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Almost every country lying under a southern sun is accustomed to rejoice at the annual return of flowers, and ancient Rome was not without its May-day. Festivals of the sort are apt to degenerate morally, and that, also, was true of the Floralia, as these feasts were called at Rome.

She is, we presume, the same as the Queen of May, who is the oldest of all the characters in the May games, and the apparent successor to the Goddess of Spring in the Roman Floralia. In the English Morris she is called simply The Lady, or more frequently Maid Marian, a name which, to our apprehension, means Lady of the May, and nothing more.

And the Lateran once had another half-heathen festival, on the Saturday after Easter, in memory of the ancient Floralia of the Romans, which had formerly been celebrated on the 28th of April. It was a most strange festival, now long forgotten, in which Christianity and paganism were blended together.

She catches with great accuracy the characteristics of the Pompeian type; and this facility, added to the brilliancy of her color and the spirit and sympathy of her treatment, has given these pictures a vogue. Two of them were sold in Holland. "Floralia" was sold in Venice. To an exhibition of Italian artists in London, in 1889, she contributed "The Young Agrippa," which was sold to Thomas Walker.

Monogas. 2. Emmelia. 7. Thracia. 12. Terminalia. 3. Sicinnia. 8. Calabrisme. 13. Floralia. 4. Jambics. 9. Molossia. 14. Pyrrhice. 5. Persica. 10. Cernophorum. 15. A sort of country-dance. 2. A still tragic dance. 3. Dancing and singing used at funerals. 4. Cutting sarcasms and lampoons. 5. The Persian dance. 6. Tunes, whose measure inspired men with a kind of divine fury. 7.

This is one of those abominable April mornings which deserve the name of Sans Cullotides, as being cold, beggarly, coarse, savage, and intrusive. The earth lies an inch deep with snow, to the confusion of the worshippers of Flora. By the way, Bogie attended his professional dinner and show of flowers at Jedburgh yesterday. Here is a beautiful sequence to their floralia.

That hunting was practised here in these days is evident, for Thomas Randall, of Cambridge, writes in the same volume: "Such royal pastimes Cotteswold mountains fill, When gentle swains visit Anglonicus hill, When with such packs of hounds they hunting go As Cyrus never woon'd his bugle to." Fozbrooke tells us that the Whitsuntide sports are the floralia of the Romans.

The most primitive people felt this inclination, and they used to gather the flowers that bloomed in profusion about them, set them up, and to pay them a sort of homage, expressed in dance and song. The old Romans had what they called Floralia, or Floral Games, which began on the twenty-eighth of April, and lasted several days.

In the Floralia, especially, the crowd seem to have claimed it as their right that the actors should play naked, probably, it has been thought, as a survival of a folk-ritual. But the Romans, though they were eager to run to the theatre, felt nothing but disdain for the performers. "Flagitii principium est, nudare inter cives corpora."

For when was this NOT done? When was it rebuked? When found fault with?" The Floralia, first introduced about 238 B.C., had a powerful influence in giving impetus to the spread of prostitution. The account of the origin of this festival, given by Lactantius, while no credence is to be placed in it, is very interesting.