In his investigations among the “sword-dancers” of Northern England, Mr. Cecil Sharp has discovered that at Earsdon, after the usual captain’s song, a strange interlude occurs, in which two of the dancers feign a quarrel, and one is killed and carried out for burial amid the lamentations of the “Bessy.”  A travelled doctor, however, arrives, and calls to the dead man, “Jack! take a drop of my bottle, that’ll go down your thrittle-throttle.”  Whereupon up jumps Jack and shakes his sword, and the dance proceeds amid the rejoicings of Bessy and the rest.  So priest slays priest, the British Diana laments her hero slain, the British Aesculapius, in verse inferior to Euripides, tends him back to life, and who in that Northumbrian dance could fail to recognise a rite sprung from the same primitive worship as the myths of Nemi?  But if one had been able to stand beside that murderous and apprehensive priest, and to foretell to him that in future centuries, long after his form of religion had died away, far off in Britain, beside the wall of the Empire’s frontier, his tragedy would thus be burlesqued by Bessy, Jack, and the doctor, one may doubt if he would have expressed any kind of scientific interest, or have even smiled, as, sword in hand, he prowled around his sacred tree, peering on every side.

Why, then, did he do it?  How came it that there was always a candidate for that bloody deed and disquieting existence?  It is true that the competition for the post appears to have decreased with years.  Originally, the priest’s murder seems to have been an annual affair, regular as the “grotter” which we are called upon to remember every August in London streets, or as the Guy Faux, whose fires will in future ages be connected with autumnal myths or with the disappearance of Adonis or Thammuz yearly wounded.  The virtues of fertility’s god had to be renewed each spring; year by year the priest was slain; and only by a subsequent concession to human weakness was he allowed to retain his life till he could no longer defend it.  The change seems to show that, as time went on, the privileges of the office were regarded with less eagerness, and it was more difficult to find one man a year anxious to be killed.

But with what motive, century after century, no matter at what interval of years, did a volunteer always come forward to slay and to be slain?  Certainly, the priest had to be a runaway slave; but was Roman slavery so hideous that a life of unending terror by day and night was to be preferred—­a life enslaved as a horse’s chained to the grinding mill in a brickyard, and without the horse’s hours of stabled peace?  Hunger will drive to much, but even when the risky encounter with one’s predecessor had been successfully accomplished, what enjoyment could there be in meals eaten in bitter haste, with one hand upon the sword?  As to money, what should all the wealth of the shrine profit a man compelled, in Bishop Ken’s language, to live