Sounds, too, had come in midnight blast, Along Benharrow's shingly side, Where mortal horseman ne'er might ride." This last passage, he informs us, "is still believed to announce death to the ancient Highland family of M'Lean of Lochbuy. The spirit of an ancestor, slain in battle, is heard to gallop along a stony bank, and then to ride thrice around the family-residence, ringing his fairy bridle, and thus intimating the approaching calamity." That the apparition of the Benshie, and the whole train of spectral and demoniacal warnings, were in full force in Ireland,during the seventeenth century, we have numerous proofs; the former was commonly called the Shrieking Woman, and of the latter a most remarkable instance is given by Mr. Scott, from the MS. Memoirs of the accomplished Lady Fanshaw. "Her husband, Sir Richard, and she, chanced, during their abode in Ireland, to visit a friend, the head of a sept, who resided in the ancient baronial castle, surrounded with a moat. At midnight, she was awakened by a ghastly and supernatural scream, and looking out of bed, beheld, by the moonlight, a female face and part of the form hovering at the window. The distance from the ground, as well as the circumstance of the moat, excluded the possibility that what she beheld was of this world. The face was that of a young and rather handsome woman, but pale, and the hair, which was reddish, loose and dishevelled. The dress, which Lady Fanshaw's terror did not prevent her remarking accurately, was that of the ancient Irish. This apparition continued to exhibit itself for some time, and then vanished with two shrieks similar to that which had first excited Lady Fanshaw's attention. In the morning, with infinite terror, she communicated to her host what she had witnessed, and found him prepared not only to credit, but to account for the apparition. 'A near relation of my family,' said he,' expired last night in this castle. We disguised our certain expectation of the event from you, lest it should throw a cloud over the cheerful reception which was your due. Now, before such an event happens in this family and castle, the female spectre whom you have seen is always visible. She is believed to be the spirit of a woman of inferior rank, whom one of my ancestors degraded himself by marrying, and whom afterwards, to expiate the dishonour done to his family, he caused to be drowned in the castle moat." Another set of omens predictive of disaster, supernatural agency, and death, was drawn from the appearances of lights, tapers, and fires. When a flame was seen by night resting on the tops of soldiers' lances, or playing and leaping by fits among the masts and sails of a ship, it was deemed the presage of misfortune; of defeat in battle in the one instance, and of destruction by tempest in the other. As the forerunner of a storm, Shakspeare has introduced it in his Tempest, where Ariel says It was also conceived, that the presence of unearthly beings, ghosts, spirits, and demons, was instantly announced by an alteration in the tint of the lights which happened to be burning; a very popular notion, which the poet adopts in his Richard the Third, the tyrant exclaiming, as he awakens, "The lights burn blue-it is now dead midnight; Act i. sc. 3. But the chief superstition annexed to this branch of omens, was founded on the idea, that lights and fires, commonly called corpse-candles and tomb-fires, preceded deaths and funerals; an article of belief which was equally prevalent among the Celtic and Teutonic nations; and was cherished therefore with the same credulity in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, as in Scandinavia, Germany, and England. In this island, during the sixteenth century, it was generally credited by the common people, that when a person was about to die, a pale flame would frequently appear at the window of the room in which he was laid, and, after pausing there for a moment, would glide towards the church-yard, minutely tracing the path where the future funeral was to pass, and glowing brightly, for a time, on the spot where the body was to be interred. Sometimes, however, instead of lights, a procession was seen by the dim light of the moon: "there have bin seene some in the night," says the English Lavaterus, "when the moone shin'd, going solemnlie with the corps, according to the custome of the people, or standing before the dores, as if some bodie were to be carried to the church to burying.' In Northumberland the fancied appearance of the corpse-light was termed seeing the Waff (the blast or spirit) of the person whose death was to take place. In Wales this superstition was formerly so general, especially in the counties of Cardigan, Caermarthen, and Pembroke, thal scarcely any individual was supposed to die without the previous signal of a corpse-candle. Mr. Davis, a Welshman, in a letter to Mr. Baxter, observes, that "They are called candles, from their resemblance, not of the body of the candle, but the fire; because that fire doth as much resemble material candle-lights, as eggs do eggs: saving that in their journey, these candles are sometimes visible, and sometimes disappear; especially if any one comes near to them, or in the way to meet them. On these occasions they vanish, but presently appear again behind the observer, and hold on their course. If a little candle is seen, of a pale or bluish colour, then follows the corpse, either of an abortive, or some infant; if a large one, then the corpse of some one come to age. If there be seen two, three, or more, of different sizes,some big, some small,-then shall so many corpses pass together, and of such ages or degrees. If two candles come from different places, and be seen to meet, the corpses will do the same; and if any of these candles be seen, to turn aside, through some bye-path leading to the church, the following corpse will be found to take exactly the same way." + Among the Highlanders of Scotland, likewise, the same species of omen was so implicitly credited, that it has continued in force even to the present day. Of this Mrs. Grant has given us, in one of her ingenious essays, a most remarkable instance, and on the authority, too, of a very pious and sensible clergyman, who was accustomed, she says, "To go forth and meditate at even; and this solitary walk he always directed to his churchyard, which was situated in a shaded spot, on the banks of a river. There, in a dusky October evening, he took his wonted path, and lingered, leaning on the churchyard-wall, till it became twilight, when he saw two small lights rise from a spot within, where there was no stone, nor memorial of any kind. He observed the course these lights took, and saw them cross the river, and stop at an opposite hamlet. Presently they returned, accompanied by a larger light, which moved on between them, till they arrived at the place from which the first two set out, when all the three seemed to sink into the earth together. "The good man went into the churchyard, and threw a few stones on the spot where the lights disappeared. Next morning he walked out early, called for the sexton, and shewed him the place, asking him if he remembered who was buried there. The man said, that many years ago, he remembered burying in that spot, two young children, belonging to a blacksmith on the opposite side of the river, who was now a very old man. The pastor returned, and was scarce sat down to breakfast, when a message came to hurry him to come over to pray with the smith, who had been suddenly taken ill, and who died next day."‡ Fiery and meteoreous exhalations, shooting through the lower regions of the air, and sinking into the ground, were also deemed predictive of death. The individual was pointed out by these fires either falling on his lands or garden, or by gleaming with a lurid light over the family burying-place. Appearances of this kind were called tomb-fires by the Scandinavians, and tan-we by the Welsh, who believed that no freeholder died without a meteor having been seen to sparkle ⚫ Of Ghostes and Spirites, 1572. p. 79. Vide Grose's Provincial Glossary, article Popular Superstitions, p. 282, 283. and vanish on his estate. In fact, as Shakspeare has expressed it, there could happen "No natural exhalations in the sky :" but were considered as 66 prodigies, and signs, Abortives, presages, and tongues of Heaven." The idea that sudden and fearful noises are frequently heard before death takes place, and are indications of such an event, was very common at the period of which we are writing, both on the Continent and in this country. "It happeneth many times," says the English Lavaterus, "that when men lye sicke of some deadly disease, there is something heard going in the chamber, like as the sicke men were wonte, when they were in good health: yea and the sicke parties themselves do many times heare the same, and by and by gesse what will come to passe. And divers times it commeth to passe, that when some of our acquaintance or friends lye a dying, albeit they are many miles off, yet there are some great stirrings or noises heard. Sometimes we think that the house will fall on our heads, or that some massie and waightie thing falleth downe throughout all the house, rendring and making a disordered noise and shortlie within few monthes after, we understand that those things happened, the very same houre that our friends departed in. There be some men of whose stocke none doth dye, but that they observe and marke some signes and tokens going before: as that they heare the dores and windowes open and shut, that some thing runneth up the staires, or walketh up and downe the house, or doth some one or other such like thing. "There was a certain parishe priest, a very honest and godly man, whom I knewe well, who in the plague time could tell beforehand, when any of his parishe should dye. For in the night time he heard a noise over his bed, like as if one had throwne downe a sacke full of corne from his shoulders which when he heard he would say: Nowe an other biddeth me farewell. After it was day, he used to inquire who died that night, or who was taken with the plague, to the end that he might comfort and strengthen them, according to the duty of a good pastour. "In Abbeys, the Monks, servaunts or any other falling sicke, many have heard in the night preparation of chests for them, in such sorte as the coffin-makers did afterwards prepare in deede. "In some country villages, when one is at death's dore, many times there are some heard in the evening, or in the night, digging a grave in the Churcheyarde, and the same the next day is so found digged, as these men did heare before." The next class of superstitions which we shall notice in this chapter, is that depending on charms and spells, a fertile source of knavery and credulity, and which has been chiefly exercised, in our poet's time and since, by old women. Of this occupation, and its attendant folly and imposition, the bard has given us a sketch, in his Merry Wives of Windsor, in the person of the Old Woman of Brentford, who is declared by Ford to be "a witch, a quean, an old cozening quean! We are simple men; we do not know what's brought to pass under the profession of fortune-telling. She works by charms, by spells, by the figure, and such daubery as this is; beyond our element: we know nothing." Act iv. sc. 2. That women of this description, or as Scot has delineated them, in one instance, indeed, deviating from the portly form of Shakspeare's cunning Dame, "leane, hollow-eied, old, beetle browed women," † were, as dealers in charms, spells and amulets, a very numerous tribe, in the days of Elizabeth and James, we have every reason to believe, from contemporary evidence; but it appears that the trade of fortune-telling was then, as now, chiefly exercised by the wandering horde of gipsies, to whose name and characteristic knavery our great poet alludes, in Antony and Cleopatra, where the Roman complains that Cleopatra, Of this wily people, of the juggle referred to in these lines, and of their pro * Of Ghostes and Spirites, p. 77-79. + Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 279. |