“But thou art neither like thy sire, nor dam;
But like a foul misshapen stigmatic
Mark’d by the destinies to be avoided,
As venom toads, or lizards’ dreadful stings.”
Again, in “2 Henry VI.” (v. 1), young Clifford says to Richard:
“Foul stigmatic, that’s more than thou canst tell.”
We may note, too, how, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), mothers’ marks and congenital forms are deprecated by Oberon from the issue of the happy lovers:
“And the blots of Nature’s hand
Shall not in their issue stand;
Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious, such as are
Despised in nativity,
Shall upon their children be.”[602]
Indeed, constant allusions are to be met with in our old writers relating to this subject, showing how strong were the feelings of our forefathers on the point. But, to give one further instance of this superstition given by Shakespeare, we may quote the words of King John (iv. 2), with reference to Hubert and his supposed murder of Prince Arthur:
“A fellow by the hand of Nature mark’d,
Quoted, and sign’d, to do a deed of shame,
This murder had not come into my mind.”
This adaptation of the mind to the deformity of the body concurs, too, with Bacon’s theory: “Deformed persons are commonly even with nature; for, as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature, being void of natural affection, and so they have their revenge on nature.”
Drowning. The old superstition[603] of its being dangerous to save a person from drowning is supposed, says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, to be alluded to in “Twelfth Night.” It was owing to the belief that the person saved would, sooner or later, injure the man who saved him. Thus, in Sir Walter Scott’s “Pirate,” Bryce, the pedler, warns the hero not to attempt to resuscitate an inanimate form which the waves had washed ashore on the mainland of Shetland. “‘Are you mad,’ exclaimed the pedler, ‘you that have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man? Wot ye not if ye bring him to life again he will do you some capital injury?’”
Epilepsy. A popular name for this terrible malady was the “falling-sickness,” because, when attacked with one of these fits, the patient falls suddenly to the ground. In “Julius Cæsar” (i. 2) it is thus mentioned in the following dialogue: