II.—The Theft of a Shroud.
The ballad with which we have now to deal has had probably as wide a currency as that of "Lord Ronald." The student of folk-lore recognises at once, in its evident fitness for local adaptation, its simple yet terrifying motive, and the logical march of its events, the elements that give a popular song a free pass among the peoples.
M. Allègre took down from word of mouth and communicated to the late Damase Arbaud a Provençal version, which runs as follows:
His scarlet cape the Prior donned,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
His scarlet cape the Prior donned,
And all the souls in Paradise
With joy and triumph fill the skies.
His sable cape the Prior donned,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
His sable cape the Prior donned,
And all the spirits of the dead
Fast tears within the graveyard shed.
Now, Ringer, to the belfry speed,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Now, Ringer, to the belfry speed,
Ring loud, to-night thy ringing tolls
An office for the dead men's souls.
Ring loud the bell of good St John:
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Ring loud the bell of good St John:
Pray all, for the poor dead; aye pray,
Kind folks, for spirits passed away.
Soon as the midnight hour strikes,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Soon as the midnight hour strikes,
The pale moon sheds around her light,
And all the graveyard waxeth white.
What seest thou, Ringer, in the close?
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
What seest thou, Ringer, in the close?
"I see the dead men wake and sit
Each one by his deserted pit."
Full thousands seven and hundreds five,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Full thousands seven and hundreds five,
Each on his grave's edge, yawning wide,
His dead man's wrappings lays aside.
Then leave they their white winding-sheets,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Then leave they their white winding-sheets,
And walk, accomplishing their doom,
In sad procession from the tomb.
Full one thousand and hundreds five,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Full one thousand and hundreds five,
And each one falls upon his knees
Soon as the holy cross he sees.
Full one thousand and hundreds five,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Full one thousand and hundreds five
Arrest their footsteps, weeping sore
When they have reached their children's door.
Full one thousand and hundreds five,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Full one thousand and hundreds five
Turn them aside and, listening, stay
Whene'er they hear some kind soul pray.
Full one thousand and hundreds five,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Full one thousand and hundreds five,
Who stand apart and groan bereft,
Seeing for them no friends are left.
But soon as ever the white cock stirs,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
But soon as ever the white cock stirs,
They take again their cerements white,
And in their hands a torch alight.
But soon as ever the red cock crows,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
But soon as ever the red cock crows,
All sing the Holy Passion song,
And in procession march along.
But soon as the gilded cock doth shine,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
But soon as the gilded cock doth shine,
Their hands and their two arms they cross,
And each descends into his foss.
'Tis now the dead men's second night,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Tis now the dead men's second night:
Peter, go up to ring; nor dread
If thou shouldst chance to see the dead.
"The dead, the dead, they fright me not,"
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
"The dead, the dead, they fright me not,
—Yet prayers are due for the dead, I ween,
And due respect should they be seen."
When next the midnight hour strikes,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
When next the midnight hour strikes,
The graves gape wide and ghastly show
The dead who issue from below.
Three diverse ways they pass along,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Three diverse ways they pass along,
Nought seen but wan white skeletons
Weeping, nought heard but sighs and moans.
Down from the belfry Peter came,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Down from the belfry Peter came,
While still the bell of good St John
Gave forth its sound: barin, baron.
He carried off a dead man's shroud,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
He carried off a dead man's shroud;
At once it seemed no longer night,
The holy close was all alight.
The holy Cross that midmost stands,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
The holy Cross that midmost stands
Grew red as though with blood 'twas dyed,
And all the altars loudly sighed.
Now, when the dead regained the close,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Now, when the dead regained the close
—The Holy Passion sung again—
They passed along in solemn train.
Then he who found his cerements gone,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Then he who found his cerements gone,
From out the graveyard gazed and signed
His winding-sheet should be resigned.
But Peter every entrance closed,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
But Peter every entrance closed
With locks and bolts, approach defies,
Then looks at him—but keeps the prize!
He with his arm, and with his hand,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
He with his arm, and with his hand,
Made signs in vain, two times or three,
And then the belfry entered he.
A noise is mounting up the stair,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
A noise is mounting up the stair,
The bolts are shattered, and the door
Is burst and dashed upon the floor.
The Ringer trembled with dismay,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
The Ringer trembled with dismay,
And still the bell of good St John
For ever swung: barin, baron.
At the first stroke of Angelus,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
At the first stroke of Angelus
The skeleton broke all his bones,
Falling to earth upon the stones.
Peter upon his bed was laid,
Ding dong, dong ding dong!
Peter upon his bed was laid,
Confessed his sin, repenting sore,
Lingered three days, then lived no more.
It will be seen that, in this ballad, which is locally called "Lou Jour des Mouerts," the officiating priest assumes red vestments in the morning, and changes them in the course of the day for black. The vestments appropriate to the evening of All Saints' Day are still black (it being the Vigil of All Souls'), but in the morning the colour worn is white or gold. An explanation, however, is at hand. The feast of All Saints had its beginning in the dedication of the Roman Pantheon by Boniface IV., in the year 607, to S. Maria ad Martyres, and red ornaments were naturally chosen for a day set apart especially to the commemoration of martyrdom. These were only discarded when the feast came to have a more general character, and there is evidence of their retention here and there in French churches till a date as advanced as the fifteenth century. Thus, we gain incidentally some notion of the age of the song.
Not long after giving a first reading to the Provençal ballad of the Shroud-theft, I became convinced of its substantial identity with a poem whose author holds quite another rank to that of the nameless folk-poet. Goethe's "Todten Tanz" tends less to edification than "Lou jour des Mouerts;" nor has it, I venture to think, an equal power. We miss the pathetic picture of the companies of sad ghosts; these kneeling before the wayside crosses; these lingering by their children's thresholds; these listening to the prayers of the pious on their behalf; these others weeping, en vesent que n'ant plus d'amics. But the divergence of treatment cannot hide the fact that the two ballads are made out of one tale.
The Dance of Death.
The watcher looks down in the dead of the night
On graves in trim order gleaming;
The moon steeps the world all around in her light—
'Tis clear as if noon were beaming.
One grave gaped apart, then another began;
Here forth steps a woman, and there steps a man,
White winding-sheets trailing behind them.
On sport they determine, nor pause they for long,
All feel for the measure advancing;
The rich and the poor, the old and the young;
But winding-sheets hinder the dancing.
Since sense of decorum no longer impedes,
They hasten to shake themselves free of their weeds,
And tombstones are quickly beshrouded.
Then legs kick about and are lifted in air,
Strange gesture and antic repeating;
The bones crack and rattle, and crash here and there,
As if to keep time they were beating.
The sight fills the watcher with mirth 'stead of fear,
And the sly one, the Tempter, speaks low in his ear:
"Now go and a winding-sheet plunder!"
The hint he soon followed, the deed it was done,
Then behind the church-door he sought shelter;
The moon in her splendour unceasingly shone,
And still dance the dead helter-skelter.
At last, one by one, they all cease from the play,
And, wrapt in the winding-sheets, hasten away,
Beneath the turf silently sinking.
One only still staggers and stumbles along,
The grave edges groping and feeling;
'Tis no brother ghost who has done him the wrong;
Now his scent shows the place of concealing.
The church-door he shakes, but his strength is represt;
'Tis well for the watcher the portals are blest
By crosses resplendent protected.
His shirt he must have, upon this he is bent,
No time has he now for reflection;
Each sculpture of Gothic some holding has lent,
He scales and he climbs each projection.
Dread vengeance o'ertakes him, 'tis up with the spy!
From arch unto arch draws the skeleton nigh,
Like lengthy-legged horrible spider.
The watcher turns pale, and he trembles full sore,
The shroud to return he beseeches;
But a claw (it is done, he is living no more),
A claw to the shroud barely reaches.
The moonlight grows faint; it strikes one by the clock;
A thunderclap burst with a terrible shock;
To earth falls the skeleton shattered.
It needed but small penetration to guess that Goethe had neither seen nor heard of the Provençal song. It seemed, therefore, certain that a version of the Shroud-theft must exist in Germany, or near it—an inference I found to be correct on consulting that excellent work, Goethe's Gedichte erläutert von Heinrich Viehoff (Stuttgart, 1870). So far as the title and the incident of the dancing are concerned, Goethe apparently had recourse to a popular story given in Appel's Book of Spectres, where it is related how, when the guards of the tower looked out at midnight, they saw Master Willibert rise from his grave in the moonshine, seat himself on a high tombstone, and begin to perform on his pocket pipe. Then several other tombs opened, and the dead came forth and danced cheerily over the mounds of the graves. The white shrouds fluttered round their dried-up limbs, and their bones clattered and shook till the clock struck one, when each returned into his narrow house, and the piper put his pipe under his arm and followed their example. The part of the ballad which has to do directly with the Shroud-theft is based upon oral traditions collected by the poet during his sojourn at Teplitz, in Bohemia, in the summer of 1813. Viehoff has ascertained that there are also traces of the legend in Silesia, Moravia, and Tyrol. In these countries the story would seem to be oftenest told in prose; but Viehoff prints a rhymed rendering of the variant localised in Tyrol, where the events are supposed to have occurred at the village of Burgeis:
The twelve night strokes have ceased to sound,
The watchman of Burgeis looks around,
The country all in moonlight sleeps;
Standing the belfry tower beneath
The tombstones, with their wreaths of death,
The wan moon's ghastly pallor steeps.
"Does the young mother in child-birth dead
Rise in her shroud from her lonely bed,
For the sake of the child she has left behind?
To mock them (they say) makes the dead ones grieve,
Let's see if I cannot her work relieve,
Or she no end to her toil may find."
So spake he, when something, with movement slow,
Stirs in the deep-dug grave below,
And in its trailing shroud comes out;
And the little garments that infants have
It hangs and stretches on gate and grave,
On rail and trellis, the yard about.
The rest of the buried in sleep repose,
That nothing of waking or trouble knows,
For the woman the sleep of the grave is killed;
Her leaden sleep, each midnight hour,
Flees, and her limbs regain their power,
And she hastes as to tend her new-born child.
All with rash spite the watchman views,
And with cruel laughter the form pursues,
As he leans from the belfrey's narrow height,
And in sinful scorn on the tower rails
Linen and sheets and bands he trails,
Mocking her acts in the moon's wan light.
Lo, with swift steps, foreboding doom,
From the churchyard's edge o'er grave and tomb
The ghost to the tower wends its ways;
And climbs and glides, ne'er fearing fall,
Up by the ledges, the lofty wall,
Fixing the sinner with fearful gaze.
The watcher grows pale, and with hasty hand,
Tears from the tower the shrouds and bands;
Vainly! That threatening grin draws nigh!
With a trembling hand he tolls the hour,
And the skeleton down from the belfry-tower,
Shattered and crumbling, falls from high.
This story overlaps the great cycle of popular belief which treats of the help given by a dead mother to her bereaved child. They say in Germany, when the sheets are ruffled in the bed of a motherless infant, that the mother has lain beside it and suckled it. Kindred superstitions stretch through the world. The sin of the Burgeis watchman is that of heartless malice, but it stops short of actual robbery, which is perhaps the reason why he escapes with his life, having the presence of mind to toll forth the first hour of day, when—
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine.
The prose legends which bear upon one or another point in the Shroud-theft, are both numerous and important. Joseph Macé, a cabin-boy of Saint Cast, in Upper Brittany, related the following to the able collector of Breton folk-lore, M. Paul Sébillot. There was a young man who went to see a young girl; his parents begged him not to go again to her, but he replied: "Mind your own business and leave me to mind mine." One evening he invited two or three of his comrades to accompany him, and as they passed by a stile they saw a woman standing there, dressed all in white. "I'll take off her coif," said the youth. "No," said the others, "let her alone." But he went straight up to her and carried off her coif—there only remained the little skullcap underneath, but he did not see her face. He went with the others to his sweetheart, and showed her the coif. "Ah!" said he, "as I came here I met a woman all in white, and I carried off her coif." "Give me the coif," replied his sweetheart; "I will put it away in my wardrobe." Next evening he started again to see the girl, and on reaching the stile he saw a woman in white like the one of the day before, but this one had no head. "Dear me," he said to himself, "it is the same as yesterday; still I did not think I had pulled off her head." When he went in to his sweetheart, she said, "I wore to-day the coif you gave me; you can't think how nice I look in it!" "Give it back to me, I beg of you," said the young man. She gave it back, and when he got home he told his mother the whole story. "Ah, my poor lad," she said, "you have kept sorry company. I told you some ill would befall you." He went to bed, but in the night his mother heard sighs coming from the bed of her son. She woke her good man and said, "Listen; one would say someone was moaning." She went to her son's bed and found him bathed in sweat. "What is the matter with you?" she asked. "Ah, my mother, I had a weight of more than three hundred pounds on my body; it stifled me, I could bear it no longer." Next day the youth went to confession, and he told all to the curate. "My boy," said the priest, "the person you saw was a woman who came from the grave to do penance; it was your dead sister." "What can I do?" asked the young man. "You must go and take her back her coif, and set it on the neck on the side to which it leans." "Ah! sir, I should never dare, I should die of fright!" Still he went that evening to the stile, where he saw the woman who was dressed in white and had no head; he set the coif just on the side the neck leant to; all at once a head showed itself inside it, and a voice said, "Ah! my brother, you hindered me from doing penance; to-morrow you will come and help me to finish it." The young man went back to bed, but next day he did not get up when the others did, and when they went to his bed he was dead.
At Saint Suliac a young man saw three young girls kneeling in the cemetery. He took the cap off one of them, saying that he would not give it back till she came to embrace him. Next day, instead of the cap he found a death's head. At midnight he carried it back, holding in his arms a new-born infant. The death's head became once more a cap, the woman disappeared, and the young man, thanks to the child, suffered no harm.
In a third Breton legend a child commits the theft, but without any consciousness of wrong-doing. A little girl picked up a small bone in a graveyard and took it away to amuse herself with it. In the evening, when she returned home, she heard a voice saying:
Give me back my bone!
Give me back my bone!
"What's that?" asked the mother.
"Perhaps it is because of a bone I picked up in the cemetery."
"Well, it must be given back."
The little girl opened the door and threw the bone into the court, but the voice went on saying:
Give me back my bone!
Give me back my bone!
"Maybe it is the bone of a dead man; take the candle, go into the court and give it back to him."
It is most unfortunate to possess a human bone, even by accident. It establishes unholy relations between the possessor and the spirit world which render him defenceless against spells and enchantments. A late chaplain to the forces in Mauritius told me that the witches, or rather wizards, who have it all their own way in that island, contrived, after a course of preparatory persecution, to surreptitiously introduce into his house the little finger of a child. He could not think what to do with it: at last he consulted a friend, a Catholic priest, who advised him to burn it, which was done. We all know "the finger of birth-strangled babe" in the witches' cauldron in Macbeth; but it is somewhat surprising to find a similar "charm for powerful trouble" in current use in a British colony.
A Corsican legend, reported by M. Frédéric Ortoli, should have a place here. On the Day of the Dead a certain man had to go to Sartena to sell chestnuts. Overnight he filled his panniers, so as to be ready to start with the first gleam of daylight. The only thing left for him to do was to go and get his horse, which was out at pasture not far from the village. So he went to bed, but hardly had he lain down when a fearful storm broke over the house. Cries and curses echoed all round: "Cursed be thou! cursed be thy wife! cursed be thy children!" The wretched man grew cold with fear; he got quite close to his wife, who asked: "Did you put the water outside the window?" "Sangu di Cristu!" cried the man, "I forgot!" He rose at once to put vessels filled with water on the balcony. The dead—whose vigil it was—were in fact come, and finding no water either to drink or to wash and purify their sins in, they had made a frightful noise and hurled maledictions against him who had forgotten their wants. The poor man went to bed again, but the storm continued, though the cursing and blaspheming had ceased.
Towards three in the morning the man wished to get up, "Stay," said his wife, "do not go."
"No, go I must."
"The weather is so bad, the wind so high; some mischief will come to you."
"Never mind; keep me no more."
And so saying the husband went out to find his horse. He had barely reached the crossway when by the path from Giufari, he saw, marching towards him, the squadra d'Arrozza—the Dead Battalion. Each dead man held a taper, and chanted the Miserere.
The poor peasant was as if petrified; his blood stood still in his veins, and he could not utter a word. Meanwhile the troop surrounded him, and he who was at its head offered him the taper he was carrying. "Take hold!" he said, and the poor wretch took it.
Then the most dreadful groans and cries were heard. "Woe! woe! woe! Be accursed, be accursed, be accursed."
The villager soon came to himself, but oh! horrid sight! in his hand was the arm of a little child. It was that, and not a taper, that the dead had given him. He tried to get rid of it, but every effort proved fruitless. In despair, he went to the priest, and told him all about it. "Men should never take what spirits offer them," said the priest, "it is always a snare they set for us; but now that the mischief is done, let us see how best we can repair it."
"What must I do?"
"For three successive nights the Dead Battalion will come under your windows at the same hour as when you met it: some will cry, some will sob, others will curse you, and ask persistently for the little child's arm; the bells of all the churches will set to tolling the funeral knell, but have no fear. At first you must not throw them the arm—only on the third day may you get rid of it, and this is how. Get ready a lot of hot ashes; then when the dead come and begin to cry and groan, throw them a part. That will make them furious; they will wish to attack your house—you will let them in, but when all the spectres are inside, suddenly throw at them what is left of the hot ashes with the child's arm along with it. The dead will take it away, and you will be saved."
Everything happened just as the priest said; for three nights cries, groans, and imprecations surrounded the man's house, while the bells tolled the death-knell. It was only by throwing hot ashes on the ghosts that he got rid of the child's arm. Not long after, he died. "Woe be to him who forgets to give drink to the dead."
The Dead Battalion, or Confraternity of Ghosts, walk abroad dressed as penitents, with hoods over their heads. The solitary night traveller sees them from time to time, defiling down the mountain gorges; they invariably try to make him accept some object, not to be recognised in the dark—but beware, lest you accept! If some important person is about to die, they come out to receive his soul into their dread brotherhood.
Ghost stories are common in Corsica. What wilder tale could be desired than that of the girl, betrayed by her lover to wed a richer bride, who returns thrice, and lies down between man and wife—twice she vanishes at cock-crow, the third time she clasps her betrayer in her chilly arms, saying, "Thou art mine, O beloved! mine thou wilt be forever, we part no more." While she speaks he breathes his last breath.
The dead, when assembled in numbers, and when not employed in rehearsing the business or calling of their former lives, are usually engaged either in dancing or in going through some sort of religious exercise. On this point there is a conformity of evidence. A spectre's mass is a very common superstition. On All Soul's Eve an old woman went to pray in the now ruined church of St Martin, at Bonn. Priests were performing the service, and there was a large congregation, but by and by the old woman became convinced that she was the only living mortal in the church. She wished to get away, but she could not; just as Mass was ending, however, her deceased husband whispered to her that now was the time to fly for her life. She ran to the door, but she stopped for one moment at the spot in the aisle where two of her children were buried, just to say, "Peace be unto them." The door swung open and closed after her: a bit of her cloak was shut in, so that she had to leave it behind. Soon after she sickened and died; the neighbours said it must be because a piece of her clothes had remained in the possession of the dead.
The dance of the dead sometimes takes the form not of an amusement but of a doom. One of the most curious instances of this is embodied in a Rhineland legend, which has the advantage of giving names, dates, and full particulars. In the 14th century, Freiherr von Metternich placed his daughter Ida in a convent on the island of Oberwörth, in order to separate her from her lover, one Gerbert, to whom she was secretly betrothed. A year later the maiden lay sick in the nunnery, attended by an aged lay sister. "Alas!" she said, "I die unwed though a betrothed wife." "Heaven forefend!" cried her companion, "then you would be doomed to dance the death-dance." The old sister went on to explain that betrothed maidens who die without having either married or taken religious vows, are condemned to dance on a grassless spot in the middle of the island, there being but one chance of escape—the coming of a lover, no matter whether the original betrothed or another, with whom the whole company dances round and round till he dies; then the youngest of the ghosts makes him her own, and may henceforth rest in her grave. The old nun's gossip does not delay (possibly it hastens) the hapless Ida's departure, and Gerbert, who hears of her illness on the shores of the Boden See, arrives at Coblentz only to have tidings of her death. He rows over to Oberwörth: it is midnight in midwinter. Under the moonlight dance the unwed brides, veiled and in flowing robes; Gerbert thinks he sees Ida amongst them. He joins in the dance; fast and furious it becomes, to the sound of a wild, unearthly music. At last the clock strikes, and the ghosts vanish—only one, as it goes, seems to stoop and kiss the youth, who sinks to the ground. There the gardener finds him on the morrow, and in spite of all the care bestowed upon him by the sisterhood he dies before sundown.
In China they are more practical. In the natural course of things the spirit of an engaged girl would certainly haunt her lover, but there is a way to prevent it, and that way he takes. He must go to the house where she died, step over the coffin containing her body, and carry home a pair of her shoes. Then he is safe.
A story may be added which comes from a Dutch source. The gravedigger happened to have a fever on All Saints' Day. "Is it not unlucky?" he said to a friend who came to see him, "I am ill, and must go to-night in the cold and snow to dig a grave." "Oh, I'll do that for you," said the gossip. "That's a little service." So it was agreed. The gossip took a spade and a pick-axe, and cheered himself with a glass at the alehouse; then, by half-past eleven, the work was done. As he was going away from the churchyard he saw a procession of white friars—they went round the close, each with a taper in his hand. When they passed the gossip, they threw down the tapers, and the last flung him a big ball of wax with two wicks. The gossip laughed quite loudly: all this wax would sell for a pretty sum! He picked up the tapers and hid them under his bed. Next day was All Souls'. The gossip went to bed betimes, but he could not get to sleep, and as twelve struck he heard three knocks. He jumped up and opened the door—there stood all the white monks, only they had no tapers! The gossip fell back on his bed from fright, and the monks marched into the room and stood all round him. Then their white robes dropped off, and, only to think of it! they were all skeletons! But no skeleton was complete; one lacked an arm, another a leg, another a backbone, and one had no head. Somehow the cloth in which the gossip had wrapped the wax came out from under the bed and fell open; instead of tapers it was full of bones. The skeletons now called out for their missing members: "Give me my rib," "Give me my backbone," and so on. The gossip gave back all the pieces, and put the skull on the right shoulders—it was what he had mistaken for a ball of wax. The moment the owner of the head had got it back he snatched a violin which was hanging against the wall, and told the gossip to begin to play forthwith, he himself extending his arms in the right position to conduct the music. All the skeletons danced, making a fearful clatter, and the gossip dared not leave off fiddling till the morning came and the monks put on their clothes and went away. The gossip and his wife did not say one word of what had happened till their last hour, when they thought it wisest to tell their confessor.
Mr Benjamin Thorpe saw a link between the above legend, of which he gave a translation in his "Northern Mythology," and the Netherlandish proverb, "Let no one take a bone from the churchyard: the dead will torment him till he return it." Its general analogy with our Shroud-theft does not admit of doubt, though the proceedings of the expropriator of wax lights are more easily accounted for than are those of the Shroud-thief. Peter of Provence either stole the winding-sheet out of sheer mischief, or he took it to enable him to see sights not lawfully visible to mortal eyes. In any case a well-worn shroud could scarcely enrich the thief, while the wax used for ecclesiastical candles was, and is still, a distinctly marketable commodity. A stranger who goes into a church at Florence in the dusk of the evening, when a funeral ceremony is in the course of performance, is surprised to see men and boys dodging the footsteps of the brethren of the Misericordia, and stooping at every turn to the pavement; if he asks what is the object of their peculiar antics, he will hear that it is to collect
The droppings of the wax to sell again.
The industry is time-honoured in Italy. At Naples in the last century, the wax-men flourished exceedingly by reason of a usage described by Henry Swinburne. Candidates for holy orders who had not money enough to pay the fees, were in the habit of letting themselves out to attend funerals, so that they might be able to lay by the sum needful. But as they were often indisposed to fulfil the duties thus undertaken, they dressed up the city vagrants in their clothes and sent them to pray and sing instead of them. These latter made their account out of the transaction by having a friend near, who held a paper bag, into which they made the tapers waste plenteously. Other devices for improving the trade were common at that date in the Neapolitan kingdom. Once, when an archbishop was to be buried, and four hundred genuine friars were in attendance, suddenly a mad bull was let loose amongst them, whereupon they dropped their wax lights, and the thieves, who had laid the plot, picked them up. At another great funeral, each assistant was respectfully asked for his taper by an individual dressed like a sacristan; the tapers were then extinguished and quietly carried away—only afterwards it was discovered that the supposed sacristans belonged to a gang of thieves. The Shroud-theft is a product of the peculiar fascination exercised by the human skeleton upon the mediæval fancy. The part played by the skeleton in the early art and early fiction of the Christian æra is one of large importance; the horrible, the grotesque, the pathetic, the humorous—all are grouped round the bare remnants of humanity. The skeleton, figuring as Death, still looks at you from the façades of the village churches in the north of Italy and the Trentino—sometimes alone, sometimes with other stray members of the Danse Macabre; carrying generally an inscription to this purport:
Giunge la morte plena de egualeza,
Sole ve voglio e non vostra richeza.
Digna mi son de portar corona,
E che signoresi ogni persona.
The Danse Macabre itself is a subject which is well nigh exhaustless. The secret of its immense popularity can be read in the lines just quoted: it proclaimed equality. "Nous mourrons tous," said the French preacher—then, catching the eye of the king, he politely substituted "presque tous." Now there is no "presque" in the Dance of Death. Whether painted by Holbein's brush, or by that of any humble artist of the Italian valleys, the moral is the same: grand lady and milkmaid, monarch and herdsman, all have to go. Who shall fathom the grim comfort there was in this vivid, this highly intelligible showing forth of the indisputable fact? It was a foretaste of the declaration of the rights of man. Professor Pellegrini, who has added an instructive monograph to the literature of the Danse Macabre, mentions that on the way to the cemetery of Galliate a wall bears the guiding inscription: "Via al vero comunismo!"
The old custom of way-side ossuaries contributed no doubt towards keeping strongly before the people the symbol and image of the great King. I have often reflected on the effect, certainly if unconsciously felt, of the constant and unveiled presence of the dead. I remember once passing one of the still standing chapels through the gratings of which may be seen neatly ranged rows of human bones, as I was descending late one night a mountain in Lombardy. The moon fell through the bars upon the village ancestors; one old man went by along the narrow way, and said gravely as he went the two words: "È tardi!" It was a scene which always comes back to me when I study the literature of the skeleton.