peare has embalmed some traditions of the kind exactly analogous
to the present case:

"In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets."[210:1]

Belief in the influence of the _stars_ over life and death, _and in
special portents at the death of great men_, survived, indeed, to recent
times. Chaucer abounds in allusions to it, and still later Shakespeare
tells us:

"When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."

It would seem that this superstition survives even to the present day,
for it is well known that the dark and yellow atmosphere which settled
over so much of the country, on the day of the removal of President
Garfield from Washington to Long Branch, was sincerely held by hundreds
of persons to be a death-warning sent from heaven, and there were
numerous predictions that dissolution would take place before the train
arrived at its destination.

As Mr. Greg remarks, there can, we think, remain little doubt in
unprepossessed minds, that the whole legend in question was one of those
intended to magnify Christ Jesus, which were current in great numbers at
the time the Matthew narrator wrote, and which he, with the usual want
of discrimination and somewhat omnivorous tendency, which distinguished
him as a compiler, admitted into his Gospel.

FOOTNOTES:

[206:1] Luke, xxiii. 44, 45.

[206:2] Matthew, xxvii. 51-53.

[206:3] Amberly: Analysis of Religious Belief, p. 268.

[206:4] Life of Christ, vol. ii. p. 643.

[207:1] See Prog. Relig. Ideas, vol. i. p. 71.

[207:2] Rhys David's Buddhism, pp. 36, 37.

[207:3] See Potter's AEschylus, "Prometheus Chained," last stanza.

[207:4] Farrar's Life of Christ, p. 52.

[207:5] See Higgins: Anacalypsis, vol. i. pp. 616, 617.

[207:6] See Ibid. and Gibbon's Rome, vol. i. pp. 159 and 590, also
Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, book xiv. ch. xii. and _note_.

[207:7]

"Cum caput obscura nitidum ferrugine texit
Impiaquae aeternam timuerunt saecula noctem."

[207:8] See Gibbon's Rome, vol. i. pp. 159 and 590.

[208:1] Tales of Ancient Greece, p. 46.

[208:2] Ibid. pp. 61, 62.

[208:3] Ibid. p. 270.

[208:4] Anacalypsis, vol. i. p. 822.

[208:5] See Bell's Pantheon, vol. i. p. 106.

[209:1] See Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities,