dence assigned us. This is our happiness, and in it is included our fame, honor, and independence. When men shall submit to it, the face of woe shall no more be seen, the turbulent voice of faction shall no more be heard. Superstition, hypocrisy, and all their fatted train, shall fly from the face of day; the common weal shall cease to be the common evil, but each individual shall drink pleasure, happiness, and joy, at the perennial and exhaustless fountain of social communion. U. J.

POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS AND CUSTOMS.

(Continued from p. 161.)

No bondage seems so dreadful as that of superstition: it hath ever imposed the most abject kind of slavery. I have known (says the Spectator) the shooting of a star spoil a night's rest, and have seen a man in love grow pale, and lose his appetite upon the plucking of a merry thought. A screech owl at midnight has alarmed a family more than a band of robbers, and the voice of a cricket has struck more terror, than the roaring of a lion. Nothing, he observes, is so inconsiderable, which may not appear dreadful to an imagination that is filled with omens and prognostics: a rusty nail, or a crooked pin, shoots up into prodigies.

For when we think Fate hovers o'er our heads,
Our apprehensions shoot beyond all bounds:
Owls, ravens, crickets, seem the watch of death;
Nature's worst vermin scare her godlike sons;
Ecchoes, the very leavings of a voice,
Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves.
Each mole-hill thought swells to huge Olympus,
While we, fantastic dreamers, heave and puff,
And sweat with an imagination's weight.

Dryden's and Lee's Edipus.

Gay, in his pastoral dirge, has preserved some of the rural prognostications of death.

-The wether's bell

Before the drooping flock toll'd forth her knell :
The solemn death-watch click'd the hour she dy'd,
And shrilling crickets in the chimney cry'd.

The boding raven on her cottage sat,

And with hoarse croaking warn'd us of her fate:

The lambkin, which her wonted tendance bred,
Dropp'd on the plain that fatal instant dead;
Swarm'd on a rotten stick, the bees I spy'd,
Which erst I saw when Goody Dobson dy'd.

THE CUSTOMS IN SCHOOLS, ON ST. NICHOLAS' DAY.

J. Boëmus Aulanus, in his description of some singular customs used in his time in Franconia, tells us, that scholars, on St. Nicholas day, used to elect three out of their number, one of whom was to play the bishop, the others to act the parts of deacons. The bishop was escorted by the rest of the boys in solemn procession to church, where, with his mitre on, he presided during the time of divine worship: this being ended, he, with his deacons, went about singing, from door to door, and collected money, which they did not beg as alms, but demanded as the bishop's subsidy. The boys were prevailed upon to fast on the eve of this day, in order to persuade themselves, that the little presents which on that night were put for them into shoes,* placed under the table for that purpose, were made them by their very bountiful prelate Nicholas.

The ancient calendar of the church of Rome, has the following observations on this day, which is the sixth of December.

December

6. Nicolao Episcopo.

Scholarum feriæ.

Reges ad ædem muneribus & pompâ accedunt.
Poetarum mos olim in schola ad pueros relatus,
Regales in scholis epulæ.

December

6. "Nicholas, bishop.

School holidays.

The kings go to church

With presents and great shew.

The ancient custom of poets in school, related to the boys.

The king's feasts in schools.”

Vestiges of these ancient Popish superstitions are still retained in several schools, about this time of the year, particularly in the

There is a festival or ceremony observed in Italy (called Zopata, from a Spanish word, signifying a shoe) in the courts of certain princes, on St. Nicholas' Day, wherein persons hide presents in the shoes and slippers of those they do honour to, in such manner as may surprise them on the morrow, when they come to dress. This is done in imitation of the practice of St. Nicholas, who used, in the night time, to throw purses in at the windows of poor maids, to be marriage portions for them. Vide Bailey.

grammar school at Durham.* They ask, and forcibly obtain from the master, what they call orders. I have heard also of a similar custom at the school of Haughton le Spring, in the county of Durham,

CHRISTENING OF BELLS.

BARONIUS informs us, that Pope John XIII. A. D. 968, consecrated a very large new cast bell in the Lateran church, and gave it the name of John, This is the first instance I meet with, of what has been since called the "baptizing of bells," a superstition which the reader may find ridiculed in the Romish beehive. The vestiges of this custom may be yet traced in England in Tom of Lincoln, and great Tom ("the mighty Tom") at Christ Church, Oxford.

ROSEMARY USED AT FUNERALS.

ROSEMARY, as are all evergreens, is an emblem of the soul's immortality. It is as much as to say, that though the body be dead, yet the soul is evergreen, and always in life: it is not like the body, and those other greens, which die and revive again at their proper seasons: no autumn nor winter can make a change in it, but it is unalterably the same, perpetually in life, and never dying.

A MONTH'S MIND.

To have a month's mind, implying a longing desire, is a figurative expression, of which the subsequent is the origin: minnying days, says Blount (from the Saxon Gemynde, i. e. the mind, q. mynding days) Bede Hist. lib. 4. ca. 30, Commemorationis dies; days which our ancestors called their monthe's mind, their year's mind, and the like, being the days whereon their souls (after their deaths) were had in special remembrance, and some office or obsequies said for them; as obits, dirges, &c. This word is still retained in Lancashire ; but elsewhere they are more commonly called anniversary days.

ST. PATRICK.

WE find, in Ware's History of the Bishops, that after the death of Maurice M'Donald, Archbishop of Armagh, in the year 1134,

* At Salt Hill, near Windsor, the Eton boys have a custom (in June) of giving salt, and extorting money from every one that passes. The captain, for so they style their leader, is said to raise, some years, several hundred pounds on this occasion, all which he claims as his own. They stop even the stage coaches. There is generally great concourse of the nobility, gentry, &c, at Salt Hill on that day.

This seems to be a fragment, but greatly mutilated, of the above described anbient customs in schools on St. Nicholas' Day.

Nigel M'Aid usurped that see, taking away with him, says St. Bernard in his Life of Malachy, the ornaments of the church, such as the text of the gospels which had belonged to St. Patrick, and a staff covered with gold, and set with precious stones, called the staff the Jesus; in such reverence were these reliques held, that whoever possessed them was esteemed the rightful possessor of the see.The history of this celebrated staff, as delivered by Joceline, is .briefly thus: St. Patrick, moved by divine instinct, or angelic revelation, visited one Justus, an ascetic, who inhabited an island in the *Tyrrhene sea, a man of exemplary virtue and most holy life. After mutual salutations and discourse, he presented the Irish Apostle with a staff, which he averred he had received from the hands of Jesus Christ himself. In this island were some men in the bloom of youth, and others who appeared aged and decrepid; St. Patrick conversing with them, found that those aged persons were sons of those seemingly young; astonished at this miraculous appearance, he was told, "that, from their infancy, they had served God, that they were constantly employed in works of charity, and their doors ever open to the traveller and distressed; that one night a stranger, with a staff in his hand, came to them, whom they accommodated to the best of their power; that, in the morning, he blessed them, and said, I am Jesus Christ, whom you have always fathfully served, but last night you received me in my proper person: he then gave his staff to their spiritual father, with directions to deliver it to a stranger named Patrick, who would shortly visit them; on saying this, he ascended into heaven, and left us in that state of juvenility in which you behold us, and our sons, then young, are the old decrepid persons you now see." Joceline goes on to relate, that, with this staff, our apostle collected every venomous creature in the island, to the top of the mountain of Cruagh Phadruig, in the county of Mayo, and from thence precipitated them into the ocean.

These tales were traditional among the Irish, from the early ages, and antecedent to the time of Joceline, who wrote A. D. 1185, for we find them in Henry, the monk of Saltrey, who flourished about forty years before that period. Superstition, thus finding an easy assent from the credulity of mankind, wonderfully exalted the power of, and excited the veneration due to, such reliques.

The following reliques were religiously preserved in Christ Church Dublin.

A crucifix which had spoken twice; the staff of Jesus; St. Patrick's high altar of marble, on which a leper was miraculously car

* Part of the Mediterranean sea on the coast of Tuscany.

H H-VOL. XVII,

ried from Great Britain to Ireland; a thorn of our Saviour's crown; part of the Virgin Mary's girdle; some of the bones of Saints Peter and Andrew; a few reliques of the holy martyr, St. Clement, St. Oswald, St. Faith, the Abbot Brendan, St. Thomas Becket, St. Wolstan, Bishop of Worcester, and St. Laurence O'Tool; with the shrine of St. Cubius.

IRELAND'S EYE.

A SMALL rocky island lying to the north of the Hill of Howth. St. Nessan founded an abbey here about A. D. 570, where he passed the evening of a well spent life in fasting and in prayer. The book of the four gospels, commonly called the Garland of Howth, was preserved here, of which Archbishop Allen, in the liber niger, says, "That book is held in so much esteem and veneration, that good men scarcely dare take an oath on it, for fear of the judgments of God being immediately shown on those who should forswear themselves."

WELCH ODE TO THE WIND.

WIND of the firmament! of ready course, and strong of voice, in ranging far away! a terrible being art thou! uttering sounds most hoarse. The bravado of the world!-without foot or wing. It is a wonder how awfully thou hast been placed in the store-house of the sky, without any one support! and now how swiftly dost thou run over the hill! Tell me, my never resting friend, of thy journey on some northern blast, over the dale. No one will stop thee, or question thee. Not an arrayed host, nor deputed hand!—Not the blue blade, nor flood, nor rain. Fire will not burn thee: thou wilt not be weakened by deceit: drown thou wilt not! Thou wilt not get entangled, for thou hast no angle: the swift steed is not wanted under thee !-nor bridge over the stream, nor boat.— No catchpole can arrest thee! nor the power of a clan in thy day of triumph. Thou that winnowest the feathered tops of trees, no eye can ken thee on thy vast naked couch. A thousand shall hear thee, nest of the pouring rain. Thou art God's bounty along the earth, thou roaring and irritating breaker of the top of the oak.— Thou shouter in the morn of day on high!-Thou waster of the heap of chaff. Thou gruff of voice. Thou comest a tempest on the calm of the sea. Thou scatterer and heaper of the fallen leaves! Thou ruthless lord of the firmament, that flieth irresistibly over the bosom of the brine to the extremities of the world! Storm of the hill, be above to-night: I go to see my love.

Q. Z.