We know that oracles became dumb in the presence of Christians, and that their silence was one motive for the concealed persecution by Julian the apostate; and it is remarkable that the first converted lands of Europe, Greece, Italy, and France, though the two former once teemed with myths of haunting genii or nymphs, are now the most devoid of those legendary beings. The regions of the elf, the fairy, and the household spirit, are Germany and Scandinavia, converted at a comparatively recent period, and those Keltic portions of France and the British Isles where Christianity not only came late, but savage remnants of pagan practice lingered on for ages. Tenacious memories, imaginative fears, and popular exaggerations, would carry on for many years, and even centuries, the remembrance of a marvel witnessed in the days of conflict between spirits of light and of darkness.

Nothing is more curious than the inability of the popular mind to retain a reasonable fact, however important, while a superstition, a custom, or a fear, remains fixed for ever, and sometimes gets a new cause assigned for it. That the eating of horse-flesh was a religious rite with our heathen forefathers, brought with them from the steppes of Asia, is a matter of book knowledge to a few, but the horror of horse-flesh, diligently inspired by the teachers of Christianity, survives in full force, and old customs derived from the worship of the animal, such as the bearing about its skull decked with ribbons on Christmas eve, and setting it up before a house which is thought in disgrace, were a short time ago prevalent in our more remote counties.

The Beltane, or midsummer and midwinter fires, commemorating the culmination of the sun's course, are the most universal of all the Aryan religious ceremonies that have now become mere popular amusements, with a sense of luck attached to them. Mr. Kelly's Indo-European Traditions best explain the astronomical force of this rite, coupled with the rolling the fiery wheel (whence he derives Jol or Yule) down a hill side, as it were to show the downward course of the sun throughout the autumn. The lane of fire over which young men leapt and animals were driven, seems to have been in use everywhere, from ancient Rome to further Germany, and curiously shows how the idea of ensuring good luck is the most real mode of preserving a significant custom. In Lancashire, the Beltane fires got mixed with a notion of Purgatory, and in the Fylde, a moor still bears the latter name, where in the last generation men used to hold aloft hay-forks with bunches of burning straw. In Cornwall, the whole district of the Land's End used to be aglow with these fires, and at Penzance, the children wore

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flowers in the morning, and bonfires blazed in the evening, while fireworks were showered on the young men and maidens who played in and out at thread-my-needle, little thinking that Ovid had thus leapt through the fires in the streets of Rome. This custom was closely described by Mr. Richard Edmonds, in the last generation, but Wesleyanism has put an end to it. The more remote parts of Germany, and the Savoyard nook of the Mediterranean, have not given up their fires, and, in the brilliant description in Denise,' we find that every house contributes some article, so that much rubbish is hoarded up for the occasion, as a cheap holocaust to ensure good luck. In fact, Luck may be said to be one of the chief gods of this world, and certainly the greatest preserver of heathen rites paid to other deities long since past away. A very senseless worship it is that this idol receives -remnants of every variety of superstition, and paid by the most unlikely persons in the most unlikely stations. Christian and heathen fashions and beliefs, are alike kept up in this one word 'Luck.' For instance, an old nurse will declare it unlucky that a child should not cry at its baptism. This is a remnant of the belief that it ought to show a certain consciousness of the exorcism and renunciation of the evil spirit; and on the other hand, the notion that it is unlucky to cut a child's nails for the first year, and that when cut, the parings should be buried under an ash tree, is apparently connected with the ship Nagelfahr, made of human nails, and the ash tree Yggdrasil. Nay, the blue woollen threads, or small cords that nursing mothers, in Mr. Wilkie's time, used to wear round their necks, on the Teviot side, may be connected with the Brahminical string so well known in India; just as Mr. Kelly traces the mysterious fame of the rowan, wiggan, or mountain ash to its likeness (observed by Bishop Heber) to the Indian palasa, which was consecrated by Vedic myth.

Happily Christian notions predominate at the birth and baptism of children, and it is with these that Mr. Henderson's collection commences. And a very interesting one is mentioned as prevailing in the north. Much importance attaches to the 'baby's first visit to another house, on which occasion it is ex'pected that he should receive three things-an egg, salt, and white bread or cake.' In the East Riding of Yorkshire, matches are added, 'to light the child on the way to heaven.' An old woman at Durham called this receiving alms. He 'could not claim them before he was baptised,' she said, 'but 'now that he is a Christian, he has a right to go and ask alms of his fellow Christians.' Bread, salt, fire, and an egg, are assuredly notable Christian emblems. The nursery is indeed the storehouse of ancient observances, there kept up in serious

ness by the long link of old nurses; while wedding customs are perhaps maintained more as excuses for mirth and gaiety, on an occasion when stock subjects of wit are apt to be valuable. The hurling of the shoe-now treated as so much a matter of course that the very newspapers record that the happy pair departed among a perfect shower of old shoes is laid by Mr. Henderson, on the authority of a writer in Notes and Queries,' to be the remnant of the transfer of right in the bride and her property -as when the kinsman of Elimelech handed his shoe to Boaz in the gate of Bethlehem; but we much more suspect that these shoes owe their importance to the old northern belief that Heimdahl, the survivor of the Asa gods, shall tread his way through the conflagration of all things in a chaussure made from the remnants of all the old shoes in the world.

Everybody knows that no village bride thinks it etiquette to go to church and hear her banns published; indeed, the only maid servant we ever met superior to the scruple, averred that she did not see why she should not go to hear herself prayed for.' We had always supposed the objection to be a modest dislike to be subjected to her neighbours' wit and remarks, but in the north of England it appears that her presence is supposed to expose her to the risk of having a family of deaf and dumb

children!

To marry a man whose surname begins with the same initial as the bride's is unlucky.

'If you change the name and not the letter,

You change for the worse and not the better.'

But to marry without a change of name confers curious powers, especially that of baking bread which is a certain cure for the whooping cough. This malady does rejoice in very curious specifics, none stranger than the Lancashire antidote--namely, a ride upon a bear, which prevented even liability to the infection, insomuch that the old bearwards derived a good part of their income for mounting children upon Bruin's back! A man riding a piebald horse becomes endowed for the time with. the faculty of suggesting a remedy. We hear of the tradition in a quotation from Archbishop Whateley's remains, where the rider suggested, 'tie a rope round the child's neck;' and we have ourselves known of a mason who, riding a piebald steed up the street of a village in Cornwall, was assailed from almost every cottage door with a cry of What is good for the whooping cough?' to which he promptly and judiciously replied, White bread and honey.' To this may be added, a cure attempted in Derry, of giving the patient half a bottle of milk, the rest of which has been drunk by a ferret; in Sunderland, of cutting the hair and hanging it on a tree, when the cough is carried off

by the unlucky birds who use the material for their nests; and in Devonshire, of administering the hair, between two slices of bread and butter, to a dog; at Middlesborough, of passing a child nine times under the belly of a donkey, or piebald horse.

We ourselves have known in Hampshire, an epileptic boy, whose mother hoped to cure him by hanging round his neck a hair out of the cross on the back of a he donkey,' or, as an alternative, a ring, made of three sixpences, given him by three young women, all bearing the same Christian name. Rings for this purpose are not uncommon in any part of the country; one made from seven damsels in seven parishes, is mentioned by Mr. Henderson, but they are more usually to be formed out of a halferown from the offertory, and sometimes it is needful to purchase this halfcrown by pence given by thirty different individuals. In this, as in the hair from the donkey's cross, there is no doubt some notion of exorcism, and the pence were probably pledges of prayers from the contributors. In the ages of faith,' epilepsy was almost always considered as the direct work of demons, and we believe that many of the miracles worked at the shrines of saints, were on behalf of this disease. It seems as if those strange specifics were chiefly for those disorders that are most irregular in their coming and going, and most baffling to medical art. Whooping cough, epilepsy, warts, and ague, seem to be the chief subjects for charms, even at the present day. Bleeding, too, seems to have been always treated with spells, from the days when Ulysses was torn by the boar, down to the present day. All of those given by Mr. Henderson, collected from the northern counties, Sussex and Devon, are of a religious character, with references to the wounds of our Blessed Lord, and no doubt descended from very ancient times. We have also known of a parish clerk who rejoiced in the belief that he had checked an attack of hæmorrhage in his vicar by the use of a verse of the Bible. It appeared that he could not make it available until he had actually seen the blood, and he refused to divulge what verse it was, lest he should thus deprive it of its efficacy.

Considering the number of holy healing wells and shrines of saints that once were scattered over the country, it is wonderful that no more superstition attaches to the spots once visited by pilgrims. Besides the still famous St. Winifred's Well, which has absolutely curious properties, the wells in Cornwall have till very recently, at least, maintained their fame and name. Indeed, it is supposed that a sacrilegious meddler with them will soon meet his death, and thus they are likely to be left untouched till their antiquarian value is felt.

Mr. Hunt has seen a newly married pair at the well of St. Keyne, where the lady, instead of, as in Southey's ballad, taking a bottle to church, had taken a draught from her thimble, and contended that it ensured her the supremacy, though her husband had previously drunk from the hollow of his hand. Many wells are thought to have healing virtues; and St. Madron's and Gulvan well reply by bubbles to queries as to the fidelity of true loves, or the welfare of the absent. Till recently Redruth Well was in great request to supply baptismal water, and St. Ludgvan's Well was supposed to have been blessed by its patron to secure all christened in its water from the gallows. A woman of the parish having poisoned her husband, was hung, to the extreme consternation of the neighbourhood, and when the parish registers proved that her baptism had taken place in the next village, the fame of St. Ludgvan was so much enhanced that we believe the water is still sent for by parents to fill the font. On the other hand, no one will christen a child who is to be called Joanna, from the well of St. Leven; for a woman of that name, who was gathering herbs in her three-cornered garden for her Sunday's dinner, had the impertinence to rebuke the hermit saint for fishing in the sea on that day. He replied that he had as much right to go to the sea for his dinner, as she had to her garden, and predicted that all who were christened by her name in her parish, should be as great fools as herself. In consequence, all the Joannas of Leven are christened at Sennan, to preserve them from the folly of censoriousness!

In general, English wells have merely become wishing wells, and the sole remnant of faith in the power of relics anything like here recorded, was manifested in a very undesirable fashion.

'The late Dr. Walker, of Teignmouth, was attending, within the last twenty years, a poor young woman, with an extensive sore on the breast. When he visited her one day, he was surprised to find the entire surface of the wound strewn over with a gritty substance, and a good deal of inflammation set up in consequence. In some displeasure, he asked what they had been putting on, but for a long time he could get no answer, beyond, "Nothing at all, sir." The people about were sullen, but the doctor was peremptory, and at last the woman's husband, rolling a mass of stone from under the bed, muttered in genuine Devonshire phrase, "Nothing but Peter's Stone, and here he is." On further inquiry, it appeared that, incited by the neighbours, who declared his wife was not getting well as she should, the poor fellow had walked by night from Teignmouth to Exeter, had flung stones against the figures on the west front of the cathedral (which is called St. Peter's by the common people), had succeeded at last in bringing down the arm of one of them, and had carried it home in triumph. Part of this relic had been pulverized, mixed with lard, and applied to the sore. I have never met with another instance of the kind, but, doubtless, it is not a solitary one, If the practice was even a common one, we need not lay to the charge of Oliver Cromwell's army, all the dilapidation of the glorious west front of Exeter Cathedral.'-Henderson, pp. 124.5.