
A health to the king and the queen here."{3}

There are many English references to the custom of electing a Twelfth Day
monarch by means of a bean or pea, and this "king" is mentioned in royal
accounts as early as the reign of Edward II.{4} He appears, however, to
have been even more popular in France than in England.

|339| The method of choosing the Epiphany king is thus described by the
sixteenth-century writer, Etienne Pasquier:--

"When the cake has been cut into as many portions as there are
guests, a small child is put under the table, and is interrogated by
the master under the name of Phebe [Phoebus], as if he were a child
who in the innocence of his age represented a kind of Apollo's
oracle. To this questioning the child answers with a Latin word:
_Domine_. Thereupon the master calls on him to say to whom he shall
give th