The Poets Herds. 275 



Smithfield butcher draws the head upwards,^ it might be 

 whimsically inferred that we still sacrifice to the Olympic 

 deities. In the scrutiny of the sanitary inspector we may 

 recall the careful divination by entrails of the old haruspex, 

 while the poets' descriptions of the ancient holocaust apply 

 to our own Yule-tide immolations. 



Indeed, who can say, visiting any great Cattle-show, that 

 the old worship of the horned things is extinct ? If the cult 

 is dead, what means this thronging of people to see these fat 

 cattle? Pilgrims come from every part of the kingdom, 

 and among those who officiate in the rites are the highest 

 in the land. 



" The sacred herd march proud and softly by. 

 Too fat and gay to think their deaths so nigh. 

 Hard fate of beasts, more innocent than we, 

 Prey to our luxury and our piety ! " 



Suppose a Herodotus on his travels had chanced to pass 

 through London and seen the Show, and inquired of the 

 inteUigent native what it meant, would he not have put 

 it down in his note-book that we had a great saint named 

 Christmas, who was commonly depicted as an aged man 

 of jolly countenance, and crowned with evergreens and 

 berries ; that the priests of the temples, of which the chief is 

 called Smithfield, annually sacrificed large numbers of fatted 

 kine or sheep and pigs in his honour, and that the people 

 exhibited the utmost reverence for this festival, never failing, 

 even to the poorest, to do their best to celebrate it with 

 merrymaking? This festival, he might have added, "comes 

 but once a year,'' and it is commonly alleged by those who 

 sing at night for alms in the streets, and have often to wait 

 a long time before they get them, that this is the reason 

 why they are so punctual in their observance of it. 



* If downwards the Greeks meant that the sacrifice was to heroes 

 or the gods of the lower world ; if upwards, to Olympus. 



