"So when a child, as playful children use, And there, scarce less illustrious, goes the Clerk !" Among the omens in the domestic circle of the Vicar of Wakefield, we are told that "Purses bounded from the fire." In the north of England these erupted cinders are carefully examined by old women and children, and are called either "coffins" or "purses," according to their respective forms, presaging either death or wealth. A coal in the shape of a coffin flying out of the fire to any particular person betokens, says Grose, his or her death to be not far off. THE HOWLING OF DOGS. Dogs have been known to stand and howl over the bodies of their masters who have been murdered, or have died suddenly or by accident. Such a degree of observation and memory of the past as is implied in these demonstrations of grief testifies to the keenness of canine sensibility; but it is hard to connect it in any way with prescience of the future, such as is vulgarly associated with the howling of a dog by night, which is held to be the presage of death to those who may be ill in the neighbourhood.* 66 Shakespeare, in Henry VI., ranks this among omens "The owl shriek'd at thy birth; an evil sign! The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempests shook down trees." Grose gives it as a certain sign that some one of the family will very shortly die; and in Home's Dæmonologie we read: "If dogs houle in the night neer an house where somebody is sick, 'tis a signe of death;" while Ross, in his Arcana Microcosmi (1652), regards it as plaine by historie and experience" that "dogs by their howling por tend death and calamities." Thus, says he, on the authority of Julius Obsiquens, there was an extraordinary howling of dogs before the sedition in Rome about the dictatorship of Pompey, even as before the civil wars between Augustus and Antony, among many other prodigies, there was a great howling of dogs near the house of Lepidus the Pon tifex; and Capitolinus tells of the death of Maximinus being presaged in the same way. Camerarius is quoted in behalf of the statement that some German princes have " certain tokens and peculiar presages of their deaths," among which is the howling of dogs; Pausanias, as relating that before the destruction of the Messenians the dogs broke out into a howling of more than ordinary fierceness; and Fincelius, as testifying that in the year 1553, some weeks before the overthrow Keuchenius says that the rolling of dogs in the dust is a sign of wind; and Willsford confirms the statement, with the addition, "if their guts rumble and stinke very much," and the extension of the sign to "6 'rain or wind." of the Saxons, the dogs in Mysina flocked together and made strange howlings in the woods and fields; and we are reminded that Virgil, Lucan, and Statius severally note the occurrence of the like howling as presaging the Roman calamities in Pharsalia. The British Apollo (1708) confesses itself unequal to determining whether this howling be a fatal prognostic or not, but inclines to believe that "out of a sense of sorrow for the sickness or absence of his master, or the like, that creature may be so disturbed." In the Merry Devil of Edmonton (1631) we read— "I hear the watchful dogs With hollow howling tell of thy approach;" and in Poole's English Parnassus "The air that night was fill'd with dismal groans, Of wolves and fatal dogs." Defoe, in Campbel's Memoirs, confesses to having "some little faith in the howling of a dog when it does not proceed from hunger, blows, or confinement. As odd and unaccountable as it may seem, those animals scent death even before it seizes a person." Moreover, Douce notes the ancient belief that dogs saw the ghosts of the deceased, and, as to their capacity of seeing apparitions, that in the Odyssey the dogs of Eumæus are described as terrified at the sight of Minerva, though at the time she was invisible to Telemachus. CATS, RATS, AND MICE. Omens were drawn by ancient superstition, as Moresinus informs us, from the entrance and exit of strange cats; and Casaubon, in his Annotations on Theophrastus, adds that the running either of a dog or of a cat across one's path also was reckoned ominous. "When the cat washeth her face over her eare, we shall have great store of raine," says Melton's Astrologaster. In Herrick we have "True calendars as pusses eare Wash't o're to tell what change is neare ;" ind among Nature's Secrets Willsford lays it down that "Cats covetng the fire more than ordinary, or licking their feet and trimming the air of their heads and mustachios, presages rainy weather;" while I note by Park in his copy of Bourne and Brand's Antiquities repreents the cat's sitting with her tail to the fire as another indication of hange of weather. The Athenian Oracle explains why it is that a cat's "combing" erself signalises the advent of rain. We are instructed that it is ecause the moisture in the air before the rain, insinuating itself into er fur, induces her to smooth the same and cover her body with it, at so she may feel less the inconvenience of winter, even as she opens her fur in summer that she may the better receive the refreshing of the moist season. Lord Westmoreland's poem, addressed to a cat that bore him com. pany in confinement, bids her "Scratch but thine ear: Then boldly tell what weather's drawing near;" and in Peele's Novice we have the original of an old proverb: "Ere Gib, our cat, can lick her eare." The sneezing of a cat seems to have been accepted as a lucky omen to a bride who was to be married the next day; and Southey, when travelling in Spain, records the prediction by an old woman of a fine day on the morrow, "because the cat's skin looked bright." There also was a vulgar tradition to the effect that cats, when hungry, would eat coals. Thus Izamo, in the Tamer Tamed, tells Moroso— "I'd learn to eat coals with an angry cat;" and the first daughter in Bonduca says— "They are cowards-eat coals like compell'd cats." a The circumstance of rats gnawing the hangings of a room is reckoned, according to Grose, the forerunner of a death in the family;* and Melton has it that "it is a great signe of ill-lucke if rats gnaw man's cloathes;" while in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy we read: "There is a fear which is commonly caused by prodigies and dismal accidents, which much troubles many of us, as if a mouse gnaw our clothes." This superstition regarding the gnawing of mice was familiar to the Romans, and is ridiculed by Cicero in the second book of his treatise on Divination: "Nos autem ita leves atque inconsiderati sumus ut, si mures corroserint aliquid, quorum est opus hoc unum, monstrum putemus. Ante vero Marsicum bellum, quod clypeos Lanuvii mures rosissent, maxumum id portentum haruspices esse discerunt. Quasi vero quicquam intersit mures, diem noctemque aliquid rodentes, scuta an cribra corroserint. Nam, si ista sequimur, quod Platonis Politian nuper apud me mures corroserint, de Republicâ debui pertimescere; aut, si Epicuri de Voluptate liber corrosus esset, putarem annonam in macello cariorem fore." In the same spirit Delrio, noting that in his time it was the habit, when mice destroyed a garment, " rather to dread the advent of future evil than to deplore the present injury," quotes the "neat" saying of Cato in answer to one informing him that the mice had eaten his shoes, that he saw nothing very strange in that, but that it would truly have been a prodigy if the mice had been devoured by the shoes. Further, Molinæus, adverting to the singular fact that the conquerors of the world should regulate themselves by the squeaking of a mouse, cites Valerius Maximus in behalf of the assertion that Fabius Maximus and Caius Grose adds that, "if the neck of a child remains flexible for several hours after its decease, it portends that some person in that house will die in a short tine." Flaminius were admonished thus of the propriety of laying down office-the one as Dictator and the other as chief of the knights. Men, adds he, who take omens from mice or ashes hear not God speaking in Scripture. Among Willsford's Nature's Secrets, it is recorded that "Bats, or flying mice, coming out of their holes quickly after sunset and sporting themselves in the open air, premonstrates fair and calm weather." CRICKETS AND FLIES. In Pliny's Natural History the cricket is mentioned as being highly esteemed by the ancient magicians; and there can be little doubt that our superstition concerning it has been transmitted from that source. Vinny Bourne, in his tender address Ad Grillum, embodies the popular notion that it is a sign of luck to have crickets in the house; and Grose says it is held to be extremely unlucky to kill one, perhaps from the idea of its being a breach of hospitality, since this insect takes refuge within doors. "The crickets chirping behind the chimney stock, or creeping upon the foot-pace," occurs among other Vain Observations and Superstitious Ominations thereupon, in Gaule's Mag-Astromancer Posed and Puzzel'd; and in Ramsey's Elminthologia (1668) we read: "Some sort of people, at every turn, upon every accident, how are they therewith terrified? If but a cricket unusually appear, or they hear but the clicking of a death-watch, as they call it, they, or some one else in the family, shall die." According to Melton's Astrologaster (1620), “it is a signe of death to some in that house where crickets have been many yeares, if on a sudden they forsake the chimney;" and Gay gives among the rural prognostications of death "And shrilling crickets in the chimney cry'd ;" while an early dramatist included in Reed's Old Plays has the line"And the strange cricket i' th' oven sings and hops." Again, in Dryden and Lee's ŒŒdipus "Owls, ravens, crickets, seem the watch of Death." So widespread has been the superstition thus associated that the Spectator writes of the voice of a cricket having struck more terror than the roaring of a lion; and in White's Selborne the cricket is represented to be "the housewife's barometer, foretelling her when it will rain;" sometimes prognosticating to her "ill or good luck, the death of a near relation, or the approach of an absent lover;" while Home's Dæmonologie (1650), after noting that "by the flying and crying of ravens over their houses, especially in the dusk evening, and where one is sick, they conclude Death," adds: "The same they conclude of a cricket crying in a house where there was wont to be none." Of flies we are instructed, in Willsford's treatise on Nature's Secrets, that if in the spring or summer they become busier or blinder than ordinary, or if they are observed to shroud themselves in warm places, it may be taken as a sign of the speedy ensuing of "hail, cold storms of rain, or very much wet weather;" while the fact of their repairing early in autumn to their winter quarters is set down as presaging "frosty mornings, cold storms, and the approach of hoary winter." The swarming and disporting of "atomes or flies" in the sunbeams, according to the same authority, "is a good omen of fair weather." ROBIN-REDBREAST. Touching the common notion that it is ominous or unlucky to destroy particular birds, such as swallows or martins, a writer in the Guardian (No. 61) observes that it might possibly arise from the confidence these birds seem to put in us by building under our roofs; so that it is a kind of violation of the laws of hospitality to murder them. As for the robin-redbreast, not improbably he owes his security to the old ballad of The Babes in the Wood; of which the subsequent stanza places him in a point of view not unlikely to conciliate the favour of children "No burial this pretty pair Of any man receives, Did cover them with leaves." In allusion to this ballad is the popular saying, adverted to by Grey in his annotations upon Shakespeare, that if the robin-redbreast finds the dead body of any rational creature, he will cover, if not the whole body, at least the face with moss; which office of covering the dead is also ascribed to the ruddock or redbreast by Drayton in The Owl (1604) "Cov'ring with moss the dead's unclosed eye, In Stafford's Niobe dissolved into a Nilus (1611) we read: “On her (the nightingale) waites Robin in his redde livorie; who sits as a crowner on the murthered man, and, seeing his body naked, playes the sorrie tailour to make him a mossy rayment;" and Herrick supplies us with the following passages in his Hesperides (1648)— "Sweet Amarillis, by a spring's Soft and soule-melting murmurings, Brought leaves and mosse to cover her." |