NOTE.--Vasari says that the Borgo Allegri at Florence took its name from the joy of the inhabitants when a Madonna by Cimabue was carried through it in procession.
=Pied Piper of Hamelin, The.= (_Dramatic Lyrics_, 1842.) Written to amuse little Willie Macready. The story told in the poem is one of a class of legends dealing with the subject of cheating magicians of a promised reward for services rendered. Verstegan, in his _Restitution of Decayed Intelligence_ (1634), has the story on which apparently Mr. Browning's poem is written. "A piper named Bunting undertook for a certain sum of money to free the town of Hamelin, in Brunswick, of the rats which infested it; but when he had drowned all the rats in the river Weser, the townsmen refused to pay the sum agreed upon. The piper, in revenge, collected together all the children of Hamelin, and enticed them by his piping into a cavern in the side of the mountain Koppenberg, which instantly closed upon them, and a hundred and thirty went down alive into the pit (June 26th, 1284). The street through which Bunting conducted his victims was Bungen, and from that day to this no music is ever allowed to be played in this particular street." The same tale is told of the fiddler of Brandenberg: the children were led to the Marienberg, which opened upon them and swallowed them up. When Lorch was infested with ants, a hermit led the multitudinous insects by his pipe into a lake, where they perished. As the inhabitants refused to pay the stipulated price, he led their pigs the same dance, and they, too, perished in the lake. Next year a charcoal burner cleared the same place of crickets; and when the price agreed upon was refused, he led the sheep of the inhabitants into the lake. The third year came a plague of rats, which an old man of the mountain piped away and destroyed. Being refused his reward, he piped the children of Lorch into the Tannenberg. There are similar Persian and Chinese tales. (See Dr. Brewer's _Reader's Handbook_.) Hamlin or Hamelin is a town in the province of Hanover, Prussia. "Some trace the origin of the legend to the 'Child Crusade,' or to an abduction of children. For a considerable time the town dated its public documents from the event" (_Encyc. Brit._). Julius Wolff wrote a poem on the subject (Berlin, 1876). See S. Baring Gould's _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_, 2nd ser., 1868; Grimm's _Deutsche Sagen_, Berlin, 1866; and Reitzenstein's edition of Springer's _Geschichte der Stadt Hameln_, Hameln, 1861. Some authorities consider the story a myth of the wind.