Shittlecock toss'd to and fro, Diverts us, and warms the chill Blood […]

[…] Dugdale, in his Origines Judiciales, gives a long and particular account of the revelry at the Temple, on each of the twelve days of Christmas, in the year 1562. It appears from this document, that the hospitable rites of St. Stephen's Day, St. John's Day, and Twelfth Day, were ordered to be exactly alike; and as many of them are in their nature perfectly rural, there is every reason to suppose they were observed, to a certain extent, in the halls of the country gentry, and substantial yeomanry.

So faulty was his knowledge that to this day impotent learnlings, who have drowned their little souls in printer's ink, find a cheap pleasure in holding up to ridicule the ignorance, the lack of system, the fallacies and errors, of this man who was all heart; smiling contemptuously, too, these impotent learnlings, as if it were more honorable and more praiseworthy to be all head, no matter how diminutive and vapory.

'[T]is wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere.