Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/151



SOME POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS OF THE ANCIENTS.

SUPERFICIAL acquaintance with classical literature is apt, I believe, to leave on the mind an exaggerated impression of the general level of intelligence in antiquity. The authors commonly read are so eminently reasonable, and so little tinctured with vulgar superstition, that we are prone to suppose that the mass of men in the classical ages were equally free from those gross and palpable delusions which we designate as superstitions. The supposition is natural, but erroneous. It is natural, because our knowledge of the ancients is derived chiefly from literature, and literature reflects the thoughts and beliefs of the educated few, not of the uneducated many. Since the invention of letters the breach between these two classes has gone on widening, till the mental condition of the one class comes to differ nearly as much from that of the other as if they were beings of different species. But down to the present century both sides remained in almost total ignorance of the gulf which divided them. Educated people, as a rule, had no inkling that the mental state of the great majority of their fellow-countrymen differed in scarcely any material respect from that of savages. They did not dream that their humble neighbours had preserved