s, faithful worshipper of the
unwedded goddess, rent by wild horses, and by Diana's prayer to the
medicine-god subsequently pieced together into life; or Virbius,
counterpart of Hippolytus; or perhaps even the two-faced Janus himself,
looking before and after. The finest conjectures of research, though
illustrated in the person of the priest himself, could have supplied him
with no antidote to those terrors of ambushed assassination.

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