ive at his ease.

The stories of this class are very numerous, all of them based on the
same belief--that in certain cases the dead, in a material shape,
leave their graves in order to destroy and prey upon the living. This
belief is not peculiar to the Slavonians but it is one of the
characteristic features of their spiritual creed. Among races which
burn their dead, remarks Hertz in his exhaustive treatise on the
Werwolf (p. 126), little is known of regular "corpse-spectres." Only
vague apparitions, dream-like phantoms, are supposed, as a general
rule, to issue from graves in which nothing more substantial than
ashes has been laid.[413] But where it is customary to lay the dead
body in the ground, "a peculiar half-life" becomes attributed to it by
popular fancy, and by some races it is supposed to be actuated at
intervals by murderous impulses. In the East these are generally
attributed to the fact of its being possessed by an evil spirit, but
in some parts of Europe no such explanation of its conduct is given,
though it may often be implied. "The belief in vampires is the
specific Slavonian form of the universal belief in spectres
(_Gespenster_)," says Hertz, and certainly vampirism has always made
those lands peculiarly its own which are or have been tenanted or
greatly influenced by Slavonians.

But animated corpses often play an important part in the traditions
of other countries. Among the Scandinavians and especially in Iceland,
were they the cause of many fears, though they were not supposed to be
impelled by a thirst for blood so much as by other carnal
appetites,[414] or by a kind of local malignity.[415] In Germany tales
of horror similar to the Icelandic are by no means unknown, but the
majority of them are to be found in districts which were once wholly
Lettic or Slavonic, though they are now reckoned as Teutonic, such as
East Prussia, or Pomerania, or Lusatia. But it is among the races
which are Slavonic by tongue as well as by descent, that the genuine
vampire tales flourish most luxuriantly: in Russia, in Poland, and in
Servia--among the Czekhs of Bohemia, and the Slovaks of Hungary, and
the numerous other subdivisions of the Slavonic family which are
included within the heterogeneous empire of Austria. Among the
Albanians and Modern Greeks they have taken firm root, but on those
peoples a strong Slavonic influence has been brought to bear. Even
Prof. Bernhard Schmidt, although an uncompromising oppon