Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/253

 Rh rats—but perhaps we have hardly time to go back as far as the Deluge. It may suffice to remind the reader of what a friend has pointed out to me, that, in the eleventh century, Norman mures et rati annoyed the blessed Lanfranc, who on one occasion conveyed a demonstrative cat in a bag ad comprimendum furorum illorum; whilst in the twelfth century, Giraldus Cambrensis twice mentions. mures majores, qui vulgariter rati vocantur. Thirteen hundred and sixty-two gave us that notable passage in the prologue of Piers the Plowman touching the project of belling the cat, where we have

and it is plain that the distinction between the two is more than one of size or age, because a wise mouse stands forth and contrasts the habits of himself and his brethren, the masses, with those of the burgher-like rats. It is unnecessary to construct a catena of authors from Langland's time to Shakespeare's, in order to prove that rats were perfectly familiar then, instead of being as strange as bandicoots would now be in London backyards and basements.

So, in spite of the naturalists, I think there might well be rats in Hameln in 1284, and, indeed, the memorable swarm may actually mark the epoch of their first appearance there. We do not wonder that the civic fathers were disturbed, and that somebody was ready to help them out of the difficulty; the trial to faith comes in when we hear how he set about it and succeeded. For myself, I frankly confess that I do not regard the performance of the "Pied