Si j'avois dispersé ceci en divers endroits de mon ouvrage, j'aurois évité la censure de ceux qui appelleront ce chapitre un fatras de petit recueils. Mais comme je cherche la commodité de mes lecteurs plutôt que la mienne, je veux bien au depens de cette censure, leur épargner la peine de rassembler ce que j'aurois dispersé.
BAYLE.
There is no superstition, however harmless it may appear, and may indeed long continue to be, but has in it some latent evil. Much has arisen from the distinction of unlucky days, which may very innocently and naturally have originated, though it was afterwards dexterously applied by astrologers, and by the priests of false religions, to their own purposes. No one would willingly commence an important undertaking on the anniversary of a day which had brought to him some great and irreparable calamity. It would be indecent to fix upon St. Bartholomew's for a day of public rejoicing in France; or in Portugal upon that day on which Lisbon was laid in ruins by the great earthquake. On the other hand an English General, and an English army, would feel something more than their wonted hope and expectation of victory, if they gave the enemy battle on the anniversaries of Waterloo, or Blenheim, Cressy, Poictiers, or Agincourt. God be thanked neither our fleets, or armies have ever yet caused a day to be noted with black in the English calendar!
But many a good ship has lost that tide which might have led to fortune, because the captain and the crew thought it unlucky to begin their voyage on a Friday. You were in no danger of being left behind by the packet's sailing on that day, however favourable the wind, if it were possible for the captain to devise any excuse for remaining till the morrow in harbour. Lord Byron partook this superstition; and if any thing of the slightest importance in which he was concerned were commenced on a Friday, he was seriously disconcerted.
Such however are the effects of superstitious animosity, that (as the Puritans in the next generation made Christmas-day a fast by an ordinance of Parliament) in James the first's reign Friday was kept as a sort of holyday. The biographer of a Spanish lady, who came to England for the purpose of secretly serving the Roman Catholic cause, says “that among her other griefs she had that of hearing the wheel go round, by which they roasted whole quarters of beef on every Friday, delighting to profane with forbidden food that day on which the catholics, by fasting and other works of penitence, manifested their sense, every week throughout the year, of the sufferings of their Lord and Saviour. In all English houses,” he says, “both private and public (to which latter great part of the people went for their meals) all kinds of meat roasted and boiled, are seen on Fridays, Good Friday not excepted, as if it were a land of Jews or Turks. The nobles in particular reserve their feasts and entertainments of all kinds of meats and delicacies for Fridays. It is the sport of the great, and their sort of piety, to testify by these sacrileges their hatred to the Roman church.”
There is probably some exaggeration in this statement; and if the biographer was conversant with the history of his own country, he must have known that there was a time when his own countrymen made it a point of duty to eat pork on Saturdays, for the sake of despiting the Jews. But the practice cannot have been so common as he represents it, for if it had, Friday would not have retained its inauspicious character to the present time. Yet even this which is in common opinion the most unlucky of all the days, may, from particular circumstances, deserve it appears to be marked with a white stone. Upon a trial brought at the Chelmsford Assizes, by a disconsolate widow against a faithless suitor, for breach of promise, a letter of the defendant's was produced, containing this passage: “Mrs. Martha Harris, you say I have used you ill; but I do not think I have at all; for I told you not to count too much, lest something should happen to disappoint. You say the day was mine; but respecting that, I said, ‘if before harvest it must be very soon, or it would be in harvest;’ and you said ‘fix any time soon.’ But you said you should like to marry on a Friday, for you thought that a good day; for on a Friday your husband died, and on a Friday I first came to see you, and Friday was market day.”
Old opinions, however groundless, are not often so easily overcome. The farmer has let precious days pass by without profiting by favourable weather, because he was warned against them by his almanack, or by tradition; and for the same reason, measures which might have relieved and saved a patient, have been fatally procrastinated. There were about thirty days in the christian year to which such malignant influences were imputed, that the recovery of any person who fell ill upon them was thought to be almost impossible: in any serious disease how greatly must this persuasion have increased the danger!
More than half the days in the year are unlucky in Madagascar: and the Ombiasses, as the sort of bastard Mahomedan jugglers in that great island are called, have made the deluded people believe that any child born on one of those days, will, if it be allowed to grow up, prove a parricide, be addicted to every kind of wickedness, and moreover be miserable throughout the whole course of its life. The infant is always exposed in consequence; and unless some humaner parents employ a slave or relation to preserve it, and remove it for ever from their knowledge, it is left for beasts, birds, or reptiles to devour!