Shakespeare has embalmed some traditions of the kind exactly analogous to the present case:
"In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets."[210:1]
Belief in the influence of the stars over life and death, and in special portents at the death of great men, survived, indeed, to recent times. Chaucer abounds in allusions to it, and still later Shakespeare tells us:
"When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."
It would seem that this superstition survives even to the present day, for it is well known that the dark and yellow atmosphere which settled over so much of the country, on the day of the removal of President Garfield from Washington to Long Branch, was sincerely held by hundreds of persons to be a death-warning sent from heaven, and there were numerous predictions that dissolution would take place before the train arrived at its destination.
As Mr. Greg remarks, there can, we think, remain little doubt in unprepossessed minds, that the whole legend in question was one of those intended to magnify Christ Jesus, which were current in great numbers at the time the Matthew narrator wrote, and which he, with the usual want of discrimination and somewhat omnivorous tendency, which distinguished him as a compiler, admitted into his Gospel.
FOOTNOTES:
[206:1] Luke, xxiii. 44, 45.