[Anon.], ‘Village Feasts And Wakes’, London Review Of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, And Science (1866)

With the wasps, midges, bluebottles, and other summer and autumn pests of the country and disturbers of rural felicity, the unsung Auburns and all those other villages that, according to the artistic and poetic vision bestowed upon them, appear as the loveliest of the plain, are visited by the annual infliction of those modern saturnalia called feasts and wakes. The only nominal connection that the village feast has with the ecclesiastical purposes of its creation is on the supposition that it is held on the Sunday. Modern followers of Autolycus, who, like their famous original, “haunt wakes,” also attend to ply their trade, beginning with illegitimate methods, and in a sly way, on the Sunday evening, Questionable, or rather unquestionable, characters swarm in from their various haunts in the vicinity.