But I must return to my main subject.—­The ancients used to keep the great Feast of the goddess Flora on the 28th of April.  It lasted till the 3rd of May.  The Floral Games of antiquity were unhappily debased by indecent exhibitions; but they were not entirely devoid of better characteristics.[048] Ovid describing the goddess Flora says that “while she was speaking she breathed forth vernal roses from her mouth.”  The same poet has represented her in her garden with the Florae gathering flowers and the Graces making garlands of them.  The British borrowed the idea of this festival from the Romans.  Some of our Kings and Queens used ‘to go a Maying,’ and to have feasts of wine and venison in the open meadows or under the good green-wood.  Prior says: 

      Let one great day
    To celebrate sports and floral play
    Be set aside.

But few people, in England, in these times, distinguish May-day from the initial day of any other month of the twelve.  I am old enough to remember Jack-in-the-Green.  Nor have I forgotten the cheerful clatter—­the brush-and-shovel music—­of our little British negroes—­“innocent blacknesses,” as Lamb calls them—­the chimney-sweepers,—­a class now almost swept away themselves by machinery.  One May-morning in the streets of London these tinsel-decorated merry-makers with their sooty cheeks and black lips lined with red, and staring eyes whose white seemed whiter still by contrast with the darkness of their cases, and their ivory teeth kept sound and brilliant with the professional powder, besieged George Selwyn and his arm-in-arm companion, Lord Pembroke, for May-day boxes.  Selwyn making them a low bow, said, very solemnly “I have often heard of the sovereignty of the people, and I suppose you are some of the young princes in court mourning.”

My Native readers in Bengal can form no conception of the delight with which the British people at home still hail the spring of the year, or the deep interest which they take in all “the Seasons and their change”; though they have dropped some of the oldest and most romantic of the ceremonies once connected with them.  If there were an annual fall of the leaf in the groves of India, instead of an eternal summer, the natives would discover how much the charms of the vegetable world are enhanced by these vicissitudes, and how even winter itself can be made delightful.  My brother exiles will remember as long as life is in them, how exquisite, in dear old England, is the enjoyment of a brisk morning walk in the clear frosty air, and how cheering and cosy is the social evening fire!  Though a cold day in Calcutta is not exactly like a cold day in London, it sometimes revives the remembrance of it.  An Indian winter, if winter it may be called, is indeed far less agreeable than a winter in England, but it is not wholly without its pleasures.  It is, at all events, a grateful change—­a welcome relief and refreshment after a sultry summer or a muggy rainy season.