r eleven months the St. John's
dancers were no longer to be found in any of the cities of Belgium. The
evil, however, was too deeply rooted to give way altogether to such
feeble attacks.

A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at
Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those
possessed amounted to more than five hundred, and about the same time at
Metz, the streets of which place are said to have been filled with
eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their
workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels,
and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous
disorder. Secret desires were excited, and but too often found
opportunities for wild enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by
vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a
temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants
their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed, and
greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection. Gangs of idle
vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the life the gestures and
convulsions of those really affected, roved from place to place seeking
maintenance and adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this
disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind
the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance as by the
reality. At last it was found necessary to drive away these mischievous
guests, who were equally inaccessible to the exorcisms of the priests
and the remedies of the physicians. It was not, however, until after
four months that the Rhenish cities were able to suppress these
impostors, which had so alarmingly increased the original evil. In the
mean time, when once called into existence, the plague crept on, and
found abundant food in the tone of thought which prevailed in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even, though in a minor degree,
throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth, causing a permanent disorder
of the mind, and exhibiting, in those cities to whose inhabitants it was
a novelty, scenes as strange as they were detestable.

Strasburg was visited by the dancing plague, or St. Vitus' dance,[60] in
the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there
as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at
the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by th