personal pronoun), and to teach him some
principles of religion. These endeavours
partially succeeded; for (if we may credit the
account), at the sacred name he would learn
to lift his hands and eyes to heaven. But he
could not be taught to speak, though there
was no apparent defect in his tongue. He
was bestowed upon one of the lords about
the court, who took him into his house as a
servant. He could not be induced to throw
aside his natural, or rather his acquired,
fierceness; but he learnt to walk upright on
his feet, and went wherever he was bidden.
"He liked raw as well as boiled flesh,"
continues the account already alluded to; "could
suffer no clothes on his back, nor ever wear
shoes, nor anything upon his head.
Sometimes he would steal to the woods, and there
suck the sap of trees, when he had torn off
the bark with his nails. It was observed
that, he being in the wood one day when a
bear had killed two men, that beast came to
him, and, instead of doing him any harm,
played and licked his face and body." It
does not appear when or how this individual
died, or what finally became of him.

Perhaps some of the details of this story
may be exaggerated; but we have no reason
for disbelieving the chief allegations. To
facts of this nature we may probably attribute
the old legends of men transforming
themselves, or being transformed, into wolves
—a fable which may also have been encouraged
by the existence of a disease called
lycanthropy, in which the patient fancies himself
a wolf, and, it is said, is sometimes known to
run wild about the fields at night, worrying
the flocks, and snarling like a dog. This
disease is introduced, with his usual charnel-
house intensity of horror, by Webster, in his
Duchess of Malfy, where a physician, speaking
of the malady, says:

In those that are possess'd with 't, there oreflows
Such melancholy humour, they imagine
Themselves to be transformed into woolves;
Steale forth to churchyards in the dead of night,
And dig dead bodies up: as, two nights since,
One met the Duke, 'bout midnight, in a lane
Behind St. Markes church, with the leg of a man
Upon his shoulder; and he howl'd fearfully;
Said he was a woolffe: only the difference
Was, a woolves skinne is hairy on the outside,
His on the inside: bad them take their swords,
Rip up his flesh, and try. Straight, I was sent for;
And, having minister'd unto him, found his grace
Very well recover'd.

"The infected," says an old writer, "imitate
wolves, and think themselves such; leaping
out of their beds in the night, and lurking
about the sepulchres by day, with pale looks,
hollow eyes, thirsty tongues, and exulcerated
bodies." In that storehouse of marvels,
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, we find it
stated that Wierus tells a story of a man at
Padua, in fifteen hundred and forty-one, "that
would not believe to the contrary, but that
he was a wolf. He hath another instance of
a Spaniard, who thought himself a bear.
Forrestus confirms as much by many examples;
one, amongst the rest, of which he was
an eye-witness, at Alcmaer, in Holland—a
poor husbandman, that still hunted about
graves and kept in churchyards, of a pale,
black, ugly, and fearful look. Such, belike,
or little better, were King Prætus's daughters,
that thought themselves kine. Nebuchadnezzar,
in Daniel, as some interpreters hold, was
only troubled with this kind of madness."

The word wehrwolf signifies a man-wolf, or
wolf-man. The fable is very old, and is found
among many and widely separated nations.
There was a people of ancient Scythia, called
Neuri, of whom it was reported that they
could turn themselves into wolves whenever
they pleased, and could with equal facility
resume their natural shapes. The Greek
mythology tells of a king of Arcadia, one
Lycaon, who was changed by Jupiter into a
wolf for impiety:

A wolf, not much from his first form estranged;
So hoary-hair'd, his looks so full of rape,
So fiery-eyed, so terrible his shape—

as Ovid writes in the first book of his
Metamorphoses. The belief extended all through
the middle ages, and even into comparatively
modern times. Bishop Hall, an English
traveller of the time of James the First, says of
a certain wood in Germany that it was
haunted, not only by freebooters, but by
wolves and witches—"although these last are
ofttimes but one." He saw there a boy, half
of whose face had been devoured by a witch-
wolf; "yet so as that the ear was rather cut
than bitten off." At Limburgh, Hall saw
one of the miscreants executed. The wretched
woman was put to the wheel, and
confessed in her tortures that she had devoured
two-and-forty children while in her wolf
form.

Pausanias, an ancient writer, tells a tale of
a man who was a wolf for ten years, and at
the end of that time resumed his humanity.
According to some German authorities,
wehrwolves, contrary to the account given by
Bishop Hall, are in a state of continual enmity
with witches; and this is illustrated by a
story of a certain countryman who put up at
the house of a jovial bailiff. After saturating
himself with drink till he could not stand, he
was left to have his sleep out on the floor;
but the next morning a discovery was made
which brought him under suspicion. A horse
was found dead in the paddock, with his body
cut in two with a scythe. The bailiff closely
questioned his guest, and at length elicited
from him the facts that the field was haunted
by a witch, who flitted about in the shape of
a light flame; that he (the guest) being a
wehrwolf, pursued her with a scythe; that
she fled for refuge under the belly of the
horse, and that in aiming at her he divided
the animal into two halves. What became
of the countryman does not clearly appear.