Far be it from us to attempt to
awaken all the various tones of this chord, whose vibrations
reveal the profound secrets which lie hid in the inmost recesses
of the soul. We might well want powers adequate to so vast an
undertaking. Our business here is only with that morbid sympathy
by the aid of which the dancing mania of the Middle Ages grew into
a real epidemic. In order to make this apparent by comparison, it
may not be out of place, at the close of this inquiry, to
introduce a few striking examples:-
1. "At a cotton manufactory at Hodden Bridge, in Lancashire, a
girl, on the fifteenth of February, 1787, put a mouse into the
bosom of another girl, who had a great dread of mice. The girl
was immediately thrown into a fit, and continued in it, with the
most violent convulsions, for twenty-four hours. On the following
day three more girls were seized in the same manner, and on the
17th six more. By this time the alarm was so great that the whole
work, in which 200 or 300 were employed, was totally stopped, and
an idea prevailed that a particular disease had been introduced by
a bag of cotton opened in the house. On Sunday the 18th, Dr.
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