maddened, many poor Jews confessed all that
men would have had confessed by them, and
told horrible tales of powdered basilisk, and
of the bags of poison sent among the faithful
of Israel from the great Rabbi at Toledo.
All the Jews in Basle were shut up
in a wooden building and therein
smothered and burnt alive. The same fate
happened to the Jews at Freyburg. In
acquiescence with the popular idea, wells had
been bricked over and buckets removed. If,
therefore, in any town, a man rose to plead
for the unhappy children of Israel, the populace
asked why it was, if they were not guilty,
that the authorities had covered up the wells.
But there was not wanting other evidence:
poison-bags, which Christians had thrown
there, were found in springs. At Spires, the
Jews withdrew into their houses and setting
fire to them, burnt themselves and all they
had with their own hands. At Strasburg,
two thousand Jews were burnt alive in their
own burial ground — those who, in frantic terror
broke their bonds and fled, being pursued
and murdered in the street. Only in Lithuania
this afflicted people found a place of safety.
There they were protected by King Casimir
the Great, who loved a Jewish Esther, and
the Lithuanian Jews still form a large body
of men who have lived in much seclusion, and
retained many of the manners of the middle
ages.

It was among people weakened physically
and mentally by desperate afflictions
and emotions that there arose certain
dancing manias, which formed a fresh
disease, affecting both the body and the mind.
The same generation that had seen the terrors
of the black death, saw, some twenty years
afterwards, men and women dancing in a ring;
shrieking, and calling wildly on St. John the
Baptist; and at last, as if seized with an
epileptic fit, tumbling on the ground, where they
desired to be trodden upon and kicked, and
were most cheerfully and freely trodden upon
and kicked by the bystanders. Their wild
ways infected others with diseased bodies and
minds, and the disease called St. John's dance,
which was supposed to be a form of demoniacal
possession, spread over the Netherlands.
The St. John's dancers were exorcised .
and made wonderful confessions. If they had
not put themselves under the patronage of,
St. John (to whose festival pagan rites and
dances had been transferred by the Germans)
they would have been racked and burnt.
Their number increased so fast that men
were afraid of them; they communicated to
each other morbid fancies; such as a furious
hatred of the red colour, with the bull's ,
desire to tear every red cloth to rags, and a
detestation of pointed shoes, against which,
and other matters of fashion, the priests had
declaimed often from their pulpits. The St.
John's dancers became so numerous and so
violent that, in Liége, the authorities were
intimidated; and, in deference to the prejudices
of the dancers, an ordinance was issued
to the effect that no one should wear any but
squaretoed shoes. This madness appeared
also at Metz, and Cologne, and extended
through the cities of the Rhine.

A similar lunacy broke out some time
afterwards at Strasburg, where the dancers
were cared for by the town council, and
conducted to the chapel of St. Vitus, a youthful
saint, martyred in the time of Diocletian.
For this saint, beca'use little was known of
him, a legend could be made suited to the
emergency, in evidence that he, and he alone,
was able to cure the dancing plague. The
plague, however, spread; and, as the physicians
regarded it as a purely spiritual question, it
was left to the care of the Church, and even
a century later, on St. Vitus's day, women
went to the chapel of St. Vitus to dance off the
fever that had accumulated in them, during
the past twelvemonth. But at that time the
lunacy was near its end, for I need not say
that it had little in common with the disease
known as St. Vitus's dance by the physicians
of the present day. In its first years it
attacked violently people of all ranks,
especially those leading sedentary lives, and
impelled them to dance even to death
sometimes, to dash their brains out against walls,
or to plunge into rivers.

Everyone has heard of a madness of this
kind that arose in Apulia, among people
who had been, or fancied that they had been
bitten by a ground spider, called the tarantula.
Those who were bitten were said to
have become melancholy, very open to the
influence of music, given to wild joyous fits
of dancing, or to miserable fits of weeping
morbid longings, and fatal paroxysms
either of laughter or of sobs. At the
close of the fifteenth century the fear of
this malady had spread beyond Apulia. The
poison of the tarantula, it was believed, could
only be worked off by those in whom it
begot a violent energy of dancing,—it passed
out then with the perspiration; but if any
lingered in the blood, the disorder became
chronic or intermittent; and the afflicted
person would be liable to suffering and
melancholy, which, whenever it reached a certain
height would be relieved by dancing. The
tarantati, or persons bitten by the tarantula,
had various whims, and they also had
violent preferences for and antipathies to
colours. Most of them were wild in love
of red, many were excited by green
objects, and so forth. They could only
dance to music, and to the music of certain
tunes which were called tarantellas, and one
man's tarantella would not always suit
another. Some needed a quick tune, others a
melancholy measure, others a suggestion of
green fields in the music as well as in the
words that always went with it. Nearly all
tarantati required some reference to water,
were mad in longing for the sea, and would
be ecstatic at the sight of water in a pan.