Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/63

 Presidential Address. 53

day is held, the afflicted gather to kiss the reliquary that holds her bones. There is nothing new under the sun. Horace tells of the shipwrecked sailor who hung up his clothes as a thankoffering in the temple of the sea-god who had preserved him ; Polydorus Vergilius, who lived in the early part of the sixteenth century, that is, some 1,500 years after Horace, describes the classic custom of ex voto offerings at length, while Conyers Middleton, in his Letter from Rome, first published in 1729, speaks of it as " a practice so common among the Heathens, that no one custom of antiquity is so frequently mentioned by all their writers "...." but the most common of all offerings were pictures representing the history of the miraculous cure or deliverance vouchsafed upon the vow of the donor." ^ Of which offerings, the blessed Virgin is so sure always to carry off the greatest share, that it may be truly said of her what Juvenal says of the God- dess /sis, whose religion was at that time in the greatest vogue in Rome, that the painters got their livelihood out of her? Middleton tells the story from Cicero which, not without covert sympathy, Montaigne quotes in his Essay on " Prognostications." Diagoras, surnamed the Atheist, being found one day in a temple, was thus addressed by a friend: "You, who think the gods take no care of human affairs, do not you see here by this number of pictures how many people, for the sake of their vows, have been saved in storms at sea, and got safe into harbour?" "Yes," answered Diagoras, " I see how it is ; for those are never painted who happen to be drowned."

As for St. Winifred's Well, the newspapers now and again report a "miracle" ^ which the medical journals ex- plain away ; ^ the repute of this Welsh Bethesda increases,

1 P. 146 (fourth edition, 1741).


 * lb., p. 151.


 * Westminster Gazette, 23 May, 1894.

^ Brit, Medical Journal, 12 October, 1894.