"The time when screech-owls cry, and ban-dogs howl,[410] And spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves."
[410] These dogs were kept for baiting bears, when that amusement was in vogue, and "from their terrific howling they are occasionally introduced to heighten the horror of the picture." Nares's "Glossary," vol. i. p. 50.
And, again, in "3 Henry VI." (v. 6), King Henry, speaking of Gloster, says:
"The owl shriek'd at thy birth,--an evil sign; The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempests shook down trees."
The same superstition prevails in France and Germany,[411] and various charms are resorted to for averting the ill-consequences supposed to attach to this sign of ill-omen. Several of these, too, are practised in our own country. Thus, in Staffordshire, when a dog howls, the following advice is given: "Take off your shoe from the left foot, and spit upon the sole, place it on the ground bottom upwards, and your foot upon the place you sat upon, which will not only preserve you from harm, but stop the howling of the dog."[412] A similar remedy is recommended in Norfolk:[413] "Pull off your left shoe, and turn it, and it will quiet him. A dog won't howl three times after." We are indebted to antiquity for this superstition, some of the earliest writers referring to it. Thus, Pausanias relates how, previous to the destruction of the Messenians, the dogs pierced the air by raising a louder barking than usual; and it is on record how, before the sedition in Rome, about the dictatorship of Pompey, there was an extraordinary howling of dogs. Vergil[414] ("Georgics," lib. i. l. 470), speaking of the Roman misfortunes, says:
"Obscenæque canes, importunæque volucres Signa dabant."
[411] See Kelly's "Indo-European Folk-Lore," p. 109.
[412] Henderson's "Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties," p. 48.
[414] See Hardwick's "Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore," p. 171.
Capitolinus narrates, too, how the dogs, by their howling, presaged the death of Maximinus. The idea which associates the dog's howl with the approach of death is probably derived from a conception in Aryan mythology, which represents a dog as summoning the departing soul. Indeed, as Mr. Fiske[415] remarks, "Throughout all Aryan mythology, the souls of the dead are supposed to ride on the night-wind, with their howling dogs, gathering into their throng the souls of those just dying as they pass by their houses."