Piper" as being indubitably "a fond thing vainly invented"; I want more proof that it is so than the poor thing, popular belief. When I was young, oil and troubled water were associated only in a figure of speech, supposed to be born of the ignorance and poetical exuberance of the ancients; whereas now the rule of oil over the waves is considered less questionable than that of Britannia. Multa renascentur. That the lower animals are affected by musical sounds has been known for centuries; and rats, from what one reads of the rhyming[1] of the Irish contingent, and of the survival of poetical conjurations in France and elsewhere,[2] may be specially susceptible to the influence of the Muses; if we did but know the Piper's tune, it may be fin-de-siècle rats would rush forth with the same mad eagerness as those of old. The very strain it ought to be: "open Barley" had a goodly sound, but it served not Cassim's turn when he failed to think of "open Sesame".
Our Hameln artist does not stand alone. Once upon a time the district about Lorch[3] was delivered from ants, crickets, and rats by three pipers, who being defrauded of the guerdon, played off pigs, sheep, and little ones respectively; and in 1240 a Capuchin named Angionini[4] lured into the river all kinds of domestic animals and stock at Draucy-les-Nouis near Paris, because the villagers refused him the reward for freeing them of rats and mice by means of a small book and a little demon. Other cases might be found for the comfort of those who, instead of agreeing that recurrence of an alleged experience goes to confirm the reality of it, regard multiplication of examples as tending to the discredit of them all. It is only when
- ↑ As You Like It, Act iii, Sc. 2, 188; Of Poetry, Temple's Miscellanea, p. ii, p. 244.
- ↑ Rolland, Faune Populaire: Les Mammiferes Sauvages, pp. 24-7.
- ↑ Cited in Curious Myths, pp. 422, 432, from Wolf's Beitrage zur deutschen Mythologie, i, 171.
- ↑ Sprenger, p. 16, from Le Corsaire, of December 1824.
