[Sidenote: Superstitious veneration for kings in ancient India.] Nor have such superstitions been confined to savages and other peoples of alien race in remote parts of the world. They seem to have been shared by the ancestors of all the Aryan peoples from India to Ireland. Thus in the ancient Indian law-book called the Laws of Manu, we read: “Because a king has been formed of particles of those lords of the gods, he therefore surpasses all created beings in lustre; and, like the sun, he burns eyes and hearts; nor can anybody on earth even gaze on him. Through his (supernatural) power he is Fire and Wind, he Sun and Moon, he the Lord of justice (Yama), he Kubera, he Varuna, he great Indra. Even an infant king must not be despised (from an idea) that he is a (mere) mortal; for he is a great deity in human form.”[16.2] And in the same law-book the effects of a good king’s reign are thus described: “In that (country) where the king avoids taking the property of (mortal) sinners, men are born in (due) time (and are) long-lived. And the crops of the husbandmen spring up, each as it was sown, and the children die not, and no misshaped (offspring) is born.”[16.3] [Sidenote: Superstitious veneration for kings in ancient Europe.] Similarly in Homeric Greece, kings and chiefs were described as sacred or divine; their houses, too, were divine, and their chariots sacred;[16.4] and it was thought that the reign of a good king caused the black earth to bring forth wheat and barley, the trees to be loaded with fruit, the flocks to multiply, and the sea to yield fish.[16.5] When the crops failed, the Burgundians used to blame their kings and depose them.[16.6] Similarly the Swedes always ascribed the abundance or scantiness of the harvest to the goodness or badness of their kings, and in time of dearth they have been known {17} to sacrifice them to the gods for the sake of procuring good crops.[17.1] In ancient Ireland it was also believed that when kings observed the customs of their ancestors the seasons were mild, the crops plentiful, the cattle fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, and the fruit-trees had to be propped up on account of the weight of their produce. A canon ascribed to St. Patrick enumerates among the blessings that attend the reign of a just king “fine weather, calm seas, crops abundant, and trees laden with fruit.”[17.2] [Sidenote: Survivals of the superstition in Scotland.] Superstitions of the kind which were thus current among the Celts of Ireland centuries ago appear to have survived among the Celts of Scotland down to Dr. Johnson’s time; for when he travelled in Skye it was still held that the return of the chief of the Macleods to Dunvegan, after any considerable absence, produced a plentiful catch of herring;[17.3] and at a still later time, when the potato crop failed, the clan Macleod desired that a certain fairy banner in the possession of their chief might be unfurled,[17.4] apparently in the belief that the