We Read
Now-A-Days Of The Ancient Festivals, Games, And Processions Of
The Greeks And Etruscans, With A Little Incredulity, Or At Least
With Little Sympathy; But How Natural And Irrepressible In Every
People Is Some Hearty And Palpable Greeting Of Nature.
The
Corybantes, the Bacchantes, the rude primitive tragedians with
their procession and goat-song, and the whole paraphernalia of
the Panathenaea, which appear so antiquated and peculiar, have
their parallel now.
The husbandman is always a better Greek than
the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still
survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in
commemorating it. The farmers crowd to the fair to-day in
obedience to the same ancient law, which Solon or Lycurgus did
not enact, as naturally as bees swarm and follow their queen.
It is worth the while to see the country's people, how they pour
into the town, the sober farmer folk, now all agog, their very
shirt and coat-collars pointing forward, - collars so broad as if
they had put their shirts on wrong end upward, for the fashions
always tend to superfluity, - and with an unusual springiness in
their gait, jabbering earnestly to one another. The more supple
vagabond, too, is sure to appear on the least rumor of such a
gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole
like the seventeen-year locust, in an ever-shabby coat, though
finer than the farmer's best, yet never dressed; come to see the
sport, and have a hand in what is going, - to know "what's the
row," if there is any; to be where some men are drunk, some
horses race, some cockerels fight; anxious to be shaking props
under a table, and above all to see the "striped pig." He
especially is the creature of the occasion.
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