[7] About twenty years ago, the widow of an Irish farmer, in Derry, killed her deceased husband’s horse. When remonstrated with by her landlord, she said, ‘Would you have my man go about on foot in the next world?’ She was quite in the savage intellectual stage.
[8] ‘At the solemn festival suppers, ordained for the honour of the gods, they forget not to serve up certain dishes of young whelp’s flesh’ (Pliny, H. N., xxix. 4).
[9] Compare Cleobulus, Fr. 2: Bergk, Lyr. Gr., iii. 201. Ed. 4.
[10] Nov., 1880.
[11] Mr. Leslie Stephen points out to me that De Quincey’s brother heard ‘the midnight axe’ in the Galapagos Islands (Autobiographical Sketches, ‘My Brother’).
[12] ‘Ah, once again may I plant the great fan on her corn-heap, while she stands smiling by, Demeter of the threshing floor, with sheaves and poppies in her hands’ (Theocritus, vii. 155-157).
[13] In Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough is a very large collection of similar harvest rites.
[14] Odyssey, xi. 32.
[15] Rev. de l’Hist. des Rel., vol. ii.