Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/66

56 Let it be noted that this general line of inquiry on which we are travelling was laid down many years ago by successive shrewd observers of the relation between past and present, among whom limits permit reference only to Burton, Hobbes, and Conyers Middleton.

Burton's various allusions in his Anatomy of Melancholy indicate that he looks on pagan practices with much the same eyes that the early Roman Catholic missionaries looked on the shaven Buddhist monks of Tibet, when they saw in their rosaries, bells, holy water, and worship of relics, the wiles of the arch-deceiver who had tempted those men to mock the solemn rites of Catholicism. For he speaks of the Devil's devices in "the strange Sacraments, the goodly Temples, the Priests and Sacrifices," and "imitation of the Ark." But Hobbes, in the Leviathan, recognises the continuity of ideas under change of names; mutato nominem tantum.

To this may be added, as one of the most striking examples, the transformation of the Lupercalia into the feast of the Purification of Mary. But the subject cannot be further pursued here; enough that what Hobbes has written concerning the Kingdom of the Fairies, and what Conyers Middleton has elaborated in his parallels, or, as he calls it