This Midsummer-Eve Fire and the rites attending it, appear to be reliques of pagan worship, for Gebelin in his Allegories Orientales observes, that at the moment of the Summer Solstice the ancients, from the most remote antiquity, were accustomed to light fires, in honour of the New Year, which they believed to have originally commenced in fire. These fires or Feux de joie were accompanied with vows and sacrifices for plenty and prosperity, and with dances
and leaping over the flames, "each on his departure snatching a firebrand of greater or less magnitude, whilst the rest was scattered to the wind, in order that it might disperse every evil as it dispersed the ashes."[329:A]
Many other superstitions, however, than those mentioned by Googe, were practised on this mysterious eve. To one of the most important Shakspeare alludes in the First Part of King Henry the Fourth, where Gadshill says of himself and company, "We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible."[329:B] Jonson and Fletcher have also ascribed the same wonderful property to this plant, the first in his New Inn.
—————— "I had
No medicine, Sir, to go invisible,
No fern-seed in my pocket;"[329:C]
the second in the Fair Maid of the Inn,—
————— "had you Gyges' ring,
Or the herb that gives invisibility?"[329:D]
It was the belief of our credulous ancestors, that the fern-seed became visible only on St. John's Eve, and at the precise moment of the birth of the Saint; that it was under the peculiar protection of the Queen of Faery, and that on this awful night, the most