shirt, which seems superstitious." Two instances of its success are recorded. There is likewise set down," against the epilepsia, "a singular amulet made of the elder growing on a sallow. If in the menth of October, a little before the full moon, you pluck a twig of the elder, and cut the cane that is betwixt two of its knees, or knots, in nine pieces, and these pieces being bound in a piece of linnen, be in a thread, so hung about the neck, that they touch the spoon of the heart, or the sword-formed cartilage; and that they may stay more firmly in that place they are to be bound thereon with a linnen or silken roller wrapt about the body, till the thred break of itself. The thred being broken and the roller removed, the amulet is not at all to be touched with bare hands, but it ought to be taken hold on by some instrument and buried in a place that nobody may touch it." We are told, "Some hang a cross, made of the elder and sallow, mutually inwrapping one another about the children's neck," pp. 54, 207, 211. Among other rustic charms may be mentioned: Curing a lame pig by boring a little hole in his ear, and putting a small peg of elder into it. In the epilogue to Lyly's "Campaspe," 1584, a passage is found which implies that elder was given at that time as a token of disgrace: "Laurell for a garland and ealder for a disgrace." So again, in "An Hue and Crie after Cromwell," 1649, p. 4, we read: "Cooke, the Recorder, have an elder tree, And steel a slip to reward treacherie." There is a vulgar prejudice that "if boys be beaten with an elder-stick, it hinders their growth." Elephants. There is a belief founded on observation, that this quadruped will not only start at the grunt of the wild pig, but at a lizard or other small object, from which he may feel a difficulty in protecting himself. This is constantly noticed in respect to the specimens which are brought to Europe, and are disconcerted by a mouse in the den among the straw. Charles Gibbon, in his Order of Equality, 1604, merely mentions that elephants are terrified by the grunting of pigs. He should have explained that the pig in question was the tenant of Indian jungles. Elf.--The elf was also called urchin or goblin. The "Urchins' Daunce" is preserved in one of Ravenscroft's musical volumes, and has been republished in Dr. Rimbault's book of "Songs and Ballads," 1851. toms and treatment were different. The nostrums which were prescribed by our Saxon doctors in each case are described at length in Mr. Cockayne's "Saxen Leechdoms." Mr. Cockayne includes a "salve against the elfin race and nocturnal goblin visitors, and for the women with whom the devil hath carnal commerce." The specific is as follows: "Take the ewe hop plant, wormwood, bishopwort, lupin, ashthroat, harewort, vipers bugloss, heathberry plants, cropleek, garlic, grains of hedgerise, githrise, fennel; put these worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep's grease, add much holy salt, strain through a cloth, throw the worts into running water." If any one was troubled by night elves, his forehead was to be smeared with this salve, and also his eyes, and any sore parts of his body, and he was to be censed with incense," and signed frequently with the cross, and then his condition would soon be better. A disease, consisting of a hardness of the side, was called in the dark ages of superstition the elf-cake. In the seventh book of Lupton's "Thousand Notable Things,' "No. 55, is the following prescription which, it is said, will help the hardness of the side called the elf-cake. "Take the root of gladen, and make powder thereof, and give the diseased party half a spoon-ful thereof to drink in white wine, and let him eat thereof so much in his pottage at one time, and it will help him within a while." A cure for the above disorder is in Harl. MS. 2378, f. 47 and 57: "For the elf-cake." This is of the time of Henry VI., and the same as that from Lupton. Camden says: "When any onein Ireland happens to fall, he springs up again, and turning round three times to the right, digs the earth with a sword or knife, and takes up a turf, because they say the earth reflects his shadow to him: (quod illi terram umbram reddere dicunt: they imagine there is a spirit in the earth); and if he falls sick within two or three days after, a woman skilled in those matters is sent to the spot, and there. says, 'I call thee P. from the east, west, south, and north, from the groves, woods, rivers, marshes, fairies white, red, black, &c.' and, after uttering certain short prayers, she returns home to the sick person, to see whether it be the distemper which they call esane, which they suppose inflicted by the fairies, and whispering in his ear another short prayer, with the Pater-noster, puts some burning coals into a cup of clear water, and forms a better judgment of the disorder than most physicians." Britannia, 1789, iii., 668. Elf-Disease. There appear to have been two kinds of elf-disease, land-elf Elf-Fire or the ignis fatuus.-"Wred-diseaso, and water-elf disease. The symp-eld vocatur Ignis qui ex attritu duorum Lignorum elicitur, & quia superstitiosis varie usurpari dicitur." Ihre," Glossar. Suio-Goth.' " 1769. Comp. Will o' the Wisp. Elf-Locks.-A matted lock of hair in the neck. See the glossary to Kennet's "Parochial Antiquities," v. Lokys. "His haires are curl'd and full of elves-locks, and nitty for want of kembing." He is speaking of Ruffian, a swash buckler, and a braggart." Lodge's "Wits Mise rie," 1596, p. 62. So Shakespear, in “Romeo and Juliet," 1597: a Yfaith her Queenship little rest should take: Id scratch that face, that may not feel the aire, And knit whole ropes of witch-knots in her haire."’ Mr. Halliwell, who cites the above passage in illustration of the word witchknot, in his "Archaic Dictionary," 1847, adds, under Elf: “To Elf-To entangle in knots." In Holland's "Don Zara del Fogo, a mock romance," 1656, "My guts, quoth Soto, are contorted like a dragons tayle, in elf-knots, as if some tripe-wife had tack't them together for chitterlings." Elf-Shot. Fairies were sometimes thought to be mischievously inclined by shooting at cattle with ar rows headed with flint-stones. These were often found, and called elfshots. They were simply the stone arrowheads used by the aboriginal Irish and by the early Scots. They are still occasionally found in different parts of the world, having been in universal use, before weapons were made of metal. It was thought that if the part of the animal affected by the elf-shot was rubbed with the arrowhead, and was then put into the water which it drank, there was no danger of fever or other ill-effect. Plot, speaking of elf-arrows, says: "These they find in Scotland in much greater plenty, especially in the præfectuary of Aberdeen, which, as the learned Sir Robert Sibbald informs us, they there called elf-arrows, lamiarum sagittas, imagining they drop from the clouds, not being to be found upon a dili gent search, but now and then by chance in the high beaten roads. The animal affected was, in order to a cure, to be touched with one of these, or made to drink the water in which one of them had been dipped." Staffordshire, p. 369. Allan Ramsay, in his " Poems," 1721, p. 224, explains elf-shot thus: "Bewitch'd, shot by fairies. Country people tell odd tales of this distemper amongst cows. When elf-shot, the cow falls down suddenly dead; no part of the skin is pierced, but often a little triangular flat stone is which is called the elf's arrow. found near the beast, as they report, In an authoritative Scotish publication of the 18th century, we are told that stone or flint arrow heads, called elf, or fairystones, used not uncommonly to be found in various districts, as at Lauder, at Wick (Caithness), and Fordice (co. Banff). About 1793, the minister of Wick reported: "Some small stones have been found which seem to be a species of flint, about an inch long and half an inch broad, of a triangular shape, and barbed on each side. The common people confidently assert that they are fairies' arrows, which they shoot at cattle, when they instantly fall down dead, though the hide of the animal remains quite entire. Some of these arrows have been found buried a foot under ground, and are supposed to have been in ancient times fixed in shafts, and shot from bows." Again: "Elves, by their arrows, destroyed, and not seldom unmercifully, cows and oxen." But now, it is added: "the elf has withdrawn his arrow." Stat. Acc. of Scotland, i., 78, x. 15; xxi., 148. The subsequent lines are found in Collins : "There ev'ry herd by sad experience knows How, wing'd with fate, their elf-shot arrows fly, When the sick ewe her summer food foregoes, Or stretch'd on earth the heart-smit heifers lie." Odes, p. 10. The author of the Whitby Glossary," quoted by Atkinson, tells us that, to cure an awf- (or elf-) shotten animal it must be touched with one of the shots, and the water administered in which one of them has been dipped." Mr. Atkinson adds: "In one district of Jutland it is believed that cattle, when elfshot, become stiff, and surely die, unless speedy help is at hand. The quickest and surest remedy consists in driving the beast up out of the moss, and firing a shot over it; only care must be taken to fire from the head in the direction of the tail." Cleveland Glossary, 1868, v. Elf. The naturalists of the dark ages owed many obligations to cur fairies, for whatever they found wonderful and could not account for, they easily got rid of by charging to their account. the Eligius, St., Eloy, or Loy.(December 1). This saint was Bishop of Noyon, and flourished in sixth century. The late Mr. Robert Bell, in a note to Chaucer's "Freres Tale," observes: "The Book of Homilies,' in enumerating the different forms of invoking the Saints, gives as an example, to the horse, God and Saint Loy save thee.'"' In Chaucer it is a carter is addressing his horse: "Hayt now,' quod he, 'ther Jhesu lesse ! That was wel twight, myn oughne lyard I pray God save thy body and Saint "Hire gretest othe was but by seint Lyndsay, in his "Monarke,” 1554, says: "Sum makis offrande to sanct Eloye; That he thare hors may weill conuoye.' And again Woodes, in the Conflict of Conscience, 1581, says: lish. See Hazlitt's Bibl. Coll, i., 285. The anniversary was subsequently adopted as a festival in honour of the accession of Elizabeth of England on the 17th of the month. Elizabeth's, Queen, Accession.-(St. Hugh's Day, Nov. 17). From a variety of notices scattered in different publications, the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's Accession appears to have been constantly observed even within the 18th century; and in many of the almanacks was noted, certainly as late as 1684, and probably considerably later. In "The Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson," 1607, inserted in "Old English JestBooks," there is the following reference to St. Hugh's Day and its observances: "Vpon Saint Hewes day being the seventeenth of November, upon which day the tryumph was holden for Queene Elizabeths hapy government, as bonefiers, ringing. of bells, and such like; but in the parish where Maister Hobson dwelled, he all, by reason the steeple was a-mending being Churchwarden, was no ringing at and the bells downe." It appears from the "Status Scholæ Etonensis," 1560, that the scholars at Eton elected their Boy on this day, as the members of the college were accustomed to do on the feast of St. Nicholas. The author of "A Protestant Memorial for the Seventeenth of "Sent Loy saue your horse, Sent An- November, being the Inauguration Day thony your swyne.' Taylor the Water-poet has an anecdote of a countryman who was saying his devotions before an old image of the saint, when it fell down, and hurt him severely. It is in "Wit and Mirth," 1629. In the "Booke in Meeter of Robin Conscience" (circa 1585), one of the interlocutors swears by St. Loy. We read in the account of Tottenham High Cross in "The Ambulator," 1790: "In a brick field, on the west side of the great road, belonging to Mr. Charles Saunders, is St. Loy's Well, which is said to be always full, and never to run over: and in a field, opposite the Vicarage House, rises a spring called Bishop's Well,' of which the common people report many strange cures.' Eligius in his lifetime was moneyer to Dagobert I. and II., Kings of Paris, and became after death and canonization patron of the Goldsmiths and Farriers. See Hazlitt's supplement to his Coins of Europe, 1897, v. Paris, and Idem, Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England, 1864-6, iii., 236. Elizabeth's Day, St.-This was the 19th November, and had no original reference to English customs, but to the natal day of Elizabeth, daughter of Alexander, King of Hungary, who was canonized, and of whom there is a life in Eng of Queen Elizabeth," 1713, mentions this as still in observance, and adds: "I say we have now a new motive to this zeal, the preservation of our most gracious queen Anne being to be added to the vindication of the most gracious queen Elizabeth." Elmo's, St., Fire.-See Castor and Pollux. We hear of the phenomenon occurring to Helen of Troy and to Servius Tullius, when the future King of Rome was a boy in the household of Tarquinius Priscus. Donaldson's Miscellanea Virgiliana, 1825, pp. 176-7, where other examples or allusions are cited from Virgil and Horace. Elvish-Marked. Shakespear has the expression elvish-marked, on which Steevens observes: "The common people in Scotland (as I learn from Kelly's" Proverbs') have still an aversion to those who have any natural defect or redundancy, as thinking them marked out for mischief." In Ady's Candle in the Dark, 1659, p. 120, we read: "There be also often found in women with childe, and in women that do nurse children with their breasts," and on other occasions, tain spots, black and blue, as if they were pinched or beaten, which some common ignorant people call fairy-nips, which, notwithstanding do come from the P "cer causes aforesaid: and yet for these have, Englewood "-the Englyssh-wood' Embalming. This was a very common practice in this country in Catholic times, and remains so abroad to this day. In one of the most interesting of our early romances, "The Squyr of Low Dethere is a description of the manner in which the daughter of the King of Hungary buried and embalmed the body (as she supposed) of her lover the squire, but in reality that of the false steward: gre,' "Into the chamber she dyd him bere; His bowels soone she dyd out drawe, And buryed them in goddes lawe. She sered that body with specery, With wyrgin waxe and commendry; And closed hym in a maser tre, And set on hym lockes thre. She put him in a marble stone, With quaynt gynnes many one, And set hym at hir beddeshead, And euery day she kyst that dead." Hazlitt's Popular Poetry, ii., 49. Some embalmed remains were discovered at Bury St Edmunds in 1772, which, on examination, were found to be in as perfectly sound a condition as an Egyptian mummy. Even the brain, the colour of the eyes and hair, the shape of the features, every thing, had remained through hundreds of years inaccessible to decomposing influences. Antiq. Repertory, 1808, iii., 331-2. The remains of Napoleon I., embalmed in 1821, were found to be in perfect state in 1840, when the tomb was opened preparatory to their removal to France. The Egyptians embalmed even their cats, and vast numbers of these mummies have been in modern times converted to common use. The Ember or Imber Days. Festyvall," speaking of the Quatuor Tempora, or Ymbre Days, now called Ember Days, fol. 41, b., says they were so called, bycause that our elder fathers wolde on these dayes ete no brede but cakes made under ashes." But in Tarlton's "Newes out of Purgatorie," 1590, the anonymous author perhaps semi-seriously ascribes the term to a different cause, "one pope," says he, "sat with a smocke about his necke, and that was he that made the imbering weekes, in honor of his faire and beautifull curtizan, Imbra.' Englewood, or Inglewood, Cumberland." At Hesket (in Cumberland) yearly on St. Barnabas's Day, by the highway-side, under a thorn tree, (according to the very ancient manner of holding assemblies in the open air), is kept the court for the whole Forest of the ballad of Adam Bel. "" of See Ephialtes. The ephialtes, or nightmare, is called by the common people witch-riding, and Wytche is the old English name for the complaint. This is, in fact an old Gothic or Scandinavian superstition. The term Ephialtes may be accounted scarcely correct, as it is merely the traditional name of one of the giants, who made war against the gods, and was slain by Apollo. Marca, whence our nightmare is derived, was in the Runic theology a spectre of the night, which seized men in their sleep, and suddenly deprived them of speech and motion. A great deal of curious learning upon the night-mare, or nacht-mare, as it is called in German, may be seen in Keysler and in Ihre. Antiquitates Selecta Septentrionales, p. 497, et seqg; Glossarium Suio-Gothicum, ii., 135. According to Pliny's "Natural History," the antients believed that a nail drawn out of a sepulchre, and placed on the threshold of the bedchamber-door, would drive away phantoms and visions which terrified people in the night. The night-mareis, of course, now almost universally referred to its true origin, dyspepsia or indigestion, but even now it is easy to account for the prevalence of the superstition among a credulous and uneducated people, when the frightfully painful nature of the struggle during its continuance, and the astonishingly vivid phantoms conjured up before us, are considered. In Scot there is the following spell against this incubus : "S. George, S. George, our Ladies Knight, He walkt by day, so did he by night, Note. "Black Jesting Pawn. So make him White Pawn. And you'd look then Made of a miller's daughter." There is an account of Johannes Cuntius of Pertsch, in Silesia, inserted in the Antiquarian Repertory," from Henry More's Philosophical Writings. This person was suspected of having sold one of his sons, and of having made were a contract with the Devil; he died, assemblage of sporting and peaceable holisuddenly under painful circumstances: day folks of all ranks, trades, and ages. and the narrative informs us (ii. The stag showed much sport, and after a 321), "He had not been dead a run of 45 minutes was taken upon the day or two, but several rumours border of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton's spread in the town, of a spiritus incubus Park, at Warlies. A strong body of the or ephialtes, in the shape of Cuntius, that Metropolitan Police were upon the ground would have forced a woman. But this at the request of some of the parties who ephialtes seems to be different from our have made illegal inclosures of portions conception of the night-mare. of the Forest, in the expectation that the fences would be thrown down; but nothing of the kind was attempted, or ever been made in this forest, and which it intended, as such encroachments as have may be necessary to throw out, will be removed in a strictly legal manner by the forest officers, when the freeholders of the County of Essex and her Majesty's ministers fulfil the engagements they recently entered into by the desire of the majority have received the sanction and cordial of the House of Commons, and which approbation of her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen." And it is also noticed in the journals for 1875. But in 1883, an anat last discontinued. nouncement appeared that it was to be Epiphany.-See Twelfth Day. Epping Forest Stag-Hunt. The Chelmsford Chronicle" of April 15, 1805, contained a notice to the following effect: "On Monday last Epping Forest was enlivened, according to ancient custom, with the celebrated stag hunt. The road from Whitechapel to the Bald-faced Stag,' on the Forest, was covered with Cockney sportsmen, chiefly dressed in the costume of the chace, viz. scarlet frock, black jockey cap, new boots, and buckskin breeches. By ten o'clock the assemblage of civic hunters, mounted on all sorts and shapes, could not fall short of 1,200. There were numberless Dianas also of the chace, from Rotherhithe, the Minories, &c., some in riding habits, mounted on titups, and others by the sides of their mothers, in gigs, tax-carts, and other vehicles appropriate to the sports of the field. The Saffron Walden stag-hounds made their joyful appearance about half after ten, but without any of the Mellishes or Bosanquets, who were more knowing sportsmen than to risque either themselves, or their horses, in so desperate a burst! The huntsman having capped their halfcrowns, the horn blew just before twelve, as a signal for the old fat one-eyed stag (kept for the day) being enlarged from the cart. He made a bound of several yards, over the heads of some pedestrians, at first starting-when such a clatter commenced, as the days of Nimrod never knew. Some of the scarlet jackets were sprawling in the high road a few minutes after starting so that a lamentable return of maimed! missing! thrown! and thrown-out! may naturally be supposed." In the Standard newspaper of April 24, 1870, occurs the subjoined paragraph: Lieut. Colonel Palmer, the verderer of the Forest and judge of the Forest Courts, attended the King's Oak, High Beach, to receive any of the Royal Princes, the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London, and such of the citizens of London and others from the vicinity who might see fit to attend for the sake of exercising their ancient privilege of hunting a stag in Epping Forest on Easter Monday. The Hon. Frederick Petre lent his pack of stag hounds for the purpose, and a fine deer was turned out about three o'clock in the afternoon, in the presence of a very large saints of this name. mus. He describes it as Erra Pater. See a good account in Nares, Glossary, 1859, in v. Errors, Vulgar or Popular.— The Schola Salernitana records some curious fallacies that rue sprinkled in a house kills all the fleas; that, when the young swallows are blind, the mother, by applying the plant celendine, can make them see that watercresses taken as a bever age, or as an ointment, are specifics against baldness and the itch; that willow-juice poured into the corn-ear will kill the blight; and that the rind of the tree boiled in vinegar will remove warts: and the present catalogue of absurdities might be enlarged with great ease. Vaughan informs us, "That the mole hath no eyes, nor the elephant knees, are two well known vulgar errors: both which notwithstanding, by daily and, manifest experience are found to be un |