Complete. From “Curiosities of Literature.”

IT is probable that this custom, so universally prevalent, originated in some ancient superstition; it seems to have excited inquiry among all nations.

  Some Catholics, says Father Feyjoo, have attributed the origin of this custom to the ordinance of a pope, St. Gregory—who is said to have instituted a short benediction to be used on such occasions, at a time when, during a pestilence, the crisis was attended by sneezing, and in most cases followed by death.

  But the Rabbins, who have a story for everything, say that before Jacob men never sneezed but once, and then immediately died. They assure us that that patriarch was the first who died by natural disease; before him all men died by sneezing,—the memory of which was ordered to be preserved in all nations by a command of every prince to his subjects to employ some salutary exclamation after the act of sneezing. But these are Talmudical dreams, and only serve to prove that so familiar a custom has always created inquiry.

  Even Aristotle has delivered some considerable nonsense on this custom; he says it is an honorable acknowledgment of the seat of good sense and genius—the head…. The custom at all events existed long prior to Pope Gregory. The lover in Apuleius, Gyton in Petronius, and allusions to it in Pliny, prove its antiquity; and a memoir of the French Academy notices the practice in the New World on the first discovery of America. Everywhere man is saluted for sneezing.

  An amusing account of the ceremonies which attend the sneezing of the king of Menomotapa shows what a national concern may be the sneeze of despotism. Those who are near his person when this happens salute him in so loud a tone that persons in the antechamber hear it and join in the acclamation; in the adjoining apartments they do the same, till the noise reaches the street, and becomes propagated throughout the city; so that at each sneeze of his Majesty results a most horrid cry from the salutations of many thousands of his vassals.

  When the king of Sennaar sneezes, his courtiers immediately turn their backs on him, and give a loud slap on their right thigh.

  With the Ancients sneezing was ominous; from the right it was considered suspicious; and Plutarch, in his “Life of Themistocles,” says that before a naval battle it was a sign of conquest! Catullus, in his pleasing poem of “Acme and Septimus,” makes this action from the deity of Love from the left the source of his fiction. The passage has been elegantly versified by a poetical friend, who finds authority that the gods’ sneezing on the right in heaven is supposed to come to us on earth on the left.