As men of this world, we feel our
dignity exalted by his keeping an ambassador from the other waiting till
he had finished his paragraph. Never surely did authorship appear to
greater advantage. Athenodorus seems to have been of Hamlet's mind:
"I do not set my life at a pin's fee,
And, for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal, as itself?"[101]
A superstition, as its name imports, is something that has been left to
stand over, like unfinished business, from one session of the world's
_witenagemot_ to the next. The vulgar receive it implicitly on the
principle of _omne ignotum pro possibili_, a theory acted on by a much
larger number than is commonly supposed, and even the enlightened are too
apt to consider it, if not proved, at least rendered probable by the
hearsay evidence of popular experience. Particular superstitions are
sometimes the embodiment by popular imagination of ideas that were at
first mere poetic figments, but more commonly the degraded and distorted
relics of religious beliefs. Dethroned gods, outlawed by the new dynasty,
haunted the borders of their old dominions, lurking in forests and
mountains, and venturing to show themselves only after nightfall. Grimm
and others have detected old divinities skulking about in strange
disguises, and living from hand to mouth on the charity of Gammer Grethel
and Mere l'Oie.
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