that which is built in the day falls down in the night. The dancers have
neither rest nor mitigation of their curse until the expiration of the
year, when they all rush into the church and fall before the altar in
a swoon, from which they are not recovered for three days. Then they
immediately flee each other's faces, and wander solitary through the
world, still dancing at times in spite of themselves. In the olden time
this was believed to be the origin of St. Vitus's dance; but we can now
see that the dance is the origin of the story.

The Dance of Death was performed by a large company dressed in the
costumes of various classes of society, which were then very marked in
their difference. One by one the dancers suddenly and silently slipped
off, thus typifying the departure of all mankind at Death's summons.
That this Dance was performed, not only with the consent, but by the
procurement of the clergy, is made certain by the discovery, in the
archives of the Cathedral of Besançon, of the account of the payment of
four measures of wine by the seneschal to those persons who performed
the Dance Macabre on the 10th of July, 1453.

The moral lesson conveyed by this strange pastime or ceremony seems
hardly calculated to secure for it a noteworthy popularity in any age;
but for a long time it was, either as a ceremony or as a picture, very
popular throughout Europe. We know of forty-four places in which it was
painted or sculptured in some large public building, the oldest example
being that at Little Bâle, which was painted in 1312. This, like that
in Great Bâle, and most of the others, has been destroyed by time or
violence. The Dance was made the ornament of books of devotion, and the
subject of ornamental initial-letters; groups from it were engraved
repeatedly by those fantastic designers and exquisite workmen known as
the Little Masters of Germany; a single group was assumed as a device,