assassinations. On this subject my friend Professor A. E. Housman, who
witnessed the celebration in different years at both places, has kindly
furnished me with the following particulars: "In 1906 I was in the
island of Capri on September the eighth, the feast of the Nativity of
the Virgin. The anniversary was duly solemnised by fire-works at nine or
ten in the evening, which I suppose were municipal; but just after
sundown the boys outside the villages were making small fires of
brushwood on waste bits of ground by the wayside. Very pretty it looked,
with the flames blowing about in the twilight; but what took my
attention was the listlessness of the boys and their lack of interest in
the proceeding. A single lad, the youngest, would be raking the fire
together and keeping it alight, but the rest stood lounging about and
looking in every other direction, with the air of discharging
mechanically a traditional office from which all zest had evaporated."
"The pious orgy at Naples on September the eighth went through the
following phases when I witnessed it in 1897. It began at eight in the
evening with an illumination of the facade of Santa Maria Piedigrotta
and with the whole population walking about blowing penny trumpets.
After four hours of this I went to bed at midnight, and was lulled to
sleep by barrel-organs, which supersede the trumpets about that hour. At
four in the morning I was waked by detonations as if the British fleet
were bombarding the city, caused, I was afterwards told, by dynamite
rockets. The only step possible beyond this is assassination, which
accordingly takes place about peep of day: I forget now the number of
the slain, but I think the average is eight or ten, and I know that in
honour of my presence they murdered a few more than usual."

[The Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin may have replaced a pagan
festival; the coincidence of the Midsummer festival with the summer
solstice implies that the founders of the festival regulated their
calendar by observation of the sun.]

It is no doubt possible that these illuminations and fireworks, like the
assassinations, are merely the natural and spontaneous expressions of
that overflowing joy with which the thought of the birth of the Virgin
must fill every pious heart; but when we remember how often the Church
has skilfully decanted the new wine of Christianity into the old bottles
of heathendom, we may be allowed to conjecture that the ecclesiastic