Note 203 — GAMMER GURTON'S NEEDLE.

In all cases of distress, and whenever the assistance of a superior power was necessary, it was usual with the Roman Catholics to promise their tutelary saints to light up candles at their altars, to induce them to be propitious to such applications as were made to them. The reader will see a very ridiculous story of this kind in the first volume of Lord Oxford's "Collection of Voyages," p. 771, quoted in Dr Grey's "Notes on Shakspeare," vol. i. p. 7. Erasmus has a story to the same purpose in his "Naufragium."