_Death-bed Superstition_.--See _Guy Mannering_, ch. xxvii. and note
upon it:--
"The popular idea that the protracted struggle between life
and death is painfully prolonged by keeping the door of the
apartment shut, was received as certain by the superstitious
eld of Scotland."
In my country (West Gloucestershire) they throw open the windows at
the moment of death.
The notion of the escape of the soul through an opening is probably
only in part the origin of this superstition. It will not account for
opening _all_ the locks in the house. There is, I conceive, a notion
of analogy and association.
"Nexosque et solveret artus," says Virgil, at the death of Dido. They
thought the soul, or the life, was tied up, and that the unloosing
of any knot might help to get rid of the principle, as one may call
it. For the same superstition prevailed in Scotland as to marriage
(Dalyell, p. 302.). Witches cast knots on a cord; and in a parish in
Perthshire both parties, just before marriage, had every knot or tie
about them loosened, though they immediately proceeded, in private,
severally to tie them up again. And as to the period of childbirth,
see the grand and interesting ballad in Walter Scott's _Border Poems_,
vol. ii. p. 27., "Willye's Lady."