of the many cognate passions and congruous circumstances which—there can be no reasonable doubt—have throughout the ages played no impertinent and no trivial but a very vital and very memorable part in consolidating the vampire legend, and in perpetuating the vampire tradition among the darker and more secret mysteries of belief that prevail in the heart of man.
In many countries there is thought to be a close connexion between the vampire and the werewolf, and I would remark that I have touched upon this but lightly as I am devoting a separate study to the werewolf and lycanthropy.
The Vampire, his Kith and Kin will be shortly followed by The Vampire in Europe, in which work I have collected and treat of numerous instances of vampirism old and new, concretely illustrating the prevalence and phases of the tradition in England and Ireland, in ancient Greece and Rome as well as in modern Greece, in Hungary and Bohemia, in Jugo-Slavia, Russia, and many other lands. In this volume will be found related in detail such famous cases as that of Arnold Paul, Stanoska Sovitzo, Millo the Hungarian, the vampires of Temeswar, Kisilova, Buckingham, Berwick, Melrose Abbey, Croglin Grange, and many more.
A survey of “The Vampire in Literature” which I attempt in Chapter V of the present volume has not, to the best of my belief, been usefully essayed by any English writer. I cannot hope that my purview is complete, for I feel confident that several pieces must inevitably have escaped me. Here too one is faced with the question what to notice and what to exclude. Vampirism is so wide a term that in some senses it might arguably be held to cover no small range of ghost stories and witch sagas where the victims peak and pine and waste away until they fall into an early grave. The choice is bound to be somewhat arbitrary, and so open to censure and objections, both on account of inclusions and omissions, and, superficially at least, these criticisms will hardly seem a little rigid and unfair. There is one vampire story, an excellent fiction and admirably discoursed, which I heard very many years ago, and which I believe is in print, but it has till now completely baffled all my recent explorations. I have no doubt that some of my readers will know the tale.
The Bibliography has offered its own difficulties with
