curse until the expiration of the year, when they all rush into the church and fall before the altar in a swoon, from which they are not recovered for three days.  Then they immediately flee each other’s faces, and wander solitary through the world, still dancing at times in spite of themselves.  In the olden time this was believed to be the origin of St. Vitus’s dance; but we can now see that the dance is the origin of the story.

The Dance of Death was performed by a large company dressed in the costumes of various classes of society, which were then very marked in their difference.  One by one the dancers suddenly and silently slipped off, thus typifying the departure of all mankind at Death’s summons.  That this Dance was performed, not only with the consent, but by the procurement of the clergy, is made certain by the discovery, in the archives of the Cathedral of Besancon, of the account of the payment of four measures of wine by the seneschal to those persons who performed the Dance Macabre on the 10th of July, 1453.

The moral lesson conveyed by this strange pastime or ceremony seems hardly calculated to secure for it a noteworthy popularity in any age; but for a long time it was, either as a ceremony or as a picture, very popular throughout Europe.  We know of forty-four places in which it was painted or sculptured in some large public building, the oldest example being that at Little Bale, which was painted in 1312.  This, like that in Great Bale, and most of the others, has been destroyed by time or violence.  The Dance was made the ornament of books of devotion, and the subject of ornamental initial-letters; groups from it were engraved repeatedly by those fantastic designers and exquisite workmen known as the Little Masters of Germany; a single group was assumed as a device, or trademark, by more than one printer; and it was sung in popular ballads.  There is now at Aix-la-Chapelle a huge state-bed-stead, on the posts, sides, and footboards of which it is elaborately carved, in the manner of the sixteenth century; and it was even made the ornament of ladies’ fans.

The reasons for this popularity were a certain strange fascination in the subject,—­yet not so strange at a time when women would crowd to see men burned or hanged and quartered;—­but chiefly, the grand democratic significance of the dance.  Death has ever been, and ever will be, the greatest leveller; and at a time when rank had an importance and bestowed advantages of which we can form little idea, while at the same time men had begun to ask why this should be, such a satire as this Dance of Death, sanctioned by the Church, that great protector of established rights and dignities, and yet sparing neither noble nor hierarch, not even the Pope himself, satisfied an eager craving in the breast of poor, envious, self-asserting human nature.  In one of those ornamental initial-letters above mentioned, the date of which was some years prior to the execution