and before the end of the year Jacopone was in a cell of the Convent at Cellarino. Sheltered by its walls from the surrounding world, he spent the last days of his stormy life in peace. At the end of the year 1306 he fell seriously ill. As he was on the point of death the brethren wished to give him the sacrament. But he said that he would receive it from no one except from his beloved Janne dell' Averna. And hardly had he finished singing the hymn "Anima O benedetta," beginning "O soul on whom the Creator has bestowed plenteous salvation, consider thy Lord on the Cross waiting to heal thee," when his friend, who lived at a great distance and who was ignorant of the illness of Jacopone, entered the room. He received the sacrament from his hands, and murmuring, "Jesù nostra fidanza, del cuor somma speranza," he fell asleep in the night specially sacred to those he had loved so well -the Madonna and her Child.

The following epitaph was written on him:

"Ossa B. Jacoponi de Benedictis
Tudertini Fr. Ordinis Minorum,
Qui stultus propter Christum,
Nova Mundum Arte delusit,
Et Coelum rapuit.

Obdormivit in Domino die XXV Decembris Anno
MCCCVI."

His works were edited by Tresatti, who added a copious commentary to them. To enter into a detailed criticism of his poems would require a large space. Apart from this, it is quite a secondary duty of the critic to pronounce judgment on a work of past times. His task is to merge his individuality in that of the person to be described; to put himself entirely in his place; to live, if possible, his life, and to breathe the spirit of the times in which his lot was cast. After having done so he stands aloof, and points out how the moral and intellectual phenomena brought to light are in accordance with laws as certain and as fixed as those of the physical world, if we but knew them. As yet we know but in part, and hence there is room for mistakes and surprise; but when we shall know fully, the only source of astonishment left to humanity will be the fact that it ever was astonished.

The one great hymn of Jacopone has sufficed to lift him from the ranks of the dead immortals to those who stand forth in living immortality. And after him came the Atlas of the Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri. The Franciscan monk was his prophet.*-Macmillan's Magazine.

THE belief that the maladies by which poor humanity is tormented are removable without the intervention of drug or doctor, has obtained in all ages and in all countries; the savage and the civilised alike

The following is a list of Jacopone's works: -The edition of Tresatti divides his poetical

works into seven books, viz., Book I. Le Satire; Book II. I Cantici Morali; Book III. Le Odi; Book IV I Cantici penitentiali; Book V. Theorica del divino amore; Book VI. Cantici spirituali amatorii; Book VII. Segreto spirituale. The titles of his prose works are as follows::-Quando homo potest scire quod sit in charitate; De humilitate; quomodo homo pervenit ad sui contemptum; De triplici animae statu; De quatuor pugnis animae; De reformatione sensuum similitudo; De studio animae ad virtutes; De quaestione inter rationem et conscientiam; De quinque scutis patientiae. It will be observed that Tresatti's edition does not contain the "Stabat Mater." This omission does not, however, favor the supposition that it was not written by Jacopone. Tresatti does not mention "Cur Mundus," which is undoubtedly from the pen of Jacopone.

have had, we might say still have, immense faith in the power of sundry charms, of a more or less ridiculous nature. Philosopher though he were, Bacon himself, not, it must be owned, without signs of misgiving, testified in their favor, writing:

I had from my childhood, a wart upon about sixteen years old, being then at Paris, one of my fingers; afterwards, when I was there grew upon both my hands a number of warts (at least an hundred) in a month's space: the English ambassador's lady, who was a woman far from superstitious, told me one day she would help me away with my warts; whereupon she got a piece of lard with the skin on, and melted the warts all over with the fat side, and amongst the rest that wart which I had from my childhood; then she nailed the piece of lard, with the fat towards the sun, upon a part of her chamber window, which was to the south. The success was, that within four weeks' space all the warts

went quite away, and that wart which I had so long endured for company; but at the rest I did little marvel, because they came in a short time, and might go away in a short time again, but the going of that which had stayed so long doth yet stick with me.' We might put down the cure to the credit of the lard, but Bacon goes on: They say the like is done by rubbing of warts with a green elder stick, and then burying the stick to rot in muck;' and we remember trying that charm most triumphantly in our boyhood, but we were taught to notch the stick before casting it away. A writer in Notes and Queries tells of a relative troubled with thirty-two warts on one hand, and two on the other, who tried the elder charm upon the worst hand, and got rid of the thirty-two, while the pair she had omitted to charm, remained to plague her; and when she sought to remedy her fault by going through the ceremony again, she found it futile; the charm would seem to have been broken by her telling of it.' Another correspondent of Notes and Queries writes: "Twenty-five years ago there resided at the little village of Ferry Hincksey, near Oxford, an old woman who had a great reputation for charming warts. Being at that time a lad, and much troubled with these excrescences, one of which was as large as a fourpenny piece, I was recommended to pay the old lady a visit. With fear and trembling, I entered her little hut; and after being interrogated as to the number of warts upon my person, a small stick was produced, upon which certain notches were cut, a cross having been first slightly imprinted on the larger wart; the old lady then retired into her garden to bury the stick, and I was dismissed. From that day my troublesome and unsightly adherents began to crumble away, and I have never been troubled since.'

these warts and their corpses pass away, ad never more return.' Another method is to make as many knots in a piece of twine as you have warts with which you wish to part company; touch each wart with a different knot, and bury the twine in a moist spot, saying: 'There is none to redeem it but thee;' or you may use green peas in the same way, but then you must wrap each pea up separately in paper before committing it to earth. Supposing you cannot get green peas, and twine is not to be had, there is no need to despair; all you have got to do is to pick up the proper number of pebbles, put them in a bag, carry them to where four crossroads meet, and fling the bag over your left shoulder, and go on your way rejoicing that you have thus transferred your warts to whoever chances to open the bag. In Cornwall they get a tramp to carry away their warts by writing the number of them inside his hat. A Leicester lady is reported to have removed a number of warts from a five-year-old boy by taking him and a packet of new pins to an ashtree. A pin was stuck through the bark of the tree, then through a wart, and then into the tree again, where it was left; the process being repeated until as many pins were sticking in the ash as the boy had warts: the latter were gone in one week's time. Those more serious excrescences called wens are not to be charmed away so easily. A common snake must be taken by its head and tail and drawn slowly across the front of the patient's neck nine times, before it is buried alive in a tightly corked bottle. Should this fail, the sufferer must wait till May-day comes round, and be up in the morning early enough to gather dew from a churchyard grave before the sun rises. Any grave will not answer; it must be that of the last young man or young woman buried there, the charmseeker and charm-yielder being, of course, of opposite sexes; and the dew must be gathered by passing the hand thrice from the head to the foot of the grave, and applied immediately to the affected part. A yet surer wen-remover is the 'dead-stroke,' but it has the disadvantage of not being always come-at-able; indeed, this unpleasant charm was put down by parliament when it made an end of public executions; for it would certainly be difficult to obtain permission to rub a dead criminal's hand three times over one's wen, especially as

A piece of stolen meat is just as efficacious as the elder-wood, provided it be buried secretly in a secluded place; so is a large black snail, if it be well rubbed on the wart and then hung upon a thorn; but this has to be repeated upon nine successive nights, when the snail will have shrivelled to nothing, and the wart have followed its example. In the south of Ireland, a wart-bearer has to wait his opportunity, and when a funeral passes by him, take to polishing his warts vigorously, while he thrice utters the invocation : 6 May

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVIII., No. 5

40

the virtue of the stroke departs with the cutting down of the body.

Boils may be cured by simply crawling under a bramble which has grown into the soil at both ends; a 'sty' may be got rid of by rubbing it nine times with the point of a hair taken from a black cat's tail on the first night of the new moon; and ringworm will vanish if the person affected will only take a small quantity of ashes between the forefinger and thumb, and while holding the ashes to the ringworm, repeat the lines:

Ringworm! ringworm red!

Never mayst thou spread or speed,
But aye grow less and less,
And die among the ase.

The performance must be gone through

before breaking fast, and for three mornings running, or it will be of no avail. In the Orkneys, sprains are cured by tying round the injured part a wresting thread of black wool knotted with nine knots, the operation being accompanied by a muttering of a rhyme ending in the lines:

Blood to blood, bone to bone, Mend thou, in God's name! The 'sweying' or pain of a burn is eased by repeating:

A dead wife out of the grave arose, And through the sea she swimmed, Through the water wade to the cradle. God save the bairn, burnt sair. Het fire, cool soon, in God's name. Or by blowing three times upon the blister, after saying:

Here come I to cure a burnt sore: If the dead knew what the living endure The burnt sore would burn no more. Another word-charm for healing a burn is noted by Pepys, as something worth preserving:

There came three angels out of the east;
The one brought fire, the other brought frost-
Out fire, in frost,

In the name of the Father, and Son, and Holy

Ghost!

Most country-bred children are familiar with the dock-leaf cure for the sting of a nettle, although they may neglect to use the old formula:

Nettle in, dock out; dock in, nettle out;
Nettle in, dock out; dock rub nettle out.

Or as Wiltshire youngsters put it:

Out 'ettle, in dock,

Dock shall ha' a new smock; 'Ettle zhant ha' narrun.

A thorn in the flesh is a still more troublesome matter; it need not be so, since it is bound to come out if solemnly charged to move in the name of Saint Blaize. If it stays in, no harm will come of it, if one recollects to repeat the quatrain:

Christ was of a Virgin born,

And he was pricked with a thorn;
And it did neither bell nor swell,
And I trust in Jesus this never will.

bleeding, catch a toad, kill him, put him If you are plagued with a nose given to in a bag, and the bag round your neck; but since a toad is not always at hand, another course is open to you, that is, to ask some one of the other sex to buy a lace want it, nor pay for it, nor thank the kind for you; but you must not say why you bringer; then, if you make a necktie of be troubled with such a disorder. Should the lace for nine days, you will never more you fail in obtaining the lace, get some wise old man or woman to repeat in your presence, but not in your hearing, these

lines:

Three virgins came over Jordan's land,
Each with a bloody knife in her hand;
Stem, blood, stem-Letherly stand!
Bloody nose, in God's name, mend!

Are you troubled with that ache which no philosopher yet bore patiently, put a double nut, or, better still, a tooth out of a dead man's jaw, in your pocket, and you may defy the dentist. Always wear a snake's skin round your head, and headache will be unknown to you. Steal a potato, and as long as you carry it about you, rheumatism will not attack your limbs; if a potato is not to be filched, the right forefoot of a hare will do, or, failing that, a bit

Coffin

of the wood of the mountain-ash. rings out of a grave, we need hardly say, or the patella of a sheep or lamb, worn as near the skin as may be convenient, will keep cramp at bay in the daytime; and to insure freedom from such a dis

agreeable bedfellow, all that is necessary is to make a cross upon the floor with the shoes and stockings, garter below the left knee, put the shoes beneath the counterpane with the toes just beyond it, or the slippers under the bed with their soles upwards.

Hertfordshire folk at one time had great faith in one of a group of trees known as the cross-oaks, standing where two roads crossed each other, near Berkhampstead;

and when troubled with ague, were wont to peg a lock of hair to the charmed tree, and by a sudden wrench, sever it from the head, and then leave it, in the happy conviction their ague would abide with the oak for evermore. Of another Hertfordshire charm, the following veracious story was told a hundred and twenty years ago. A girl at Gaddesden having the evil in her feet from infancy, at eleven years old lost one of her toes by it, and was so bad that she could hardly walk. A beggar-woman coming to the door, and hearing of it, said if they would cut off the hind-leg, and the fore-leg on the contrary side, of a toad, and put them in a silken bag about the girl's neck, it would certainly cure her; but they must be sure to turn the maimed toad loose again, and as it pined, wasted, and died, so would the distemper likewise waste and die; which happened accordingly, for the girl was entirely cured by it. Another Gaddesden girl, having the evil in her eyes, her parents dried a toad in the sun, and put it in a silken bag, which they hung upon the back of her neck; and although it was thus dried, such was the virture of the charm, that it raised little blisters, and did the girl a great deal of good, until she carelessly lost it.

panied by thirty young men; when service was over, she set herself in the church porch, and each young man, as he passed by, dropped a penny into her lap; but the last, instead of giving her a penny, took up the twenty-nine she had received, and gave her half-a-crown in exchange. With this in her hand, she walked thrice round the communion-table, and then departed to get the half-crown made into a ring. One Sunday, a decrepit old woman stood within the porch of the west door of Exeter Cathedral, in the hope of obtaining forty pennies from forty unmarried men, as a certain charm against paralysis.

Epilepsy, although it defies the doctors, yields to a charmed ring; the worst of it is, authorities agree to differ about the method to be adopted to insure the ring's efficacy. In Northamptonshire, the afflicted individual collects from nine persons of the opposite sex nine pieces of silver money and nine three-halfpences; the former to be made into the ring, the latter to pay for making it. In Norfork, the coppers are dispensed with, but the silver pieces must be sixpenny ones, contributed by an odd number, either nine or eleven, of friends; while in Suffolk they swear by even numbers, and insist upon the necessity of collecting ten or twelve pieces of silver, bits of brooches, or anything of that sort, from as many people, if the ring is to effect its object. In Devonshire, a midnight walk, thrice repeated, round the communiontable of the parish church, is all an epileptic patient need do to charm away the 'sacred disease.' According to the Times of the 7th of March, 1854, a Devonshire lass sought to make assurance doubly sure by rolling the two charms into one, after a fashion of her own. She went to afternoon service at the parish church, accom

A tongue taken from a living fox prevents disease of any kind attacking the fortunate possessor. The slough of an adder hung on the rafters of a house renders insuring that house unnecessary; a house-leek in the roof makes it a proof against the lightning's flash. When the wheat begins to show in Herefordshire, the farm-servants cut a branch of thorn before daybreak, burn part of it in a large fire in the field, and hang up the rest in the farmhouse, as a charm against mildew and smut. When a Northamptonshire henwife sets a hen, she is particular that the nest contains an odd number of eggs, and is careful to mark each egg with a small black cross, to save it from four-footed poachers. A large stone having a natural hole through it, hung outside a cowhouse, prevents the cattle having the nightmare; and farmers of the fifteenth century thought their beasts secure against murrain if marked with the mark of a saint, for one Thomas Egliston was paid ninepence for putting St. Wilfrid's mark upon sixteen oxen belonging to Cardinal Langley, bishop of Durham, to the intent that they might escape such a visitation. A Norfolk man boasted that no mishap could chance to his horse so long as he wore something he had tied round its neck; a curious urchin stole the charm, which turned out to be the thumb of an old leather glove, containing a copy of the Lord's Prayer. Not long ago a valuable horse, belonging to a well-to-do farmer at Crewkerne, was so ill, that two veterinary surgeons were summoned to consult as to what should be done; upon examining their patient, they found something tied round the animal's neck, and making inquiry, were told by the farmer's wife that she and her husband agreed that the horse was bewitched, and

she had therefore tied one of her garters round its neck to break the spell.

An old beldam, accused in the fifteenth century of curing diseases by witchcraft, was told by her judges they would set her at liberty if she would divulge her charm. She closed with the offer, and informed them that it consisted in repeating the words:

My loaf in my lap,

My penny in my purse,
Thou art never the better,
I am never the worse!

Her fee being a penny and a loaf of bread. This deceiver let off her silly dupes more cheaply than the old crone who, a year or two ago, made a farm-laborer pay a guinea for a piece of parchment inscribed with sundry mysterious signs and foreign words, to

be worn by his wife, whom she had pronounced to be ill-wished.' If any of our readers would like to know how the power of ill-wishing is to be obtained, we can tell them. Here is the potent ill-working charm: Ye gang out ov a night, ivery night, while ye find nine toads; and when ye've gitten t' nine toads, ye hang 'em up ov a string, and ye make a hole and buries t' toads 't' hole, and as t' toads pines away, so t' person pines away 'at you've looked upon wiv a yevil eye, and they pine and pine away while they die, without ony disease at all!' This is the art of killing no murder made easy; but having every confidence in the good intentions of those we address, we feel no qualms of conscience for making them masters of the awful secret.-Chambers's Journal.