DECEMBER.

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer's time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lord's decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit ;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.
Sonnet xcvii.

DECEMBER chill and frosty, no matter though

the sky be blue and the short arc'd sun be shining. It is a time for the death of things, a harbinger of winter near, the advent hymn of Nature prophetic of a new awakening into life, when the dainty decking of her nakedness has passed, when the white snow mantle is dissolved away and the crystal jewellery falls from the branches of tree and

shrub.

Within doors it is also a time of preparation, a time for laying in Christmas store and making Christmas fare, a time for kneading the Christmas pudding, in which all must have their share "for luck," and of compounding mince-meat; and since flowers we have none, save, perhaps, a few chrysan[ 120 ]

themums in our garden, and the trees have lost both leaf and fruit, save only the sturdy undying evergreens, it may be as well to hear what the poet has to tell us of such species as he mentions. The catalogue is not a long one, and will not take long in the telling.

In Love's Labour's Lost, V. ii. 651, we come to trenchant critiques of the players, and in one the omnipotent Mars is compared to

Long. A gilt nutmeg.
Biron. A lemon.

Long. Stuck with cloves.

The whole connection is suggestive of the small dried Seville oranges stuck with cloves given as a Christmas present, as, indeed, gilded nutmegs were given and considered also needful accessories of every china bowl of pot-pourri.

The spice as sold to-day is, as then, the unopened flower-buds of a tree (Caryophyllus aromaticus, L.), a native of the Moluccas, first introduced into our English greenhouses in 1800.

When these cloves were first an article of commerce, the Dutch took every means, fair and unfair, to keep the trade in their own hands, and afford an example of double dealing and treachery unmatched elsewhere in the annals of trade. As a flavouring cloves have lost none of their popularity to the present day. With them the nutmeg is also mentioned, and it also occurs as a colour in Henry V., III. vii. 20, where the Dauphine's horse is described thus by Orleans:

He's of the colour of the nutmeg.

And again, in the Winter's Tale, IV. iii. 39, where

in the "Sheep-shearing Feast," we find, the Clown requires

three pound of sugar, five pound of currants, rice,-what will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on. She hath made me four-and-twenty nosegays for the shearers, threeman-song-men all, and very good ones; but they are most of them means and bases; but one puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes. I must have saffron to colour the warden pies; mace; dates?-none, that's out of my note; nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger, but that I may beg.

The whole is worth quoting, since it calls up to our mind what was once a very popular rustic festival, now, like many others, extinct.

Old Tusser, in his "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry," thus alludes to it:

Wife, make us a dinner, spare flesh neither corne,
Make wafers and cakes, for our sheepe must be shorne ;
At sheepe shearing, neighbours none other things cran,
But good cheese and welcome like neighbours to han.

But to return to the nutmeg. It is the fruit, or part of it, of the tree called by botanists Myrista officinalis, a native of the Moluccas, principally in

those known as the Islands of Banda. Gerard describes it, but could not have done so except from hearsay, as it is not supposed to have been introduced into these islands until 1795. Mace is the name given to the curious perforated coat (arillus) which grows up round the nut, and is really developed from the hilum after fertilization. We get an example in other forms in the so-called "berries" of the yew and the silky hairs of the willow. Mace is only once referred to in the lines we have given. It was known and used as early as the fourteenth century. Among the names generally used for spices in Shakespeare's time we may take "pepper," by us

confined to a special plant (Piper nigrum, L.), a native of the tropics. Its name is a native one, pippali, latinized into piper. It was apparently well known and used among the Romans, but not so much among the Greeks. By the former it was probably introduced into our islands, and hence we may account for its mention in Saxon literature. It may be added that in medieval times a pound of pepper was one of the commonest rents at which land was held in socage. In this description of nominal payments, we find not only a pound of pepper, or even a peppercorn, but such things as a sparrow-bawk, a pair of gloves, a pair of gilt spurs, or a pound of cummin, or a red rose payable on St. John the Baptist's Day.

Shakespeare uses the word pepper in several senses; as a general name for spice, we have the words " pepper gingerbread" (1 Henry IV., III. i. 260).

The single flower-bud occurs

An I have not forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I am a peppercorn, a brewer's horse.

I Henry IV., III. iii. 8.

In a metaphorical sense it is used twice again in the same play, II. iv. 212, and V. iii. 36, as well as in Romeo and Juliet, III. i. 102:

I am peppered I warrant for this world.

And, lastly, in Twelfth Night, III. iv. 157 :

Here's the challenge, read it: I warrant there's vinegar and pepper in't.

The vessel, call it what you will, in which the ground spice was kept is mentioned as a pepper-box in the Merry Wives of Windsor, III. v. 147.

In concluding these brief notes on some of the

spices mentioned in the plays, let us give one short quotation from Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, I. iii., which serves to illustrate their use as ingredients in the hot spiced ale our forefathers loved :

Nutmegs and ginger, cinnamon and cloves,
And they gave me this jolly red nose.

But we have not yet touched on ginger, although we have mentioned it in the quotation from the Winter's Tale, IV. iii. 50. It occurs in nine other places. Its heat is referred to in Twelfth Night, II. iii. 125, when Sir Toby queries:

Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

And Clown replies:

Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth too.

And in the Merchant of Venice, III. i. 9, we get:

I would she were as lying a gossip in that as ever knapped ginger.

Razes of ginger are not only mentioned in the Winter's Tale, but in 1 Henry IV., II. i.

25:

I have a gammon of bacon and two razes of ginger to be delivered as far as Charing Cross.

Gingerbreads occur in Love's Labour's Lost,

V. i. 74:

An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread.

And in 1 Henry IV., III. i. 258:

Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art, a good mouth