Excerpt from In My Study To what forgotten bard does England owe this lyric Then the door-bell rang and tin mugs were waved, appealing for pence. By the time that half a dozen Guys had appeared, each with its howling retinue, and been wheeled away, the reception which one's elders gave the seventh seemed cruelly unsympathetic. You were prepared to welcome any number; the very memory of their comic attire, their air of solemn helplessness, made you bubble with laughter for days afterwards. I don't know when Mr. Guy Fawkes first made his tour of the streets, whether the commemoration began in 1606, whether or no it was intermitted in Puritan days.1 But the Guy of 1678, or thereabouts, seems to have been exactly like the Guy of two hundred years later. Perhaps you remember that delightful little letter from Diana Temple, the child of Sir William and Dorothy she died in 1679, aged fourteen And now if Papa was here, the child writes, I Should think myself a perfect Pope, though I hope I should not be burnt, as there was one at Nell Gwynn's door the fifth of November, who was sat in a great chair, with a red nose half a yard long, with some hundreds of boys throwing squibs at it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.