A Masque of Days from the Last Essays of Elia

At a grand New Year's banquet, every Day of the calendar arrives as a distinct personality, from solemn fasts to bright holidays, each with its own costume, temper, and comic habits. What begins as a festive gathering soon turns into a glittering miniature society, where rivalries, flirtations, misunderstandings, and absurdly human vanities unfold around the table. As the feast progresses, the Days debate precedence, politics, privilege, healths, and old grievances, with Candlemas, May-Day, the Quarter Days, and April Fool among the sharpest voices in the room. The New Year presides with polished ease, but the dinner becomes a comic battlefield of old loyalties and new fashions, satirizing social order, partisanship, appetite, and the endless urge to rank and perform. Blending mock-epic wit with affectionate observation, the piece turns the cycle of the year into a graceful pageant. As the Days depart in weather and light suited to their natures, especially the bittersweet lovers Valentine and May, the work leaves a vivid sense of seasonal rhythm, comic memory, and the strange beauty of time's recurring round. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.