of course such actions as those of Mrs. Copeland would not thus be explained.

There is likewise a strong concurrence of testimony to the spectres that in certain families herald the death of a member of it. The Norsemen of old believed each family to be attended by a certain ancestral spirit, the dis, (pl. disir,) perhaps of the same origin as the lares of Roman households, but though the lar was always in the shape of a dog, as the 'dogs' of open hearths still attest, the dis might be in the form of an animal, each family having its own. Many heraldic bearings might perhaps be accounted for as commemorating the family dis; and possibly too some of those phantom creatures attached to old families, such as the black dog, which was seen by a young mother in Cornwall lying on her sick child's bed. She called her husband to drive it away, he knew too well what it boded, and by the time he had reached the nursery, the child was dead. Another family is said by Mrs. Crowe to be warned by the sight of a single swan upon a lake, and white doves are perhaps the most frequent harbingers-as the fairest. Louis of Thuringia, the crusader, husband of the dear Saint' Elizabeth of Hungary, was summoned by a flight of white doves. The Littelton family are said to have a dove monitor, and in Lancashire the appearance of a white dove at a sick person's window is thought to indicate either a speedy recovery or the presence of a good angel to conduct away the soul. Still, to connect these portents with the disir is far from removing the mystery, but rather heightens it.

The human form sometimes belonged to the disir, and is the more common among these heralds of fate. The White Lady attached to the House of Brandenburg is one instance, and so is the Bodach Glas, or Grey Man of whom Scott made such effective use in foreboding the capture of Fergus Mac Ivor. We believe that he is really attached to the Eglinton family, and Mr. Henderson gives an authentic account of his very recent appearance to the late Earl. Scotland and Ireland are chiefly thus visited: the Banshee, or White Spectre, seems to belong to many of the oldest Keltic families in both. No one can forget Lady Fanshawe's account of the Banshee, who so terrified her in the house of Lady Honor O'Brien, without her being aware either of the tradition or that one of the O'Brien family was actually lying in the same house at the point of death. Croker has likewise a most striking story of the Banshee of the Bunworth family.

These ghastly monitors are not always connected with individual families, but are sometimes attached to villages and towns -always, however, we believe, in those parts of England where the population chiefly came from Scandinavia. It is in Denmark that we find the origin of this belief. It would seem that there

has always been a notion that a building required as it were a living sacrifice. We find it in the old Roman legend of the willing leap of Curtius; and Copenhagen is said to have been only founded by the cruel sacrifice of a poor little girl, who was lured into a vault and then walled up. Mr. Atkinson, quoting from Danish authorities, tells us that the workman employed in church-building, used on the day their wall was finished, to seize on any unfortunate animal who came in their way and build it up alive within the wall. Its ghost then became a sort of parish official, called the Kirke-vare or varsel, the church warning, and performed the function of announcing approaching deaths among the parishioners.

'So much so, indeed, that in one church or more in the district of Funen, and its outlying islets, it has been the custom, within the present century, to put fresh straw every New Year's Eve into the vaults of the church, to serve as the Kirke Varsel's lair or couch, and when this was done, the bed of the past year was always found to have been reduced to the form of small chafflike particles by the regular use made of it during the past twelve months, as a lair or resting-place. Many churches in the district indicated had their own peculiar Kirke Varsel. Thus, Dalby church had a white goose or gander, at least an entity in that form; Messinge, a black bull or bullock; Drigstrup, a white lamb; Biby, a grey-coloured sheep; Stubberup, two red oxen; Gudberg, a lamb; Gudne, a sow. . . . The belief in the countryside is, or was till very recently, that it was not safe to meet this creature, unless the person encountering it scrupulously kept himself to himself, and diligently held his peace. If he spoke a single word, or chanced to come face to face with the Varsel, in a place where he could not pass without contact with it, he was sure to suffer for it, and possibly be violently hurled to a considerable distance. Sometimes its approach to the doomed house was accompanied by an awful din, as of a lot of iron articles driven in a wheelbarrow over a rough stone pavement; and its arrival, notified, perhaps, by three loud blows on the floor, or by a noise of the windows, as of wings flapping against them, or by a tremendous thundering at the main entrance of the homestead.'-Comparative Folk Lore: Monthly Packet, Vol. xxxix. p. 250.

Several instances are then adduced of persons meeting these creatures on their way to houses, where their arrival is invariably followed by a death. It would seem that throughout the north of England, the like appearance was believed in under the name of Barguest, though his existence is not there explained, nor does he seem to have any care taken for his accommodation. Mr. Harland derives the term Barguest from Bar or gate, and ghost; but Mr. Henderson's Bahr geist or Bier ghost seems to us the most satisfactory source proposed for the name. tiff, a white rabbit, a pig, a donkey, a horse, or a cow seem to have been the ordinary shapes, but always with large glaring saucer eyes. To roar like a Barguest,' is a popular comparison, and, till very recently, Durham, Newcastle, Burnley, and Whitby believed in their Barguest; nay, in a note, Mr. Atkinson tells us of a sailor at Whitby, lately dead, who believed that a severe

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swelling in his leg was the effect of meeting an immense shadowy white dog with saucer eyes in a narrow thoroughfare after dark. In Yorkshire, the Barguest is called Padfoot, because of the padding, tramping sound with which it makes its presence known. In Lancashire, it is called Trash, from its splashing along with a sound like that made by old shoes in a miry lane, and Skriker from its wailing cry. Mr. Harland says he has met persons who believed themselves to have seen Trash' in the form of a horse or cow, but he is generally more like a very large dog, with very broad feet, shaggy hair, drooping ears, and the inevitable saucer eyes. On being seen, he walks back wards, growing smaller and smaller, and vanishes either when unwatched for a moment, or in a pool of water with a loud splash.

In general, however, these mysterious beings seem to have fled before the schoolmaster, and with them those more attractive beings, the Brownie, the Pixie, the Elf, and the Fay. Nobody of the present generation ever beheld one of these creatures, except perhaps a Spriggan' recently captured in Cornwall and lost, and it took a considerable amount of liquor to enable one of the past, even in Ireland, to discern them. We will not enter on a discussion on the origin of these beliefs, further than to express our dissent from the theory that they were human and remnants of the races conquered by the invaders. It is far more probable that the same primary idea which peopled Greece so gracefully with a nymph for every tree and every wave, developed in the Keltic and Teutonic minds into the Shefro, the Elf, and the Fay, so curiously similar in all genuine traditions. Is it not, indeed, according to all analogy that such spirits may have had power to manifest themselves before the redemption had been fully set forth, and to linger longest in the lands that were the last to become Christian? There may have been the truth of a poet's divination in Milton's lines, inspired by Plutarch's tale of the weeping and wailing in the lonely isle on the night of the Nativity. * The lonely mountains o'er,

And the resounding shore

A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament.

From haunted spring and dale,

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting genius is with sighing sent,

With flower inwoven tresses torn,

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.'

Is this poetry and not truth? We know that demoniac possession was never permitted at Jerusalem, and that it prevailed in proportion to the distance of places from where

'Only one border

Reflected to the seraph's ken
Heaven's light and order.'

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

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 expected 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. '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

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