as applicable to folklore as to political history. The ground-ideas on which popular mysticism lays the foundation of its tenets are identical among all people unhabituated to abstruse thought. To the savage, "courage" is no abstract conceptio ; it is a thing to be got hold of and appropriated by carrying out the quasi-obligatory act of devouring the courageous adversary whom he has killed: and equally, to the English collier, "goodness" is a transferable article, a something he cannot actually see and handle, but which may, nevertheless, be passed over from one person to another. The latter belief, it is true, clothes itself in a touching religious shape, while the former startles and revolts the cultivated mind, but the intellectual groundwork on which the two ideas are based is the same.
A practice which affords another illustration of this mode of thought is said to be followed in Upper Bavaria. When a dead person is laid out, a cake of ordinary flour is put on his breast, which is supposed to absorb the virtues of the deceased, the cake afterwards being eaten by the nearest relatives.[1]
In Wales, as is generally known, the sins of the dead used to be similarly taken into possession by the sin-eater. But it is a fact worthy of mention that the characteristics usually taken over from the dead are those regarded as laudable. The uncivilised warrior, and those like-minded with him, are desirous of assuming the nobler traits of a corpse's ebbing individuality, but as a rule they lay no claim to its weaknesses: they have no inclination to become the scape-goat of the departed and make themselves responsible for his evil qualities. A natural proneness to shun what is contemptible and of ill report seems to be the chief cause of this tendency; but it may also be, in some degree, attributable to the feeling that defects and faults are, as these words really imply, failures, lacks, and
- ↑ Am Urquell, vol. ii., p. 101.
