Chapter 8

FATHER, REDEEMER, COMFORTER DIVINE!This humble offering to thy equal shrineHere thy unworthy servant grateful pays,Of undivided thanks, united praise,For all those mercies which at birth began,And ceaseless flow'd thro' life's long-lengthened span,Propt my frail frame thro' all the varied scene,With health enough for many a day serene;Enough of science clearly to discernHow few important truths the wisest learn;Enough of arts ingenuous to employThe vacant hours, when graver studies cloy;Enough of wealth to serve each honest end,The poor to succour, or assist a friend;Enough of faith in Scripture to descry,That the sure hope of immortality,Which only can the fear of death remove,Flows from the fountain of REDEEMINGLOVE.

One who visited York a few years after the death of the Poet, says, “the Verger who showed us the Minster upon my inquiring of him concerning Mason, began an encomium upon him in an humble way indeed, but more honourable than all the factitious praises of learned ostentation; his countenance brightened up when I asked him the question; his very looks told me that Mason's charities did not evaporate in effusions of sensibility; I learned that he was humble, mild, and generous; the father of his family; the delight of all that came within the sphere of his notice. Then he was so good in his parish. My soul contemplates, with fond exultation, the picture of a man, endowed with genius, wit and every talent to please the great, butsuâ se virtute involventem, resigning himself with complacency to the humble duties of a country pastor,—turning select Psalms into Verse to be sung in his Church; simplifying and arranging, and directing to the purposes of devotion his church music; and performing his duties as a minister with meekness, perseverance, and brotherly love.”

Enough has now been adduced to vindicate Mason's character from Miller's aspersion. They who desire to see his merits as a poet appreciated with great ability and equal justice should peruse his life in Hartley Coleridge's Boreal Biography,—what a boisterous title for a book in which there is not one blustering sentence, and so many sweet strains of feeling and of thought!

THE DOCTOR'S THEORY OF PROGRESSIVE EXISTENCE.

Quam multæ pecudes humano in corpore vivunt!PALINGENIUS.

Like Mason, Dr. Dove looked to the future in that sure and certain hope without which the present would be intolerable to a thinking mind and feeling heart. But in his speculations he looked to the past also.

Watson Bishop of Llandaff amused himself with asking from whom his mind descended? where it existed before he was born? and who he should have been if he had not been Richard Watson? “The Bishop was a philosopher,” says Dr. Jarrold, “and ought not to have asked such idle questions.”

My Doctor would not have agreed with Dr. Jarrold in this opinion. Who the Bishop might have been if he had not been the discontented hero of his own auto-biography, he could not indeed have pretended to divine; but what he was before he was Richard Watson, where his mind had existed before he was born, and from whom, or rather from what, it had been transmitted, were questions which according to his notions, might admit of a probable solution.

It will not surprise the judicious reader to be told that the Doctor was a professed physiognomist, though Lavater had not in those days made it fashionable to talk of physiognomy as a science. Baptista Porta led him to consider the subject; and the coarse wood-cuts of a bungling Italian elucidated the system as effectually as has since been done by Mr. Holloway's graver. But Dr. Dove carried it farther than the Swiss enthusiast after, or the Neapolitan physician before him. Conceiving in a deeper sense than Lebrun,que chacun avait sa bête dans la figure, he insisted that the strong animal likenesses which are often so distinctly to be traced in men, and the correspondent propensities wherewith they are frequently accompanied, are evidence of our having pre-existed in an inferior state of being. And he deduced from it a theory, or notion as he modestly called it, which he would have firmly believed to be a part of the patriarchal faith, if he had known how much it resembled the doctrine of the Druids.

His notion was that the Archeus, or living principle, acquires that perfect wisdom with which it acts, by passing through a long progression in the lower world, before it becomes capable of being united to a rational and immortal soul in the human body. He even persuaded himself that he could discover in particular individuals indications of the line by which their Archeus had travelled through the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

There was a little pragmatical exciseman, with a hungry face, sharp nose, red eyes, and thin, coarse, straggling hair of a yellow cast, (what was formerly called Judas-colour,) whom he pronounced to have been a ferret in his last stage. “Depend upon it,” he said, “no rat will come under the roof where he resides!” And he was particularly careful when they met in the open air always to take the wind of him.

One lawyer, a man of ability and fair character, but ready to avail himself of every advantage which his profession afforded, he traced from a bramble into a wasp, thence into a butcher-bird, and lastly into a fox, the vulpine character being manifestly retained in his countenance. There was another, who from sweeping his master's office and blacking his shoes, had risen to be the most noted pettifogger in those parts. This fellow was his peculiar abhorrence; his living principle, he affirmed, could never have existed in any other form than that of a nuisance; and accordingly he made out his genealogy thus:—a stinker (which is the trivial name of thephallus impudicus,) a London bug, an ear-wig, a pole-cat,—and, still worsening as he went on, a knavish attorney.

He convicted an old Major in the West York Militia of having been a turkey cock; and all who knew the Major were satisfied of the likeness, whatever they might be of the theory.

One of the neighbouring justices was a large, square-built, heavy person, with a huge head, a wide mouth, little eyes, and a slender proportion of intellect. Him he set down for a hippopotamus.

A brother magistrate of the Major's had been a goose, beyond all dispute. There was even proof of the fact; for it was perfectly well remembered that he had been born web-fingered.

All those persons who habitually sit up till night is far spent, and as regularly pass the best hours of the morning in bed, he supposed to have been bats, night-birds, night-prowling beasts, and insects whose portion of active life has been assigned to them during the hours of darkness. One indication of this was, that candle-light could not have such attractions for them unless they had been moths.

The dog was frequently detected in all its varieties, from the lap-dog, who had passed into the whipper-snapperpetit-maître, and the turnspit, who was now the bandy-legged baker's boy,—to the Squire's eldest son, who had been a lurcher,—the Butcher, who had been a bulldog, and so continued still in the same line of life;—Lord A——'s domestic chaplain, harmless, good-natured, sleek, obsequious, and as fond of ease, indulgence and the fire-side, as when he had been a parlour spaniel; Sir William B——'s huntsman, who exercised now the whip which he had felt when last upon four legs, and who was still an ugly hound, though staunch; and the Doctor's own man, Barnaby, whom, for steadiness, fidelity and courage, he pronounced to have been a true old English mastiff, and one of the best of his kind.

Chloris had been a lily. You saw it in the sickly delicacy of her complexion. Moreover she toiled not, neither did she spin.

A young lady, in whose family he was perfectly familiar, had the singular habit of sitting always upon one or other foot, which as she sat down she conveyed so dexterously into the seat of her chair, that no one who was not previously acquainted with her ways, could possibly perceive the movement. Upon her mother's observing one day that this was a most unaccountable peculiarity, the Doctor replied, “No, madam! I can account for it to my own entire satisfaction. Your daughter was a bird of some gentle and beautiful species, in her last stage of existence; in that state she used always to draw up one leg when at rest. The habits that we acquire in our pre-existent state, continue with us through many stages of our progress; your daughter will be an Angel in her next promotion, and then, if Angels close their eyes in slumber, she will sleep with her head under her wing.”

The landlady of the White Lion had been a cabbage, a blue-bottle fly, a tame duck, and a bacon pig.

Who could doubt that Vauban had been an earthworm, a mole and a rabbit? that Euclid acquired the practical knowledge of geometry when he was a spider; and that the first builder of a pyramid imitated unconsciously the proportionately far greater edifices which he had been employed in raising when he was one of a nation of white ants?

Mrs. Dove had been a cowslip, a humble bee, and, lastly, a cushat.

He himself had been a Dove and a Serpent—for “Dan was a Serpent by the way;” and moreover he flattered himself that he had the wisdom of the one, and the simplicity of the other. Of his other stages he was not so certain,—except that he had probably once been an inhabitant of the waters, in the shape of some queer fish.

ELUCIDATIONS OF THE COLUMBIAN THEORY.

Thou almost makest me waver in my faithTo hold opinion with Pythagoras,That souls of animals infuse themselvesInto the trunks of men.MERCHANT OFVENICE.

Many facts in illustration or exemplification of the Doctor's theory concerning progressive existence must have occurred to every one within the circle of his own observations. One of the scientific persons who abridged the Philosophical Transactions says, he “was acquainted with a medical practitioner of considerable eminence who could not refrain from eating toasted cheese, though he was subject to an alarming pulmonary complaint which was uniformly aggravated by it, and which terminated fatally at an age by no means advanced.” This practitioner, the Doctor would have said, had been either a mouse or a rat, and in that pre-existent form had nibbled at such a bait,—perhaps once too often. This would account for the propensity even if he were not a Welshman to boot.

The same author says “there is now living a physician of my acquaintance who at an autumnal dessert, never ceases eating all the filberts he can lay his hands upon, although he very candidly acknowledges that they are extremely indigestible and hurtful things.” Upon the Doctor's theory, who can doubt that he had been a squirrel?

“I remember,” says a certain Mr. George Garden in a letter written from Aberdeen in 1676, “when Mrs. Scougall and I were with you last summer, we had occasion to speak of a man in this country very remarkable for something peculiar in his temper, that inclines him to imitate unawares all the gestures and motions of those with whom he converses. We then had never seen him ourselves. Since our return we were together at Strathbogie where he dwells, and notwithstanding all we had heard of him before, were somewhat surprized with the oddness of this dotterel quality. This person named Donald Munro, being a little old and very plain man, of a thin slender body, has been subject to this infirmity, as he told us, from his very infancy. He is very loath to have it observed, and therefore casts down his eyes when he walks in the streets, and turns them aside when he is in company. We had made several trials before he perceived our design, and afterwards had much ado to make him stay. We caressed him as much as we could, and had then the opportunity to observe that he imitated not only the scratching of the head, but also the wringing of the hands, wiping of the nose, stretching forth of the arms, &c., and we needed not strain compliments to persuade him to be covered, for he still put off and on as he saw us do, and all this with so much exactness, and yet with such a natural and unaffected air that we could not so much as suspect that he did it on design. When we held both his hands and caused another to make such motions, he pressed to get free; but when we would have known more particularly how he found himself affected, he could only give us this simple answer, that it vexed his heart and his brain.”

The writer of this letter had hit upon the solution of the idiosyncracy which he describes, but had not perceived it. The man had been a dotterel.

“Have we not heard,” said the Doctor, “of persons who have ruminated? Do we not read well authenticated cases of some whose skins were tuberculated? Is it not recorded of Dioscorides, not the botanist but the Alexandrian physician of Cleopatra's time, that he was called Phacas because his body was covered with warts? And where was this so likely to have happened as in Egypt? He had been a crocodile. The cases are more frequent of people who in the scaliness of their skins have borne testimony of their piscine origin.”

Was not Margaret Griffith, wife of David Owen of Llan Gaduain in Montgomeryshire shown in London, because a crooked horn four inches long grew out of the middle of her forehead? “A miraculous and monstrous, but yet most true and certain account” of her, with her rude portrait affixed, was imprinted at London by Thomas Owen, in the year of the Spanish Armada, and sold by Edward White, at the little north door of St. Pauls Church at the Sign of the Gun. And in the British Museum there is not only the picture of another horned woman, Davies by name, who was born at Shotwick in Cheshire, but one of the horns also which she shed.

There was a Mistress Bomby, (not the Mother Bombie of the old play, but a person of our own times,) who having been a schoolmistress till the age of fifty, married at that age, and on the day of her marriage became deranged. She never recovered her reason, but she lived to be fourscore; and in the latter year of her life a crooked horn sprouted from the side of her forehead, and grew to the length of nearly six inches. Another made its appearance, but its growth was stopped. It is to be regretted that the person who recorded this did not say whether the second horn made its appearance on the other side of the forehead, so as to correspond with the former and form a pair.

Blumenbach had three human horns in his collection, all the growth of one woman. She had broken her head by a fall and the first of them grew from the wound; it continued growing for thirty years, till it was about ten inches long, then it dropped off; a second grew from its place, this was short thick and nearly straight, and she shed it in less time; the third was growing when she died, and the Professor had it cut from the corpse. The first was completely twisted like a ram's horn, was round and rough, of a brownish colour, and full half an inch in diameter at the roots. All three appeared to be hollow and were blunt and rounded at the termination. It has been said that all the cases of this kind which have been observed have been in women; the remark whether it were made by Blumenbach, or by the intelligent traveller who describes this part of his collection, would if it were true be unimportant, because of the paucity of cases that have been recorded: but there is a case of a male subject, and it is remarkable for the circumstances attending it.

Marshal Laverdin in the year 1599 was hunting in the province of Maine, when his attendants came in sight of a peasant who, instead of waiting to pay his obeisance to their master, fled from them. They pursued and overtook him; and as he did not uncover to salute the Marshal, they plucked off his cap, and discovered that he had a horn growing on his head. François Trouillu was this poor man's name, and he was then aged thirty-four years: the horn began to sprout when he was about seven years old; it was shaped almost like that of a ram, only the flutings were straight instead of spiral, and the end bowed inwards toward the cranium. The fore part of his head was bald, and his beard red and tufted, such as painters bestow upon Satyrs. He had retired to the woods hoping to escape exposure there, and there he wrought in the coal-pits. Marshal Laverdin took possession of him as he would of a wild beast, and sent him as a present to Henry IV; and that King, with even more inhumanity than the Marshal, bestowed him upon somebody who carried him about as a show. Mezeray, who relates this without any comment upon the abominable tyranny of the Marshal and the King, concludes the story by saying “the poor man took it so much to heart to be thus led about like a bear and exposed to the laughter and mockery of his fellow creatures, that he very soon died.”

Blumenbach says “it has been ascertained by chemical analysis that such horns have a greater affinity in their composition with the horns of the rhinoceros than of any other animal.” It may be so; but the short and straight horns were stunted in their growth; their natural tendency was to twist like a sheep's horn;—and the habit of cornification is more likely to have been formed nearer home than in the interior of Africa.

The first rope-dancer, or as Johnson would have called him ‘funambulist,’ the Doctor said, had been a monkey; the first fellow who threw a somerset, a tumbler pigeon.

The Oneirocrites, or Oneirologists, as they who pretended to lay down rules for the interpretation of dreams called themselves, say that if any one dreams he has the head of a horse on his shoulders instead of his own, it betokens poverty and servitude. The Doctor was of opinion that it presaged nothing, but that it bore a retrospective interpretation, being the confused reminiscence of a prior state.

Amateur thieves,—for there are persons who commit petty larcenies with no other motive than the pleasure of stealing,—he supposed to have been tame magpies or jackdaws. And in the vulgar appellation which is sometimes bestowed upon an odious woman, he thought that though there was not more meant than meets the ear, there was more truth conveyed than was intended.

A dramatist of Charles the First's reign, says,

'Tis thought the hairy child that's shown aboutCame by the mother's thinking on the pictureOf Saint John Baptist, in his camel's coat.

But for this and other recorded cases of the same kind the Doctor accounted more satisfactorily to himself by his own theory. For though imagination, he said, might explain these perfectly well, (which he fully admitted,) yet it could not explain the horned, nor the tubercular, nor the ruminating cases; nor the case of John Ferguisson, of the parish of Killmelfoord in Argyleshire, who lived eighteen years without taking any other sustenance than water, and must therefore either have been a leech, tortoise, or some other creature capable of being so supported. Nor could any thing so well as his hypothesis explain the cases in which various parts of the human body had been covered with incrustations, which were shed and reproduced in continual succession, a habit retained from some crustaceous stage of existence, and probably acquired in the form of a crab or lobster. Still more remarkable was the case of a German, communicated by Dr. Steyerthall to the Royal Society: this poor man cast his leg by an effort of nature, not by an immediate act of volition as he would have done in his crab or lobster state, for the power had not been retained with the habit, but after long and severe suffering; the limb however at last separated of itself, and the wound healed.

Neither, he said, could imagination explain the marvellous and yet well-attested story of the Danish woman who lay in, like Leda, of two eggs. The neighbours who were called in at the delivery, most improperly broke one and found that it contained a yolk and white, to all appearance as in that of a hen, which it also resembled in size. The other, instead of endeavouring to hatch it, they sent to Olaus Wormius, and it is still to be seen at Copenhagen.

How, he would ask, was the case of Samuel Chilton, near Bath, to be explained, who used to sleep for weeks and months at a time; but as an old habit of hibernation, acting at irregular times, because it was no longer under the direction of a sane instinct. And how that of the idiot at Ostend, who died at last in consequence of his appetite for iron, no fewer than eight and twenty pieces to the amount of nearly three pounds in weight, having been found in his stomach after death. Who but must acknowledge that he had retained this habit from an ostrich?

This poor creature was really ferrivorous. The Doctor though he sometimes pressed into his service a case to which some exceptions might have been taken, would not have classed as a quondam ostrich, the sailor who used to swallow knives for a feat of desperate bravery, and died miserably as might be expected. Nor would he have formed any such conclusion concerning the person of whom Adam Clarke has preserved the following remarkable story, in the words of Dr. Fox who kept a lunatic asylum near Bristol.

“In my visits among my patients, one morning, I went into a room where two, who were acquaintances of each other, were accustomed to live: immediately I entered, I noticed an unusual degree of dejection about one of them, and a feverish kind of excitement in the other. I enquired what was the matter? ‘Matter!’ said the excited one, ‘matter enough! he has done for himself!’—‘Why? what has he done?’—‘Oh he has only swallowed the poker!’ During this short conversation the other looked increasingly mournful; and on my enquiring what was the matter with him, he replied, ‘He has told you true enough; I have swallowed the poker, and do not know what I shall do with it!’ ‘I will tell you how it happened,’ said the first. ‘My friend and I were sitting by the fire talking on different things, when I offered to lay him a wager that he could not eat any of the poker: he said he could and would; took it up, twisted the end of it backward and forward between the bars of the grate, and at last broke off some inches of it, and instantly swallowed it; and he has looked melancholy ever since.’ I did not believe,” said Dr. Fox, “a word of this tale; and I suppose the narrator guessed as much, for he added, ‘O, you can see that it is true, for there is the rest of the poker.’ I went to the grate and examined the poker, which, being an old one, had been much burned; and where the action of the fire had been fiercest and had worn away the iron, a piece of between two and three inches had been wrenched off and was missing. Still I could hardly credit that the human stomach could receive such a dose and remain ‘feeling,’ as the professed swallower of it said, ‘nothing particular.’ However the constant affirming of the first, united to the assent and rueful looks of the second, induced me to use the patient as though the account were true: I administered very strong medicines, and watched their effects constantly. The man eat and drank and slept as usual, and appeared to suffer nothing but from the effect of the medicines. At last, to my astonishment, the piece of the poker came away, and the man was as well as ever. The iron had undergone a regular process of digestion and the surface of it was deeply honey-combed by the action of the juices. This was a most singular case, and proves how the God of Nature has endowed our system with powers of sustaining and redressing the effects of our own follies.”

The tales of lycanthropy which are found in such different ages and remote countries, strongly supported the Doctor's theory. Virgil, and Ovid in his story of Lycaon, had only adapted a popular superstition to their purposes. And like its relator he regarded as a mere fable the legend which Pliny has preserved from the lost works of Evanthes a Greek author not to be despised. Evanthes had found it written among the Arcadians that a man from the family of a certain author in that country was chosen by lot and taken to a certain lake; there he stript, hung his garments upon an oak, swam across and going into the wilderness, became a wolf, and herded with wolves for nine years; and if during that time he abstained from doing any hurt to men, he returned to the lake, recrossed it, resumed his human form, with the only change of being the worse, not for the wear indeed, but for the lapse of those nine years; and moreover found his clothes where he had left them. Upon which Pliny observes,Mirum est quo procedat Græca credulitas! Nullum tam impudens mendacium est quod teste careat.

A worse manner of effecting the same metamorphosis Pliny relates from the Olympionics of Agriopas; that at a human sacrifice offered by the Arcadians to Jupiter Lycæus, one Demænetus Parrhasius tasted the entrails, and was transformed into a wolf; at the expiration of ten years he resumed his original form, and obtained the prize of pugilism at the Olympic games.

But the Doctor differed from Pliny's opinion that all which is related concerning lycanthropy must be rejected or all believed;—Homines in lupos verti rursumque restitui sibi, falsum esse confidenter existimare debemus; aut credere omnia, quæ fabulosa tot seculis comperimus.The belief however, he admits, was so firmly fixed in the common people that their word for turncoat was derived from it;—Unde tamen ista vulgo infixa sit fama in tantum, ut in maledictis versipelles habeat, indicabitur.These fables the Doctor argued, could not invalidate the testimony of ancient physicians, that there was an actual and well known species of madness, in which men howled like wolves, and wandered by night about in lonely places or among the tombs. It was most severe at the commencement of spring; and was sometimes epidemic in certain countries. Pieter Forest whose character for accuracy and sagacity stands high among medical writers, affirms that he, in the sixteenth century, had seen the disease, and that it was as it had been described by the ancients. He must have been a credulous person who believed Constantinople had been so infested by these wolf-men, that the Grand Seignior and his guards had been obliged to go out against them; killing a hundred and fifty, and putting the rest of the pack to flight. This was a traveller's tale; and the stories related in books of demonology and witchcraft, concerning wretches who had been tried and executed for having, in the shape of wolves, killed and eaten children, and who had confessed their guilt, might be explained, like other confessions of witchcraft, by the effects of fear and tortures; yet there were cases upon which the Doctor thought no doubt could be entertained.

One case upon which the Doctor insisted, was that of an Italian peasant near Pavia, who in the year 1541, was seized with this madness, and fancying himself to be a wolf, attacked several persons in the fields and killed some of them. He was taken at last, but not without great difficulty; and when in the hands of his captors he declared that he was a wolf, however much they might doubt the avowal, and that the only difference between him and other wolves was, that they had their fur on the outside of the skin, but his was between the skin and the flesh. The madman asserted this so positively that some of the party,trop inhumains et loups par effect, as Simon Goulart says with a humanity above the standard of his age, determined to see, and made several slashes in his arms and legs. Repenting of their cruelty, when they had convinced themselves by this experiment that the poor wretch was really insane, they put him under the care of a surgeon; and he died in the course of a few days under his hands. “Now” said the Doctor “if this were a solitary case, it would evidently be a case of madness; but as lycanthropy is recognized by physicians of different times and countries, as a specific and well known affection of the human mind, can it be so satisfactorily explained in any other manner, as by the theory of progressive existence,—by the resurrection of a habit belonging to the preceding stage of the individual's progress?”

The superstition was not disbelieved by Bishop Hall. In the account of what he observed in the Netherlands, he says of Spa, “the wide deserts on which it borders are haunted with three kinds of ill cattle, free booters, wolves, and witches, though these two last are often one.”

When Spenser tells us it was said of the Irish, as of the Scythians, how they were once a year turned into wolves, “though Master Camden in a better sense doth suppose it was the disease called Lycanthropia,”—he adds these remarkable words, “yet some of the Irish do use to make the wolf their gossip.” Now it must be observed that gossip is not here used in its secondary meaning of a talking, tattling, or tippling companion, but in its original import, though wickedly detorted here: “Our Christian ancestors,” says Verstegan, “understanding a spiritual affinity to grow between the parents and such as undertook for the child at baptism, called each other by the name of God-sib, which is as much as to say as that they weresibtogether, that is, of kin together, through God.” The Limerick schoolmaster whose words are transcribed by Camden, says, “they receive wolves as gossips, calling themChari-Christ, praying for them, and wishing them happy; upon which account they are not afraid of them.” There was great store of wolves in Ireland at that time; and the Doctor asked whether so strange a custom could be satisfactorily explained in any way but by a blind consciousness of physical affinity,—by supposing that those who chose wolves to be godfathers and godmothers for their children, had in the preceding stage of their own existence been wolves themselves?

How triumphantly would he have appealed to a story which Captain Beaver relates in his African Memoranda. “In the evening” says that most enterprising, resolute, able, and right minded man, “two or three of the grumetas came to me and said that Francisco, one of their party, was not a good man: that he wanted to eat one of them, John Basse, who had been this day taken very ill. As I could not comprehend what they meant by saying that one of them wanted to eat another, I sent for Johnson to explain. He said that the man accused of eating the other was a witch, and that he was the cause of John Basse's illness, by sucking his blood with his infernal witchcraft; and that these people had come to request that I would let them tie him to a tree and flog him, after they had finished their work. I told them that there was no such thing as a witch; that it was impossible for this man to suck the blood of another, by any art which he could possibly possess; that he could not be the cause of another man's illness by such means; and that with respect to flogging, no one punished on the island but myself. Johnson who is as bigotted in this instance as any of them, says that he is well known to be a witch; that he has killed many people with his infernal art, and that this is the cause of his leaving his own country, where if he should ever be caught, he would be sold as a slave; and that he with difficulty had prevented the other grumetas from throwing him overboard on their passage from Bissao hither. Johnson moreover told me that there was another witch among the grumetas, who had the power of changing himself into an alligator, and that he also had killed many people by his witchcraft, and was consequently obliged to run from his country. They therefore most earnestly entreated me to let them punish them, country-fashion, and they promised not to kill either of them. Astonished at the assurance that neither of them should be killed if they were permitted to punish them, I told Johnson that if such a thing should occur, I would immediately hang all those concerned in it, and then endeavoured to reason them out of their foolish notions respecting these two poor men. Johnson replied, that it was the custom of the country for white men never to interfere in these cases, and that at Bissao the governor never took notice of their thus punishing one another according to their own country fashion, and that they expected the same indulgence here; for that if these people were in their own country, they would either be killed or sold, as witchcraft was never forgiven and its professors never suffered to remain in their own country when once found out. I had now all the grumetas round me, among whom were the accused themselves, and endeavoured again to convince them of the innocence of these people, by pointing out the impossibility of their hurting others by any magic or spell, or of transforming themselves into any other shape. When many of them said this man had often avowed his turning himself into an alligator to devour people: ‘How say you Corasmo, said I, did you ever say so to any of these people?’ ‘Yes,’ was his reply. ‘What do you mean? do you mean to say that you ever transformed yourself into any other shape than that which you now bear?’ ‘Yes,’ was the answer. ‘Now, Corasmo, you know that white man knows every thing; you cannot deceive me; therefore avow to those people, that you never changed yourself into an alligator, and that these are all lies.’ ‘No,’ was his reply,—who can believe it? ‘Icanchange myself into an alligator, andhave oftendone it.’ This was such an incorrigible witch that I immediately gave him up to the grumetas to punish him, but desired them to be merciful.—It is scarcely credible that a man can so work upon his own weak imagination as to believe, which I doubt not this man did, its own fanciful creations to be realities.—After the grumetas had left me last night I regretted having delivered up to them the two poor miserable wretches accused of witchcraft. From ten till twelve at night their cries were most piteous and loud, and though distant a full half mile, were distinctly heard. This morning they cannot move.”

There was a Mr. William Wright of Saham Tony in Norfolk who used to cast his skin every year, sometimes once, sometimes twice; it was an uneasy and distressing effort of nature, preceded by itching, red spots and swellings; the fingers became stiff, hard, and painful at the ends, and about the nails the pain was exquisite. The whole process of changing was completed in from ten to twelve days, but it was about six months before the nails were perfectly renewed. From the hands the skin came off whole like a glove: and a print representing one of these gloves is given with the account of the case in the Gentleman's Magazine.

When this was related to the Doctor it perplexed him. The habit was evidently that of a snake; and it did not agree with his theory to suppose that the Archeus would pass, as it wereper saltum, from so low a stage of existence to the human form. But upon reading the account himself he was completely satisfied as soon as he found that the subject was an Attorney.

He did not know, because it was not known till Mr. Wilkin published his excellent edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Works, that that Philosopher sent to his son Dr. Edward Browne “the skin of the palm of a woman's hand, cast off at the end of a fever, or in the declination thereof. I called it,” he says, “exuvium palmæ muliebris, the Latin word beingexuviain the plural, but I named itexuvium, orexuviain the singular number. It is neat, and worthy to be shown when you speak of the skin. Snakes and lizards and divers insects cast their skins, and they are very neat ones: men also in some diseases, by pieces, but I have not met with any so neat as this: a palmister might read a lecture of it. The whole soles of the feet came off, and I have one.” If the Doctor had heard of this case, and had not suspected the woman of having once belonged to a generation of vipers, or somesnekki-familias the words are rendered in the Talkee-talkee version, he would have derived her from an eel, and expressed a charitable hope that she might not still be a slippery subject.

WHEREIN THE AUTHOR SPEAKS OF A TRAGEDY FOR THE LADIES, AND INTRODUCES ONE OF WILLIAM DOVE'S STORIES FOR CHILDREN.

Y donde sobre todo de su dueñoEl gran tesoro y el caudal se infiere,Es que al grande, al mediano, y al pequeño,Todo se da de balde á quien lo quiere.BALBUENA.

Here might be the place for enquiring how far the Doctor's opinions or fancies upon this mysterious subject were original. Hisnotionhe used to call it; but a person to whom the reader will be introduced ere long, and who regarded him with the highest admiration and the profoundest respect, always spoke of it as the Columbian Theory of Progressive Existence. Original indeed in the Doctor it was not; he said that he had learned it from his poor Uncle William; but that William Dove originated it himself there can be little doubt. From books it was impossible that he should have derived it, because he could not read; and nothing can be more unlikely than that he should have met with it as a traditional opinion. The Doctor believed that this poor Uncle, of whom he never spoke without some expression of compassionate kindness, had deduced it intuitively as an inference from his instinctive skill in physiognomy.

When subjects like these are treated of, it should be done discreetly. There should be, in the words of Bishop Andrewes, “Οἰκονομία, a dispensation, not a dissipation; a laying forth, notδιασκορπισμος, a casting away; a wary sowing, not a heedless scattering; and a sowingχεὶρι, οὐ θυλακῃ, by handfulls, not by basket-fulls, as the heathen-man well said.” Bearing this in mind I have given a Chapterfull, not a Volumefull, and that Chapter is for physiologists and philosophers; but this Opus is not intended for them alone; they constitute but a part only of that “fit audience” and not “few,” which it will find.

One Andrew Henderson, a Scotchman, who kept a bookseller's shop, or stand, in Westminster Hall, at a time when lawyers' tongues and witnesses' souls were not the only commodities exposed for sale there, published a tragedy, called “Arsinoe, or The Incestuous Marriage.” The story was Egyptian; but the drama deserves to be called Hendersonian, after its incomparable author; for he assured the reader, in a prefatory advertisement, that there were to be found in it “the most convincing arguments against incest and self-murder, interspersed with an inestimable treasure of ancient and modern learning, and the substance of the principles of the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton, adapted to the meanest capacity, and very entertaining to the Ladies, containing a nice description of the passions and behaviour of the Fair Sex.”

The Biographer, or Historian, or Anecdotist, or rather the reminiscent relator of circumstances concerning the birth, parentage and education, life, character and behaviour, of Dr. Daniel Dove, prefers not so wide a claim upon the gratitude of his readers as Andrew Henderson has advanced. Yet, like the author of “Arsinoe,” he trusts that his work is “adapted to the meanest capacity;” that the lamb may wade in it, though the elephant may swim, and also that it will be found “very entertaining to the Ladies.” Indeed, he flatters himself that it will be found profitable for old and young, for men and for women, the married and the single, the idle and the studious, the merry and the sad; that it may sometimes inspire the thoughtless with thought, and sometimes beguile the careful of their cares. One thing alone might hitherto seem wanting to render it a catholic, which is to say, an universal book, and that is, that as there are Chapters in it for the closet, for the library, for the breakfast room, for the boudoir, (which is in modern habitations what the oriel was in ancient ones,) for the drawing-room, and for the kitchen, if you please, (for whatever you may think, good reader, I am of opinion, that books which at once amuse and instruct, may be as useful to servant men and maids, as to their masters and mistresses)—so should there be one at least for the nursery. With such a chapter, therefore, will I brighten the countenance of many a dear child, and gladden the heart of many a happy father, and tender mother, and nepotious uncle or aunt, and fond brother or sister;

ἡδεῖαν φάτινΦεροίμεν ἀυτοῖς.1

For their sakes I will relate one of William Dove's stories, with which he used to delight young Daniel, and with which the Doctor in his turn used to delight his young favourites; and which never fails of effect with that fit audience for which it is designed, if it be told with dramatic spirit, in the manner that our way of printing it may sufficiently indicate, without the aid of musical notation.Experto crede.Prick up your ears then,

“My good little women and men;”2

and ye who are neither so little, nor so good,favete linguis, for here follows the Story of the Three Bears.

1SOPHOCLES.

2SOUTHEY.

A tale which may content the mindsOf learned men and grave philosophers.GASCOYNE.

Once upon a time there were Three Bears, who lived together in a house of their own, in a wood. One of them was a Little, Small, Wee Bear; and one was a Middle-sized Bear, and the other was a Great, Huge Bear. They had each a pot for their porridge, a little pot for the Little, Small, Wee Bear; and a middle-sized pot for the Middle Bear, and a great pot for the Great, Huge Bear. And they had each a chair to sit in; a little chair for the Little, Small, Wee Bear; and a middle-sized chair for the Middle Bear; and a great chair for the Great, Huge Bear. And they had each a bed to sleep in; a little bed for the Little, Small, Wee Bear; and a middle-sized bed for the Middle Bear; and a great bed for the Great, Huge Bear.

One day, after they had made the porridge for their breakfast, and poured it into their porridge-pots, they walked out into the wood while the porridge was cooling, that they might not burn their mouths, by beginning too soon to eat it. And while they were walking, a little old Woman came to the house. She could not have been a good, honest old Woman; for first she looked in at the window, and then she peeped in at the keyhole; and seeing nobody in the house, she lifted the latch. The door was not fastened, because the Bears were good Bears, who did nobody any harm, and never suspected that any body would harm them. So the little old Woman opened the door, and went in; and well pleased she was when she saw the porridge on the table. If she had been a good little old Woman, she would have waited till the Bears came home, and then, perhaps, they would have asked her to breakfast; for they were good Bears,—a little rough or so, as the manner of Bears is, but for all that very good natured and hospitable. But she was an impudent, bad old Woman, and set about helping herself.

So first she tasted the porridge of the Great, Huge Bear, and that was too hot for her; and she said a bad word about that. And then she tasted the porridge of the Middle Bear, and that was too cold for her; and she said a bad word about that, too. And then she went to the porridge of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and tasted that; and that was neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right; and she liked it so well, that she ate it all up: but the naughty old Woman said a bad word about the little porridge-pot, because it did not hold enough for her.

Then the little old Woman sate down in the chair of the Great Huge Bear, and that was too hard for her. And then she sate down in the chair of the Middle Bear, and that was too soft for her. And then she sate down in the chair of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and that was neither too hard, nor too soft, but just right. So she seated herself in it, and there she sate till the bottom of the chair came out, and down came hers, plump upon the ground. And the naughty old Woman said a wicked word about that too.

Then the little old Woman went up stairs into the bed-chamber in which the three Bears slept. And first she lay down upon the bed of the Great, Huge Bear; but that was too high at the head for her. And next she lay down upon the bed of the Middle Bear; and that was too high at the foot for her. And then she lay down upon the bed of the Little, Small, Wee Bear; and that was neither too high at the head, nor at the foot, but just right. So she covered herself up comfortably, and lay there till she fell fast asleep.

By this time the Three Bears thought their porridge would be cool enough; so they came home to breakfast. Now the little old Woman had left the spoon of the Great, Huge Bear, standing in his porridge.

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