COUNTRY CUSTOMS.

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The ceremony of carrying Candlemas candles continued in England, till it was repealed for its Popish tendency by an order in council in the second year of King Edward VI. Still the many and various customs, that grew out of it, could not be extirpated by any legal enactments. They assumed a multitude of forms, the innate signification of which is now as much lost to us as that of the characters upon the Egyptian pyramids. Thus Hone tells us, from the communication of some unnamed individual, of a custom that prevailed in Lynne Regis, and which, so far as he knew, was confined to a single family-"The wood-ashes of the family being sold throughout the year as they were made, the person who purchased them annually sent a present at Candlemas Day of a large candle. When night came, the candle was lighted, and, assisted by its illumination, the inmates regaled themselves with cheering draughts of ale and sippings of punch, or some other animating beverage, until the candle had burnt out. The coming of the Candlemas candle was looked forward to by the young ones as an event of some consequence, for of usage they had a sort of right to sit up all night and partake of the refreshments till all retired to rest, the signal for which was the self-extinction of the Candlemas candie."

The peculiar merits of this day are not yet exhausted. It was a favourite epoch for drawing prognostics of the weather, it being held on all hands that the second of February ought on no account to be fine.*

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY.-Saint Valentine ?-all we know of this holy personage is that he was a priest at Rome, where he was martyred about 270, and had in consequence the honour of being assigned a niche in the record of Saints, his post being the 14th of February. Enquiries have been made, but hitherto in vain, to discover what the good bishop had done that should entitle him to have this day above all others appropriated to him. We have only, however, to suppose that his martyrdom took place on the 14th, and the whole mystery is solved, all the other peculiarities of the day being merely accidents, that had nothing to do with his

*Similar superstitions are at the present day prevalent in Bavaria, and in other parts of Germany.

individual character, and which would have as readily attached to any one else, who had met with the good fortune of being sainted at that particular season.

The origin of this custom has been sought for in the Lupercalia of the Romans, and with much apparent reason, as will be evident when we come to enquire into the old mode of celebrating Valentine's Day, which, as we shall presently see, had but little in common with the modern habit of sending silly letters by the penny post. In ancient Rome a festival was held about the middle of February, called the Lupercalia, in honour of Pan and Juno, whence the latter obtained the epithet of Februata Februalis, and Fabrulla. Upon this occasion the names of young women were put, amidst a variety of ceremonies, into a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed, and so rooted had this, like many other customs, become amongst the people, that the pastors of the early Christian church. found themselves unable to eradicate it. They therefore, instead of entering into a fruitless struggle, adopted their usual policy on such occasions, and since they could not remove what they held to be an unsightly nuisance, they endeavoured, as a skilful architect would do, to convert it into an ornament. Thus they substituted the names of Saints for those of women, a change that would not seem to have been generally, or for any long time, popular, since we read that at a very remote period the custom prevailed of the young men drawing the names of the girls, and that the practice of adopting mates by chance-lots soon grew reciprocal between the sexes. In fact Pan and Juno vacated their seats in favour of Saint Valentine, but the Christian bishop could not escape having much of the heathen ritual fastened upon him. We must not, however, imagine that Valentine's day, any more than Epiphany or Candlemas, was celebrated with one uniform mode of observance; the customs attendant upon it varied considerably according to the place and period. In many parts of England, and more particularly in London, the person of the opposite sex, who is first met in the morning, not being an inmate of the house, was taken to be the Valentine, a usage that is noticed by the poet Gay

ST. VALENTINE'S DAY.

I early rose just at the break of day
Before the sun had chased the stars away;
A-field I went, amid the morning dew,

To milk my kine (for so should housewives do)
The first I spied, and the first swain we see

In spite of fortune our true love shall be.

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That the lasses went out to seek for their makes, or mates, i.e., Valentines, is also shown in poor Ophelia's broken snatches of a song:

Good morrow! 'tis St. Valentine's day

All in the morning betime,

And I a maid at your window

To be your Valentine.

In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1779, a correspondent under the name of Kitty Curious, relates an odd ceremony that she has been witness to in some humble village in Kent. The girls from five or six to eighteen years old were assembled in a crowd, burning an uncouth effigy, which they called a holly-boy, and which they had stolen from the boys, while in another part of the village the boys were burning what they called an ivy-girl, which they had stolen from the girls. The ceremony of each burning was attended with huzzas and other acclamations according to the receipt of custom in all such cases.

The Monday before Shrove Tuesday was in old times called Collop Monday, "collop " being a term for slices of dried or salted meat, as steak" signifies a slice of fresh meat. The etymology is too uncertain to make it worth while to quote the different accounts of it, but upon this day it was customary to feast upon eggs and collops, and, as Lent was approaching, our ancestors used to cut up their meat in slices, and preserve it, till the season of fast was over, by salting, or drying it. In some parts the day seemed to have been kept as the vigil, or eve, of Shrove Tuesday, and in the neighbourhood of Salisbury, we are told, the boys went about from door to door, singing thus:

Shrove-tide is nigh at hand,
And I am come a shroving;
Pray, dame, something,

An apple, or a dumpling,
Or a piece of truckle cheese
Of your own making,

Or a piece of pancake.

The observance of this day originated, if we may believe Polydore Virgil, in the Roman feasts of Bacchus, and some vestiges of such an origin remain to the present time in the custom that the Eton boys have of writing verses at this season in praise of the Lybian God. These were composed in all kinds of measures and affixed to the college-doors.

Another opinion on the origin of choosing Valentines is formed on a tradition among the common people, that at this season of the year birds choose their mates, a circumstance that is frequently alluded to by our poets; yet this seems to be a mere poetical idea borrowed, in all probability, from the practice in question.

Madam Royale, the daughter of Henry IV. of France, built a palace near Turin, which was called the Valentine, on account of the great veneration in which the Saint was held in that country. At the first entertainment given there by the princess, who was naturally of a gallant disposition, she desired that the ladies should choose their lovers by lots. The only difference with respect to herself was that she should be at liberty to fix on her own partner. At every ball during the year, each lady received from her gallant a nosegay; and at every tournament, the lady furnished his horse's trappings, the prize obtained being hers.

The following ceremonies of this day are of a much humbler description; they are given by a female correspondent of the "Connoisseur," and are quoted in Time's Telescope for 1814.

I got five bay-leaves, and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth to the middle, and then, if I dreamed of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk and filled it up with salt; and when I went to bed, eat it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it, and this was to have the same effect with the bay-leaves. We also wrote our lovers' names upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in

SHROVE TUESDAY.

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clay, and put them into water: and the first that rose up was to be our Valentine.

SHROVE TUESDAY,-or Pancake Tuesday,-or Fastings Even, Fasterns, Fasten, as it is sometimes called from being the vigil of Ash Wednesday, the commencement of the Lent Fast, is a day of great importance in the ritual calendar. It is said to have received its first, and more general, appellation from the circumstance of its being a day when every one was bound to confess and be shrove, or shriven, so long as the Roman Catholic faith was predominant. That none might plead forgetfulness of this ceremony the great bell was rung at an early hour in every parish, and in after times this ringing was still kept up in some places, though the cause of it ceased with the introduction of Protestantism; it then got the name of the Pancake-Bell, for reasons which we shall see hereafter.

Notwithstanding this necessity for confession, Shrove Tuesday with us had all the features of the last day of the Italian carnival. What it was in the old time may be judged from the account given by Taylor, the Water-poet"Always before Lent there comes waddling a fat, grosse, groome, called Shrove Tuesday, one whose manners shows he is better fed than taught, and indeed he is the only monster for feeding amongst all the dayes of the yeere, for he devoures more flesh in fourteene houres than this old kingdom doth (or at least should doe) in sixe weekes after. Such boyling and broyling, such roasting and toasting, such stewing and brewing, such baking, frying, mincing, cutting, carving, devouring, and gorbellied gurmondizing, that a man would thinke people did take in two month's provision at once. Moreover it is a goodly sight to see how the cookes in great men's kitchins doe frye in their master's suet, that if ever a cooke be worth the eating, it is when Shrove Tuesday is in towne, for he is so stued and larded, basted, and almost over-roasted, that a man may eate every bit of him and never take a surfet. In a word, they are that day extreme cholerike, and too hot for any man to meddle with, being monarchs of the marrow-bones, marquesses of the mutton, lords high regents of the spit and the kettle, barons of the gridiron, and sole commanders of the frying-pan. And all this hurly burly is for no other purpose than to