That’s the fair, true sketch, as far as it goes, of one of the larger village feasts in the Vale of Berks, when I was a little boy.  They are much altered for the worse, I am told.  I haven’t been at one these twenty years, but I have been at the statute fairs in some west-country towns, where servants are hired, and greater abominations cannot be found.  What village feasts have come to, I fear, in many cases, may be read in the pages of “Yeast” (though I never saw one so bad—­thank God!).

Do you want to know why?  It is because, as I said before, gentlefolk and farmers have left off joining or taking an interest in them.  They don’t either subscribe to the prizes, or go down and enjoy the fun.

Is this a good or a bad sign?  I hardly know.  Bad, sure enough, if it only arises from the further separation of classes consequent on twenty years of buying cheap and selling dear, and its accompanying overwork; or because our sons and daughters have their hearts in London club-life, or so-called “society,” instead of in the old English home-duties; because farmers’ sons are apeing fine gentlemen, and farmers’ daughters caring more to make bad foreign music than good English cheeses.  Good, perhaps, if it be that the time for the old “veast” has gone by; that it is no longer the healthy, sound expression of English country holiday-making; that, in fact, we, as a nation, have got beyond it, and are in a transition state, feeling for and soon likely to find some better substitute.

Only I have just got this to say before I quit the text.  Don’t let reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay hold of the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel whatever, which isn’t some bona fide equivalent for the games of the old country “veast” in it; something to put in the place of the back-swording and wrestling and racing; something to try the muscles of men’s bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them rejoice in their strength.  In all the new-fangled comprehensive plans which I see, this is all left out; and the consequence is, that your great mechanics’ institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your Christian young men’s societies in religious Pharisaism.

Well, well, we must bide our time.  Life isn’t all beer and skittles; but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.  If I could only drive this into the heads of you rising parliamentary lords, and young swells who “have your ways made for you,” as the saying is, you, who frequent palaver houses and West-end clubs, waiting always ready to strap yourselves on to the back of poor dear old John, as soon as the present used-up lot (your fathers and uncles), who sit there on the great parliamentary-majorities’ pack-saddle, and make believe they’re guiding him with their red-tape bridle, tumble, or have to be lifted off!