Note 199 — Chapter XV · THE GIPSY AND THE WEST-SAXON.

I may seem to exaggerate both here and in the next chapter. I wish that I did. For similar cases in the neighbouring counties of Dorset and Sussex let the reader turn to the words “hag-rod,” “maiden-tree,” and “viary-rings,” in Mr. Barnes’s Glossary of the Dorset Dialect; and vol. ii. pp. 266, 269, 270, 278, of Mr. Warter’s Seaboard and the Down. I hesitate not to say that superstition in some sort or another is universal throughout England. It assumes different forms: in the higher classes, just at present, of spirit-rapping and table-turning, more gross than even those of the lower; and I am afraid really seems constitutional in our English nature.