every kind and reverse of fortune. This mighty earth-work of the Ancient Britons was not reared with any of the mild views of peace and trade; we may well believe that military prowess and Druidic superstition were the two great animating principles. But the City of the Sun has lost all its glory, a score or two of stones alone remain to tell of some former importance, "The city sits solitary that was full of people."

But the Roman cities, they stood in pride and pomp in Britain. Eboracum, Clausentum, Silchester, and now we lose all memorial of them, no! not all: the Museum Gardens of York are rich beyond all comparison. In the monuments of Eboracum, and the fields about Staines, still preserve innumerable evidences of the old city of Silchester; this was the third of the British towns in extent; here Arthur is Isaid to have been crowned; here the Roman soldiers hung the imperial purple upon Constantine; here innumerable monuments have been, from time to time, brought forth to the light, and the corn waves now over the ruins of a noble city. Thus it is with York. Thus it is, most probably, with Kenchester, near Hereford; and thus with many cities in England, whose very names have passed away from record and from memory. It would be, my friend, a pleasant occupation for us, if some day, we were to start forth upon an excursion, to dig among the ruins of these old places; to disentomb our English Pompeii's; and to lay bare the theatres, baths, temples, and monuments once flourishing in pride above, but now buried beneath the ground.

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CHAPTER IX.

SUPERSTITIONS OF OLD ENGLAND.

"And as she lay upon the dirty ground,

Her huge long tail her den all overspread, Yet was in knots and many boughts upwound, Pointed with mortal sting; of her there bred A thousand young ones, which she daily fed Sucking upon her poisonous dugs; each one Of sundry shapes, yet all ill favoured : Soon as the uncouth light upon them shone, Into her mouth they crept, and sudden all were gone." SPENSER.

Fairy Queen.-Book I.-The Cave of Error.

THERE are superstitions lingering in England yet, beyond all question, and many very derogatory to the dignity of this proud human nature of ours; but we have left behind us the day when every spot of earth was haunted by all sorts of ridiculous spectres of the diseased fancy. We are writing upon Old England, and it will not, therefore, be too much to suppose that many of these strange beings and hallucinations are altogether unknown to the reader from an immense heap of rubbish we will therefore select a few instances illustrative

Even in the

of our forefathers' follies of faith. North of England, however, among the dales, in the north-western part of Northumberland, where there are no towns, and where the scanty population reside in small villages and lonely farm-steads, many traces of popular superstition yet remain; and houses which many years since had the reputation of being haunted, have not yet given up the ghost. It is yet a common practice, we understand, at lyke wakes, where young and old assemble to watch the dead, as is usual with the lower classes, for the neighbours and friends to relate ghost stories,-and, no doubt, when related in the room in which the corpse lies, they produce a powerful impression, and tend materially to preserve the forms of the old expiring follies. Fear still holds her dominion over many a lonely district. The inhabitants of large towns, never out of the circle of lamp-light, understand nothing of these fears within the charmed beam of the lamp-light no spirit dare enter: but, alas for those unfortunate creatures who have frequently to pass the dark shut-up house the spot where the murder was committed, or the three 'loaning' ends where a suicide lies buried, or the corner of a church-yard where lies a miser who died without discovering his hidden treasure, and where he is still said to walk!

"Though among the Northumbrian peasantry the number is not great of persons who profess to testify, from their own experience, of the appearance of ghosts, wraiths, death-hearses, and similar apparitions, and of the power of

warlocks and witches, yet there are many who are firmly persuaded that such things have been;' and not a few who continue to believe that there are ghosts and witches still. The troubled spirits which most frequently vexed the upper air, and made night hideous, were those of persons who had been murdered, and of misers who had hidden treasure, and failed to discover it before their decease. Persons who mourned with inordinate grief the death of parent, child, husband, wife, or friend, were sometimes visited by the spirit of the departed, and solemnly warned not to disturb the repose of the dead by their unavailing lamentations, and murmurs at the dispensations of Providence. It was believed that though human justice failed in detecting the murderer, yet went he not without punishment even on earth, for not unfrequently did the spirit of his victim appear to him in the darkness and solitude of night, filling his mind with terror, to which death would have been to him a relief, had he not dreaded the greater torments which awaited him hereafter.

“A wraith, or wauf, as it is frequently called. in Northumberland, is the apparition of a person which appears before his death. The wraith is commonly seen by a near relation or friend of the party whose death it portends; and it is sometimes seen, though the person whose death is thus announced be in a distant country. I have heard of a man who saw and spoke to his

* Richardson's Book of the Borders.

own wraith, though without receiving an answer, and who died next day. When the death-hearse, drawn by headless horses, and driven by a headless driver, is seen about midnight, proceeding rapidly, but without noise, to the church-yard, the death of some considerable person in the parish is sure to happen at no distant period. After the death of a person, the following was the mode of proceeding to ascertain which member of the family was next to depart for their long home.' The straw or chaff of the bed or mattress on which the person last deceased had died, was to be taken into the yard and burnt, and in the ashes was to be seen the print of a foot; and that member of a family whose foot corresponded with the impression was the person who was next to die.It is an article of general belief, that if there be pigeons' feathers in a bed on which a dying person lies, the struggle of the departing spirit in liberating itself from its tenement of clay is painfully protracted, and that a person cannot even die on such a bed, but must be lifted out before the troubled spirit can obtain its release.”*

Who has not heard of the "Brown Man of the Muirs?"" In the year before the great Rebellion," says Mr. Surtees, in his History of Durham, "two young men from Newcastle were sporting on the High Moors above Elsdon, and after pursuing their game several hours, sat down to dine in a green glen, near one of the

* Rambles in Northumberland.