train of the infernal master of the hunt only the spectres of
suicides, drunkards, and ruffians; and, with all the uncharitableness
of a dogmatic faith, the spirits of children who died unbaptized,
whose hard fate had thrown them into such evil company. This was the
way in which that wide-spread superstition arose, which sees in the
phantoms of the clouds the shapes of the Wild Huntsman and his
accursed crew, and hears, in spring and autumn nights, when sea-fowl
take the wing to fly either south or north, the strange accents and
uncouth yells with which the chase is pressed on in upper air.
Thus, in Sweden it is still Odin who passes by; in Denmark it is
King Waldemar's Hunt; in Norway it is _Aaskereida_, that is
_Asgard's Car_; in Germany, it is Wode, Woden, or Hackelberend,
or Dieterich of Bern; in France it is Hellequin, or King Hugo, or
Charles the Fifth, or, dropping a name altogether, it is _Le Grand
Veneur_ who ranges at night through the Forest of Fontainebleau.
Nor was England without her Wild Huntsman and his ghastly following.
Gervase of Tilbury, in the twelfth century, could tell it of King
Arthur, round whose mighty name the superstition settled itself, for
he had heard from the foresters how, 'on alternate days, about the
full of the moon, one day at noon, the next at midnight when the moon
shone bright, a mighty train of hunters on horses was seen, with
baying hounds and blast of horns; and when those hunters were asked
of whose company and household they were, they replied "of
Arthur's".' We hear of him again in _The Complaynt of Scotland_,
that curious composition attributed by some to Sir David Lyndsay of
the Mount in Fife, and of Gilmerton in East Lothian, pp. 97, 98,
where he says:

Arthur knycht, he raid on nycht,
With gyldin spur and candil lycht.