[484]. White and blue are the favourite variation. In a series, climax is often displaced by anticlimax, as in the quotation below: wife—betrothed; gold—silver; back—neck. For anticlimax with decreasing numbers, see Radloff, II. 670.
[485]. Radloff, II. 669.
[486]. See Vilmar, Deutsche Altertümer im Hêliand, Marburg, 1862, pp. 3 f.
[487]. Essai sur l’Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs, Paris, 3d ed., 1887, pp. 6 f.
[488]. Odyssey, I. 352.
[489]. A study of marriage-songs must begin with choral sex-dances and songs of the great periodic excitement, the mating-time, still observed by Australian tribes, and work up through survivals of every sort to the festal “epithalamies” and their deputies in the poetry of art.
[490]. E. H. Meyer, Volkskunde, p. 168.
[491]. Perhaps a survival, but surely an exceptional case, valuable only for the communal feeling. See Pearson, who gives the facts, Chances of Death, II. 141.
[492]. Old English Ballads, pp. xxxii ff.
[493]. Fauriel, Chants Populaires de la Grèce Moderne, Paris, I. 1824, II. 1825. See I. xxxvi. Roman literature gives hints of the same sort. The first epithalamium of Catullus (lxi) is “an imitation of the national custom”: Teuffel, Hist. Roman Lit., trans. Warr, p. 5.