Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/398

 358 Correspondence.

Wortley to Wharncliffe Lodge "over rocks and cloud-kissing mountains, one of them so high that in cleer day a man may from the top thereof see both the minsters or cathedral churches, Yorke and Lincolne, neere 60 miles off us ; and as it is to be sup- posed that when the Devil did looke over Lincolne as the proverb is, that he stood upon that mountain or neere it."

In Mr. Andrew Clark's recent history of Lincoln College, p. 208, will be found the following quotation from John Pointer's guide- book to Oxford, in 1749: "The image of the Devil that stood many years on the top of this college (or else that over Lincoln Cathedral) gave occasion for that proverb. To look on one as the Devil looks over Lincoln." In the Oxford Magazine, vi., 376 (May 23, 1888), Mr. Haverfield cites from the Gentleman's Afaga- zine, i. (1731), p. 402 : "Wednesday, Sept. 15. The famous Devil that used to overlook Lincoln College in Oxford was taken down, having about two years since lost his head in a storm." And in Oxford Magazi?ie, vii., 263 (Mar. 13, 1889), I note that "as early as 1695 Miss Celia Fiennes, whose diary has recently been pub- lished under the title of Through England on a Side-Saddle, paid a visit to Oxford in that year ... in the list of colleges which she gives we find mention of ' Linghorn Colledge which is overlook't by the Devil' " I will add, from the autobiographical chapter in the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (ed. 1888, vol. i., p. 75), one more illustration. " I once met Sydney Smith . . . He was talking about Lady Cork . . . He now said, ' It is generally be- lieved that my dear old friend Lady Cork has been overlooked,' and he said this in such a manner that no one could for a moment doubt that he meant that his dear old friend had been overlooked by the devil."

With regard to the winds, evidently considered as supernatural, which play and battle round the walls of many a cathedral, it may be worth while to mention that the north-west angle of Wells Cathedral is known upon this account as " Kill-Canon Corner." The conception underlying all these stories and allusions is doubt- less that the prince of the power of the air (Eph. ii. 2, cf. vi. 12), with his angels, carried on perpetual warfare against the Church of God (see the Prologue of Longfellow's Golden Legend). In the Old Testament the lightning is the fire of God, the weapon of Jehovah (Deut. xxxi. 41), and it is inferred that the high mountain and the lofty tower incur his wrath (Is. ii. 12, et seq.). But in