however, employed to calm the
excitement of those affected, and it is mentioned as a character of the
tunes played with this view to the St. Vitus's dancers, that they
contained transitions from a quick to a slow measure, and passed
gradually from a high to a low key. It is to be regretted that no trace
of this music has reached out times, which is owing partly to the
disastrous events of the seventeenth century, and partly to the
circumstance that the disorder was looked upon as entirely national, and
only incidentally considered worthy of notice by foreign men of learning.
If the St. Vitus's dance was already on the decline at the commencement
of the seventeenth century, the subsequent events were altogether adverse
to its continuance. Wars carried on with animosity, and with various
success, for thirty years, shook the west of Europe; and although the
unspeakable calamities which they brought upon Germany, both during their
continuance and in their immediate consequences, were by no means
favourable to the advance of knowledge, yet, with the vehemence of a
purifying fire, they gradually effected the intellectual regeneration of
the Germans; superstition, in her ancient form, never again appeared, and
the belief in the dominion of spirits, which prevailed in the middle
ages, lost for ever its once formidable power.

CHAPTER II--THE DANCING MANIA IN ITALY

SECT. 1--TARANTISM

It was of the utmost advantage to the St. Vitus's dancers that they made
choice of a favourite patron saint; for, not to mention that people were
inclined to compare them to the possessed with evil spirits described in
the Bible, and thence to consider them as innocent victims to the power
of Satan, the name of their great intercessor recommended them to general
commiseration, and a magic boundary was thus set to every harsh feeling,
which might otherwise have proved hostile to their safety. Other
fanatics were not so fortunate, being often treated with the most
relentless cruelty, whenever the notions of the middle ages either
excused or commanded it as a religious duty. Thus, passing over the
innumerable instances of the burning of witches, who were, after all,
only labouring under a delusion, the Teutonic knights in Prussia not
unfrequently condemned those maniacs to the stake who imagined themselves
to be metamorphosed into wolves--an extraordinary species of insanity,
which, having existed in Greece before our era, spread, in pr