MERRIE DAYS OF

ENGLAND

Sketches of the Olden Time.

BY EDWARD Mc DERMOTT.

ILLUSTRATED WITH TWENTY ENGRAVINGS,

FROM DRAWINGS BY JOSEPH NASH, GEORGE THOMAS, BIRKET FOSTER,
AND EDWARD CORBOULD.

WILLIAM KENT & CO. 86, FLEET STREET,

1859.

msm

OW pleasant are the ideas which are affociated with "the merrie days of

England;" and how ftrikingly do they contrast with our experience of the present time! Turn afide for a moment from the

records of the mifdeeds of haughty Plantagenets; the defolating wars of York and Lancaster; the terrible misfortunes of

the Stuarts; the fanguinary conflicts of

Towton, of Bofworth, or of Nafeby; and even amid these darker scenes of our history, abundant evidence is afforded that England was in truth "a merrie England.”

Our fathers fought manfully and earnestly at Creffy and at Agincourt; they worked well and nobly as they piled up castle, and abbey, and groined cathedral; but the ftrife for existence was not so keen, nor the struggle of competition fo fierce then as now. At break of dawn and close of day, at the early blush of May-tide, amid the bleak winter of Christmas, there were heard from the hill-fides and valleys of old England the joyous shouts of a contented and a happy people. The peasant in his humble abode, the young trading Guilds of the towns, the noble in his manfion, the baron in his castle, the monk in his abbey, and the courtier that applauded the king's jester in the palace, were gay and light-hearted;—men laughed and women smiled, and minstrels fang, and all fared well in "the merrie days of England."

Pale students, deeply read in their Hallams, their Humes, and their Rapins, tell us that there were no railways, no electric telegraphs, and no leviathan steamers in the "olden time." Alas! we know it; and we read too that there were then no commercial panics, nor monster workhouses, nor some other of the types of modern times, and products of this iron and progreffive age. And yet our fathers lived