Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/17

Rh sucked up into the life of this English peasant. And so we get to the fact that tradition is the sanction for the existence of this pagan Englishman of the seventeenth century. In the next place such a tradition must have been kept alive, not by means of one individual, one family, one small group of peasants, who signalised themselves by obstinately learning not to become Christians. It must have been kept alive by the agency of a considerable number of people; and perhaps Shakespeare has preserved evidence of this when he puts into the mouth of Dame Quickly the information that Falstaff on his death-bed "babbled of green fields". And so we conclude that in this fortunate allusion in a seventeenth century sermon to the irreligious beliefs of one member of a Christian flock, we have one of those accidents of literature the discovery of which is as important for the study of man as a discovery in geology, in chemistry, is for those branches of natural science. But let me point this out. If such an accidental discovery proves so fruitful in good results it behoves us to tap the sources of such information more thoroughly, more scientifically; and if any member of the Society under my presidency shows himself unduly restive or sceptical as to folk-lore methods, I shall set him to work to wade through all the dreary tomes of sermons which theologians have flung upon a book-ridden world.

When we folk-lorists, then, claim that certain legends or customs or beliefs are relics of a prehistoric culture, we have at least the support of actual fact to show that the culture of historic times has not penetrated everywhere among the people. With this fresh in your minds I want to draw attention to an Irish custom which in some respects is as curious and remarkable as anything I have come across in folk-lore.

At Lahinch, a small village at the bottom of the Bay of Liscannor, in Ireland, a remarkable summer ceremony took place about the year 1833. It was observed in two successive years, and the details were on each occasion the same.