Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/210

176 sympathy by no means superficial with persons who may have been in many cases innocent, and always were rather the victims of an inequitable social order than malefactors without excuse. Such victims even in their eyes would without difficulty assume the unspotted raiment of martyrs.

Throughout Christendom the qualifications of a martyr were vague; a violent death was, (perhaps it still is), the only condition absolutely necessary to satisfy. In our own country we have only to refer to the honours paid to Saint Kenelm, king and martyr, to King Edward the Martyr, and to Simon de Montfort, Edward II., and Charles I., as examples of the extreme latitude of interpretation of the term martyr. More might easily be cited, and from other countries hundreds.

Some peoples indeed go to the length of putting to death a holy man in order to provide an object of devotion. At Gilgit there is the shrine of a famous Mohammedan saint who is said to have been thus murdered; and similar stories are told about many shrines in Afghanistan and on the north-western frontier of India. These stories are very often true; for it is well known that the late Sir Richard Burton, when exploring some remote places disguised as a Mohammedan fakir, had a narrow escape from being thus honoured. The practice is of long standing, and embodies ideas of wide range in the East. Marco Polo relates that the people of a province he calls Carian were villainous and wicked. A stranger of learning and bodily perfection coming that way would be put to death at sight,—not, they declared, for the purpose of robbery, but that his beauty and learning might abide in them and their country. The Great Khan, however, conquered the province in 1296, and put down the practice. Half-a-century ago it was a common