but say that it is bad for a woman to remark the moon. Yet on the occasion of a birth,* in the South of Ireland at any rate, it is a very usual thing for the mother to send some one to look at the moon, and discover in what quarter it may be. If a male child, and the moon is full, it is a fortunate birth: "Full moon, full man!" That is to say, if he is born at full moon, or even while the moon is on the increase, he will live to manhood; but if, on the contrary, the moon is waning, it is a bad sign for his length of days. Clouds before, or around the moon, at the birth of a child of either sex, are thought to presage the various troubles that he or she will have to encounter through life; but a fair sky at such a time is the happy omen of a prosperous existence. This anxiety as to the state of the moon at a birth may be better understood when we learn that in Scotland an idea still prevails that a child put to the breast when the moon is decreasing will not thrive, but pine all the time the moon wastes. This faith in the full moon being fortunate for the birth of a son, is at least as old as the days of Hesiod, who quotes it from an ancient calendar, in one of his poems. Marriages were happier for being celebrated at the new moon; but the most fortunate period of all for this event, according to the ancient Greeks, was at the conjunction of the sun and moon. In the second century before Christ, the Singhalese king, Dutugaimana, availed himself of the services of astronomers, to name the proper days of the moon on which to lay the foundations of his great religious structures; but in more ancient times, the Spartans believed that the most fortunate time for any undertaking was at the full of the moon. Tacitus tells us that the Saxons held the same faith, and would not undertake any enterprise whatever, under ordinary conditions, unless the moon was at the full. The Swedes and Germans appear to have had no belief in their own valour, unless at new or full moon, and would neither accept war or risk a battle under any other conditions. All septentrional nations held the same superstition; and long after St. Patrick had christianized Ireland, Duchesne tells us that the native Kearnes, when they saw the new moon, would kneel down, repeat the paternoster, and at the end of it, addressing the nascent moon, cry with a loud voice, "May thou leave us as safe as thou found us!" The people in Murray, at the full March moon, cut withies of mistletoe or ivy, which they bind into circles, and keep all the year, with the belief that they cure hectic and other disorders with them-clearly a druidical superstition; for it will be remembered that the Druids used the sacred mistletoe medicinally, and only gathered it by moonlight, and at a certain period of the year. The Irish Pishoge, who with the aid o herbs and a dead man's hand dries up the The moon, under the name of Lucina, presided over childbirth. udders of one neighbour's cow, and charms the milk into the pails of another, can only work her wicked spells under peculiar conditions of the moon, which is her secret. And in this country, though St. Augustine forbade such practices, and taught that it was a great offence for any man to observe the time and course of the sun or moon when sowing or planting, and that none put trust in them, but those who worshipped them, the moon continued, for centuries after the Saint, to keep the same hold upon the superstitious prejudices of the people, as she had done in pagan times. Oral traditions, transmitted from generation to generation, were preserved in rustic calendars and almanacks, and innumerable rules laid down in connection with the times of the moon, which must have sadly interfered with spontaneous action, and have made the farmer and the housewife disagreeably dependent on her changes. Despite St. Augustine's suggestions, the husbandman continued to plant and sow only at the new moon, and the wane; the first with the idea that trees &c., so planted, grew with her growth; while the reason for the latter is best learned from the rhymes of that capital theorist and indifferent farmer Old Tusser, who in his "Five-hundred Points of good Husbandry," under the head of February, advises : Sow peason and beans in the wane of the moon; Not a colewort was planted, not a vine pruned, not a clucking hen put to her eggs, without a calendar being called, for to "find out moonshine!" Pigs literally saved their bacon, however fit for household sacrifice, till the moon was full; for if killed at her decrease, who could expect otherwise than that the meat would waste? an idea which I am told is still in full force in Not tinghamshire, and very generally acted upon. But the best time for shearing sheep, to ensure a rapid regrowth of the fleece, was at new moon; and at the same period, upon the same principle, Corn-cutters men and women cut their hair. (chiropodists in present parlance), on the other hand, reaped their harvest in the waning moon, with the fervent hope on the part of the patient that the undesired crop might farther waste with the decrease of the puissant luminary. We learn that to this day, in Scotland, a strong objection exists to begin any new undertaking while the moon is on the wane; but the first, and middle, and full growth are fortunate periods. and Virgil, still lingers; and there are no doubt some Master Simples, who believe with Nasidiemus, in Horaces's 8th Satire, that "honey apples are most ruddy, when gathered under the waning moon." Thus the faith, old as Homer and Hesiod But long after experience and observation be gan to enlighten our English agriculturists on | particular attention be paid to the subthe true art of farming, and freed them from ject.* this lunar serfdom, the physicians, whose art depended much more on astrology and alchemy than on any real knowledge of diseases or actual curative skill, maintained the belief in planetary influence over nature and the human body, and framed their prescriptions accordingly. The author of a thin, worm-eaten, yellow-leaved volume, close at hand, entitled "The Marrow of Physick," published 1640, and therefore to have allowance made for the period in which he wrote, thus discourses of the queen of night "Luna, the moon, makes her passage through the zodiacke in nine-and-twenty daies and eight houres, and overtakes the sunne in nine-and-twenty daies and twelve houres, or thereabouts; she is a planet naturally cold and moist, of the night, feminine; she is the carrier of the influence of all the planets through her orbe unto us; she rules the stomace, taste, liver, and the left side; she governes noble women, widowes, also mariners and vagabondes, and humors phlegmatike; the greatnesse of her body is the 39th part of the earth; her character is thus,>" We are also informed in the same quaint "Medicamentary," that the "moone" alters the constitution of our bodies by those signs wherein she enters; therefore the author feels it necessary to declare to his readers "the twelve signes, and the parts they governe, and consequently the diseases caused by the influence of the moone in every one of those signes." Which information the reader may see for himself in the last edition of "Moore's almanack," if indeed any edition of it still survives. According to Culpepper and other herbalists of a more recent date, in whose nostrums our great grandmothers and still-room maids had perfect faith, we find the following passage touching the gathering of herbs: "Such as are artists in astrology (and indeed none else are fit to make physicians)-such I advise, let the planet that governs the herb be angular, and the stronger the better; if thy care be in herbs of Saturn, let Saturn be in the ascendant-in the herbs of Mars, let Mars be in the mid-heaven, for in these houses they delight; let the moon apply to them by good aspect, and let her not be in the houses of her enemies; if you cannot well stay till she apply to them, let her apply to a planet of the same triplicity; if you cannot wait that time neither, let her be with a fixed star of their nature." With more to the same effect, which if my readers comprehend, it is more than I do. Shakespeare, and the elder poets, abound in allusions to the moon's influence on plants and men; and in modern times, many medical men of eminence have believed the human body to be affected by her agency. Dr. Mead, the celebrated physician, was firmly of this opinion. Dr. Balfour also, who resided fourteen years in Bengal, and had much experience in tropical fevers, asserts that the moon has great influence in such cases, and advises that a constant and But while these and other men of science held to this opinion, it was combatted by others as having no foundation whatever. Even the long-received belief in planetary influence on crazed or mad persons received some fifty years since a knock-down blow from Mr. Halsam's "Observations on madness;" his experience as apothecary to old Bethlehem Hospital going to prove that lunacy was not so in the sense that has made the word synonymous with madness. Allowing doctors to differ, we are inclined to side with popular opinion, and see no reason why Drs. Mosely, Balfour, and Currie should have chosen to fabricate lunar attraction, which does not exist either in febrile or brain diseases. The effect of moonlight in preventing sleep in many persons is no bad argument for the absoluteness of her power in cerebral affections. sove Shakespeare alludes to the moon as reign mistress of true melancholy." Milton also speaks of " moon-struck madness," a belief older than the Evangelists, the etymology of whose phrase in the original, touching the dweller in the tombs possessed of a devil, exactly answers to the meaning of our word lunatic. The power of the moon upon the ocean is evident and allowed; and there is no reason why an influence capable of affecting the tides should not occasion paroxsysms in the human body, originating in the same cause with the tides, or flux and reflux of the sea. There was a time when this phenomenon suggested to philosophers and wise men the idea that the earth and sea were a living creature, that by its respiration produced this ebbing and flowing-a theory followed by others equally strange and false; but in later times, the harmony observed between the tides and the moon leaves no doubt that the swelling and recession of the sea is the result of lunar attraction. "People that use the sea do testify," observes a hundred-years-old writer, "that at new and full moon the face of the ocean is constantly rough and troubled, but calm and quiet at the quadratures. And thence he goes on to demonstrate that the tides are highest when the moon is vertical or nearest to the earth, which she is at new and full moon. The same writer informs us that animals and vegetables are impregnated with a greater quantity of sea moisture at the full moon than at the new, though the tides are then everywhit as high; but a Dutchman, Twist (not Oliver), in his description of India, where he lived many years, observes that in the kingdom of Guzerat the oysters and crabs and other shell-fish are not so fat and juicy at the full moon as at the new, which we are told is contrary to their nature in all other places. A writer in "Notes and Queries" tells us that in Essex moonlight and mushrooms are associated, and quotes the following rhyme in proof of it: * European Magazine, December, 1786. "When the moon is at the full, Mushrooms you may freely pull; But when the moon is on the vane, Wait ere you think to pull again," In the character of Hecate, the ancients believed the moon to occasion many evils and disorders, and the fact of moon-blindness is well known to us. In tropical countries, where the slaves are in the habit of sleeping out of doors exposed to the moonlight, they take care to cover the head and face to prevent swelling of the head and distortion of the features, which they assert it would otherwise occasion. The well-known fact that moonshine renders meat and fish putrescent if exposed to it, bears out this belief, in its baleful power. In this country, death itself was commonly supposed to be controlled in some degree by the moon, (another lingering proof of the worship of the triform Diana); for it is still no unusual thing to bear a village crone suggest to her gossip, of some dying neighbour, that he or she will last till the moon changes. But to hark back a few lines, the visible proofs of lunar influence on the ocean has afforded a show of reason for the hypothesis of her atmospheric power-a belief which early obtained amongst primitive nations, and which the observations of mariners in modern times have upheld, if not confirmed. Science may laugh at Virgil's prognostics of the weather, drawn from the aspect of the moon; but ask a sailor, and in all probability he will feel no reluctance or doubt in indorsing the opinion of the poet: "When first the moon appears, if then she shrouds In Sussex it is commonly said that a Saturday's moon is always a stormy one. But in Hampshire, it is remarked in rude rhyme that "I saw the old moon late yestreen With the new moon in her arm, And if we gang to sea, master, I fear we'll come to harm.* *"" Sailors of all nations will second the truth of these presages. A halo round the moon is accounted a sign of bad weather, and all over Great Britain it is regarded as a similar omen if the new moon lies on her back. If her horns appear sharp, it threatens windy weather; and as I have before said, "a burre" about her threatens a storm. Lowe, in his "prognostics of the weather," shows that according to his observation this sign is at least as often right as it is wrong, while many others that he has proved do not fulfil their auguries once in many times. There is an ancient superstition, not yet ejected from the nursery, and retained by many ancient children of larger growth, the origin of which, as far as I have read, has not yet been accounted for: I allude to the custom of turning our money on the first time of seeing the new moon. In Scotland it is accounted unfortunate to be without gold in one's pocket on this occasion, and in Ireland it is done with the vena hope of having whatever money you possess at least doubled in the course of the month. But the antiquaries, whose works I have read, throw no light upon the subject, and I can only conjecture that it is the relic of a pagan superstition, current amongst us in Roman times, and has reference to the moon under her name of Moneta,† who was the protectress of wealth, and whose temple on the Capitoline hill was the Roman mint. From her name we have the word "money" and it is not perhaps too far-fetched a conclusion to arrive at that this lingering custom of turning money on the first occasion of seeing the new moon began with the belief in her power to protect and increase it. We have spoken of the moon as the reputed patroness of enchantments; but some of her pupils, it would seem, were stronger than herself. In Drayton's "Mooncalf," we read of a witch who "by her spells could make the moon to stay." And in "Paradise Lost" Milton says "Not uglier follow the night-hag when called An expression reminiscent of an observation of Lloyd's in his "Stratagems of Jerusalem-” that the Romans at the time of an eclipse of the moon would take their brazen pots and pans, and beat them, lifting up many torches and links, and firebrands into the air, thinking to * "The old moon with the new one in her arms." In other words, says Brand, when that part of the moon which is covered with the shadow of the earth is seen through it. "Moneta, soon her sinking fane shall mourn."Iran's Pharsalia. himself, who has become a proverb for wha is inexplicable. I have waded through sundry antiquarian authors, none of whom seem to know anything more about it than the "Man in the Moon himself," who knows nothing; so that Mr. Halliwell must forgive me for supplementing the small store of traditions I have found, by drawing at second-hand on his. He gives us Ashmole's pun upon the subject recall her to her light; so also the Macedonians; and he adds, " It was thought that witches had power to draw the moon from her sphere, and these noises were made to distract her attention from their spells." The fact that moon-worship existed in this country is capable of many proofs, and readily accounts for the various superstitions connected with the customs and traditions we have noted. Mona, the ancient name of the Isle of Anglesea, was doubtless given it in honour of the goddess worshipped there, and "Tis strange, yet true, he's but a month old man, while the temple of the Sun arose on Thorney | And yet hath lived there since the world began." Island where Westminster Abbey now stands, that of Diana occupied the site of the past and Stranger still, however, is the silence of the present St. Paul's cathedral, and in the mean- ancients with regard to him. Plutarch, in his while serene and glorious as at her first creation. treatise on the moon's spots, quotes the poet Agesianax; according to whom, the face seen in the moon was that of a boy. "She sweeps her way a bark magnificent Careering lonely through a silver sea;" fulfilling still for us the purpose of the great Creator, for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years. Monday, the Saxon Monanday, the Dies Luna of the Romans, was sacred to the worship of the moon. Verstegans describes an Anglo-saxon idol, which symbolized her, and which he says, "seemeth very strange and ridiculous, for being made for a woman she hath a short coat like a man; but more strange it is to see her hood, with two long ears. The holding of a moon before her breast may seem to have been to express what she is, but the reason of her chapron with long ears, as also her short coat and pyked shoes, I doe not finde." Might not the long ears to her hood represent the moon's horns or crescent, and the short coat be characteristic of Diana the huntress? As time went by, and the philosophic mind threw off the belief in the divinity of the fair luminary, on which priest and poet had lavished so many sweet names, and sweeter epithets, various curious ideas were promulgated as to its nature and design some we read, "made it an elysium, and others a purgatory, while some imagined it a sort of entrepot between earth and heaven, where souls which had left their bodies, and those that were on their way to join them, were deposited in the valleys of Hecate, and waited till farther orders." Others of the ancients supposed that there is an etherial ocean above us, and that the sun and moon are two floating luminary Islands, in which the spirits of the blest abide. Amongst the Greeks, death was often spoken of as the passing of the ocean, an expression almost analogous to the christian phrase of passing the river Jordan. That archest of false-apostles, Manes, the founder of the sect of Manicheans, imagined the sun and moon to be the residence of Christ, and his ascension his flight to these orbs. Aristotle supposed the moon to be the limit of Divine interference, and excluded this sublunary world from the influence of Providence. When and how the "man in the moon," found his way to his present altitude, appears to be as unaccountable, as is that individual Dante, in the 20th canto of the "Inferno," refers to the Italian version of the tradition in the 13th century, which imagined the Man in the "Mon in the moon stond and strit, popular superstition :- And on her breast a choarl painted ful even, Which for his theft might clime no ner to Heaven." And we learn from the antiquary just quoted, that on the roof of Gyffyn church, Conway, there is a representation of the moon with the man bearing his thorn-bush, but without his dog. In the Deutsche Mythologie of Grimm, three different legends are given in connection with the Man in the Moon. First, that this person was Isaac carrying a bundle of wood for his own sacrifice; the second is precisely the same as the Italian legend of Cain; and the third the one current in England, which makes the Man in the Moon the Sabbath-breaking stick gatherer, mentioned in the 15th chapter of Numbers. In all these legends the bundle of thorns plays a conspicuous part, and though the Irish version is wholly different in outline, still the thorn-bush figures in it just as distinctly. There the Man in the Moon is one who, being the gossip of his neighbour (a very sacred relation with the peasantry), removed the thornbush which did duty as a gate in the gap of his field, and thus left it open to the devastations of cattle, &c.; a bad turn, for which, laden with the stolen thorn-bush, he has done penance in the moon ever since. Here again there is evidently an association, as in the majority of these differing versions of the miediæval legend, with the classic belief in the purgatorial nature of the moon. But in China, the author of the History of the "Ti-ping Revolution," informs me, Ley-chin, the old Man of the Moon, has quite another story from that which attaches to him in Europe. We ourselves have a saying that "marriages are made in heaven;" the Chinese believe that they are made in the moon, or in a previous state of existence; and the Divinity whose function it is to pair, or tie together at their birth all male and female children, is no other than the Man in the Moon. No possible event can overrule or set aside the matches settled in his luminous registry; and in this idea, notwithstanding the change of sex, there is a reflex of the attributes of the primal Ma, Ashtaroth, the great Mother of Nature, the protectress of the young and of marriage. Shakespeare's adjuration, "Oh swear not by the moon," would seem to second the conclusion Dr. Jamieson has arrived at, from a passage in one of Dunbar's poems, that it was formerly customary to swear by the moon. I have no doubt that a raid among the old poets and playwrights would decide the question in favour of the Doctor's opinion; but here, for the present, we must bring our lunar observations to an end, and bid farewell to the flambeau of the night, the ship of heaven en voyage sans cesse, which has lighted our researches, and brought us thus far in our exploration of old belief and modern superstitions in connection with her. ALBOIN AND ROSAMOND. BY FREDERICK NAPIER BROOME. There is an antique Latin chronicle Of later days, wrapped shroud-like on dead Rome, All laws waxed old and weak, none else was had Sowing thick seed upon the bearing days; There was a king of Lombard men, ALBOIN Over his head and on his chin and cheek, Beyond the high horizon where sky ends, |