CHAPTER VIII.

But before we proceed to our disquisitions concerning the power and efficacy of natural magic, and examine what mysterious operations may be brought about and compassed by magical practises, and before we take a farther survey of what Mr. Campbell has performed in this kind, that relates to his profession and the public part of his life, which concerns other people as well as himself; I shall here relate some singular adventures that he passed through in his private life, and which regard only his own person. In order to this, I must return back to the year 1702, about which time some unaccountable turns of fortune attended him in his own private capacity, which must be very surprising and entertaining to my readers, when they find a man, whose foresight was always so great a help and assistance to others, who consulted him in their own future affairs, helpless, as it has been an observation concerning all such men in the account of the second-sight, and blind in his own future affairs, tossed up and down by inevitable and spiteful accidents of fortune, and made the may-game of chance and hazard, as if that wayward and inconstant goddess, was resolved to punish him, when she catched him on the blind side, for having such a quick insight and penetrating faculty in other people's matters, and scrutinizing too narrowly into her mysteries, and so sometimes preventing those fatal intentions of hers, into which she would fain lead many mortals hood-winked, and before they knew where they were. In this light, these mighty and famous seers seem to be born for the benefit and felicity of others, but at the same time to be born to unhappiness themselves. And certainly, inasmuch as we consider them as useful and beneficial often, but always satisfactory to persons who are curious in their enquiries about their fortunes, it will be natural to those of us who have the least share of generosity in our minds, to yield our pity and compassion to them, when they are remarkably unfortunate themselves; especially when that calamity seems more particularly to light upon them for their ability, and endeavour to consult the good fortune of other folks.

About the above-mentioned year, 1702, Duncan Campbell grew a little tired of his profession; such a multitude of followers troubled him, several of whom were wild youths, and came to banter him, and many more too inquisitive females to tease him with endless impertinences, and who, the more he told them, had still the more to ask, and whose curiosity was never to be satisfied: and besides this, he was so much envied, and had so many malicious artifices daily practised against him, that he resolved to leave off his profession. He had, I know, followed it pretty closely from the time I first saw him in London, which was, I think, in the beginning of the year 1698, till the year 1702, with very good success; and in those few years he had got together a pretty round sum of money. Our young seer was now at man's estate, and had learned the notion that he was to be his own governor, so far as to be his own counsellor too in what road of life he was to take, and this consideration no doubt worked with a deeper impression on his mind, than it usually does on others that are in the same blossom and pride of manhood, because it might appear more natural for him to believe that he had a sufficient ability to be his own proper adviser, who had given so many others, and some more aged than himself, counsel, with very good success. Now every experienced person knows, that when manhood is yet green, it is still in the same dangerous condition as a young plant, which is liable to be warped by a thousand cross fortuitous accidents, if good measures be not taken to support it against all the contingent shocks it may meet with from the weather or otherwise. Now, it was his misfortune to be made averse to business, which he loved before, by having too much of it, and to be so soured by meeting with numerous perplexities and malicious rubs laid in his way by invidious people, (who are the useless and injurious busy-bodies that always repine at the good of others, and rejoice to do harm to the diligent and assiduous, though they reap no profit by it themselves), that he was disgusted and deterred entirely from the prosecution of a profession by which he got not only a competent but a copious and plentiful subsistence. Nay, indeed, this was another mischief arising to him from his having so much business, that he had got money enough to leave it off, when the perplexities of it had made him willing to do so, and to live very comfortably and handsomely, like a gentleman, without it, for a time; and we know the youngest men are not wont to look the farthest before them, in matters that concern their own welfare. Now, inasmuch as he had thus taken a disgust to business and application, and was surfeited, as I may say, with the perplexities of it, it must be as natural for him, we know, to search for repose in the contrary extreme, viz., recreation and idleness, as it is for a man to seek rest after toil, to sleep after a day's labour, or to sit down after a long and tiresome walk. But there are two very distinct sorts of idleness, and two very different kinds of recreation; there is a shameful idleness which is no better than downright sloth; and there is a splendid kind of indolence, where a man having taken an aversion to the wearisomeness of a business which properly belongs to him, neglects not however to employ his thoughts, when they are vacant from what they ought more chiefly to be about, in other matters not entirely unprofitable in life, the exercise of which he finds he can follow with more abundant ease and satisfaction. There are some sorts of recreations, too, that are mean, sordid, and base; others that are very innocent, though very diverting, and that will give one the very next most valuable qualifications of a gentleman, after those which are obtained by a more serious application of the mind. The idea which I have already given my readers of our Duncan Campbell, will easily make them judge, before I tell them, which way, in these two ways, his genius would naturally lead him; and that, when he grew an idle man, he would rather indulge himself with applying his mind to the shining trifles of life, than be wholly slothful and inactive; and that when he diverted himself he would not do it after a sordid, base manner, as having a better taste and a relish for good company; but that his recreations would still be the recreations of a gentleman. And just, accordingly, as my readers would naturally judge beforehand in his case, so it really happened. The moment he shook off business, and dismissed the thoughts of it, his genius led him to a very gallant way of life; in his lodgings, in his entertainments, in paying and receiving visits, in coffee-houses, in taverns, in fencing-schools, in balls, and other public assemblies, in all ways, in fine, both at home and abroad, Duncan Campbell was a well-comported and civil fine gentleman; he was a man of pleasure, and nothing of the man of business appeared about him. But a gentleman's life, without a gentleman's estate, however shining and pleasant it may be for a time, will certainly end in sorrow, if not in infamy; and comparing life, as moralists do, to a day, one may safely pronounce this truth to all the splendid idlers I have mentioned, that if they have sunshiny weather till noon, yet the afternoon of their life will be very stormy, rainy and uncomfortable, and perhaps just at the end of their journey, to carry on the metaphor throughout, close in the darkest kind of night. Of this, as I was a man of years and more experienced in the world than he, I took upon me to forewarn Mr. Campbell, as soon as I perceived the first dangerous fit of this elegant idleness had seized him. But when will young men, by so much the more headstrong as they have less of the beard, be guided and brought to learn! and when shall we see that happy age, in which the grey heads of old men shall be clapped upon the shoulders of youth! I told him, that in this one thing he ought to consult me, and acknowledge me to be a true prophet, if I told him the end of the seeming merry steps in life he was now taking, would infallibly bring him to a labyrinth of difficulties, out of which if he extricated himself at all, he would at least find it a laborious piece of work. His taste had been already vitiated with the sweets which lay at the top of the bitter draught of fortune, and my honest rugged counsel came too late to prevail, when his fancy had decoyed and debauched his judgment, and carried it over into another interest. I remember I writ down to him the moral story, where vicious Pleasure and Virtue are pictured by the philosopher to appear before Hercules, to court him into two several paths. I told him more particularly, since he had not an estate to go through with the gentlemanly life, as he called it, that, if he followed the alluring pleasures which endeavoured to tempt Hercules, he would involve himself at last in a whole heap of miseries, out of which it would be more than an Herculean labour for him to disentangle himself again. If he had been a man that could have ever heard with either, I would have told the reader in a very familiar idiom, that he turned the deaf ear to me; for he did not mind one syllable or tittle of the prescriptions I set down for him, no more than if he had never read them; but, varying the phrase a little, I may say at least, when he should have looked upon my counsel with all the eyes he had, he turned the blind side upon it. I was resolved to make use of the revenge natural to a man of years, and therefore applied that reproachful proverb to him, which we ancients delight much in making use of to youths that follow their own false and hot imaginations, and will not heed the cooler dictates of age, experience, and wisdom. Accordingly, I wrote down to him these words, and left him in a seeming passion: I am very well assured, young man, you think me that am old, to be a fool; but I that am old, absolutely know you, who are a young fellow, to be a downright fool, and so I leave you to follow your own ways, till sad and woful experience teaches you to know it your own self, and makes you come to me to own it of your own accord. As I was going away, after this tart admonition and severe reprimand, I had a mind to observe his countenance, and I saw him smile, which I rightly construed to be done in contempt of the advice of age, and in the gaiety and fulness of conceit, which youth entertains of its own fond opinions and hair-brained rash resolves. He was got into the company of a very pretty set of gentlemen, whose fortunes were far superior to his; but he followed the same genteel exercises, as fencing, &c., and made one at all their public entertainments; and so being at an equal expense with those who could well afford to spend what they did out of their estates, he went on very pleasantly for a time, still spending and never getting, without ever considering that it must, by inevitable consequence, fall to his lot at last to be entirely reduced to a state of indigence and want. And what commonly heightens the misfortune of such men, and so of all gentlemen's younger brothers, who live upon the ready money that is given them for their portions, is, that the prosperity they live in for a time gains them credit enough just to bring them in debt, and render them more miserable than those very wretches who never had either any money or credit at all. They run themselves into debt out of shame, and to put off the evil day of appearing ruined men as long as they can, and then, when their tempers are soured by adversity, they grow tired of their own lives; and then, in a quarrel, they or some other gentleman, may be, is run through, or else being hunted by bailiffs, they exercise their swords upon those pursuers. Thus, where gentlemen will not consider their circumstances, their very prosperity is a cause of, and aggravates their misery; their very pride, which was a decent pride at first, in keeping up and maintaining their credit, subjects them too often to the lowest and the meanest acts, and their courage, which was of a laudable kind, turns into a brutish and savage rage; and all the fine, esteemed, flourishing, and happy gentleman ends, and is lost in the contemned, poor and miserable desperado, whose portion at last is confinement and a gaol, and sometimes even worse, and what I shall not so much as name here. Into many of these calamities Mr. Campbell had brought himself before it was long, by his heedlessness, and running, according to the wild dictates of youth, counter to all sound and wholesome advice. He had, it seems, run himself into debt, and one day as he was at a coffee-house, the sign of the Three Crowns, in Great Queen-street, in rushed four bailiffs upon him, who being directed by the creditor's wife, had watched him into that house, and told him they had a warrant against him, and upon his not answering, they being unacquainted with his being deaf and dumb, offered to seize his sword. He startled at their offering of violence, and taking them for ruffians, which he had often met with, repelled the assaulters, and drawing his sword, as one man, more bold than the rest, closed in with him, he shortened his blade, and in the fall pinned the fellow through the shoulder, and himself through the leg, to the floor. After that he stood at bay with all the four officers, when the most mischievous assailant of them all, the creditor's wife, ventured to step into the fray, and very barbarously took hold of that nameless part of the man, for which, as she was a married woman, nature methinks should have taught her to have a greater tenderness, and almost squeezed and crushed those vitals to death. But at last he got free from them all, and was going away as fast as he could, not knowing what consequences might ensue. But the woman who aimed herself at committing murder, in the most savage and inhuman manner, ran out after him, crying out, Murder! murder! as loud as she could, and alarmed the whole street. The bailiffs following the woman, and being bloody from head to foot, by means of the wound he received, gave credit to the outcry. The late Earl Rivers's footmen happening to be at the door, ran immediately to stop the supposed murderer, and they indeed did take him at last, but perceived their mistake, and discovered that instead of being assistants in taking a man whom they thought to be a murderer endeavouring to make his escape from the hands of justice, they had only been tricked in by that false cry to be adjutants to a bailiff in retaking a gentleman, who, by so gallant a defence, had rescued himself from the dangers of a prison; and when they had discovered this their mistake they were mighty sorry for what they had done. The most active and busy among the earl's footmen was a Dutchman, and the earl happening to be in a room next the street, and hearing the outcry of murder, stepped to the window, and seeing his own servants in the midst of the bustle, examined the Dutchman how the matter was, and, being told it, he chid the man for being concerned in stopping a gentleman that was getting free from such troublesome companions. But the Dutchman excused himself, like a Dutchman, by making a very merry blunder for a reply; _Sacramente_, said he, to his lord, if I had thought they were bailiffs, I would have fought for the poor dumb gentlemen, but then why had he not told me they were bailiffs, my lord?

In short, Duncan Campbell was carried off as their prisoner; but the bailiff that was wounded was led back to the coffee-house, where he pretended the wound was mortal, and that he despaired of living an hour. The proverb, however, was of the fellow's side, and he recovered sooner than other people expected he could. As soon as all danger was over, an action for damages and smart money, as their term is, was brought against Mr. Campbell; the damages were exaggerated and the demand was so extravagant, that Duncan Campbell was neither able, just at that time, nor willing, had he been able, to pay so much, as he thought, in his own wrong, and having no bail, and being ashamed to make his case known to his better sort of friends, who were both able and willing to help him at a dead lift, he was hurried away to gaol by the bailiffs, who showed such a malignant and insolent pleasure, as commonly attends powerful revenge, when they put him into the Marshalsea. There he lay in confinement six weeks, till at last four or five of his chief friends came by mere chance to hear of it; immediately they consulted about his deliverance, and unanimously resolved to contribute for his enlargement, and they accordingly went across the water together, and procured it out of hand.

Two of his benefactors were officers, and were just then going over to Flanders. Duncan Campbell, to whom they communicated their design, was resolved to try his fortune in a military way, out of a roving kind of humour, raised in him partly by his having taken a sort of aversion to his own profession in town, and partly by his finding that he could not live, without following a profession, as he had done, any longer. He, over a bottle, frankly imparted his mind to them at large; he signified to them that he hoped, since they had lately done him so great a favour in freeing him from one captivity, they would not think him too urgent if he pressed for one favour farther, upon natures so generous as theirs, by whom he took as great a pleasure in being obliged, as he could receive in being capable of obliging others. He wrote to them that the favour he meant was to redeem him from another captivity, almost as irksome to him as that out of which they had lately ransomed him. This captivity, continued he, is being either forced to follow my old profession, which I have taken an entire disgust to, for a maintenance, or being forced to live in a narrower way than suits with my genius, and the better taste I have of higher life. Such a state, gentlemen, you know, is more unpalatable than half-pay; it is like either being forced to go upon the forlorn hope, or else like a man's being an entirely cashiered and broken officer, that had no younger brother's fortune, and no other support but his commission. Thus, though you have set my body at liberty, my soul is still under an imprisonment, and will be till I leave England, and can find means of visiting Flanders, which I can do no otherwise than by the advantage of having you for my convoy. I have a mighty longing to experience some part of a military life, and I fancy, if you will grant me your interest, and introduce me to the valiant young Lord Lorne, and be spokesmen for a dumb man, I shall meet with a favourable reception; and as for you, gentlemen, after having named that great patron and pattern of courage and conduct in the field, I can't doubt but the very name I bear, if you had not known me, would have made you take me for a person of a military genius, and that I should do nothing but what would become a British soldier, and a gentleman; nothing, in fine, that should make you repent the recommendation.

These generous and gallant friends of his, it seems, complied with his request, and promised they would make application for him to the Lord Lorne, and Duncan Campbell had nothing to do but to get his bag and baggage ready, and provide himself with a pass. His baggage was not very long a getting together, and he had it in tolerable good order, and as for his pass, a brother of the Lord Forbes was so kind as to procure him one upon the first application Duncan made to him.

Accordingly, in a few days afterwards, they went on board, and having a speedy and an easy passage, arrived soon at Rotterdam. Duncan met with some of his English acquaintance in that town, and his mind being pretty much bent upon rambling, and seeing all the curiosities, customs, and humours he could, in all the foreign places he was to pass through, he went, out of a frolic, with some gentlemen, next day, in a boat to an adjacent village, to make merry over a homely Dutch entertainment, the intended repast being to consist of what the boors there count a great delicacy, brown bread and white beer. He walked out of sight from his company, and they lost one another; and strolling about by himself at an unseasonable hour, as they call it there after the bell has tolled, Duncan Campbell, who neither knew their laws, nor if he had, was capable of being guided by the notice which their laws ordain, was taken into custody in the village, for that night, and carried away the next day to Williamstadt, where he was taken for a spy, and put into a close imprisonment for three or four days.

But some Scotch gentlemen, who had been in company with Mr. Campbell at Mr. Cloysterman's, a painter in Covent-garden, made their application to the magistrate and got him released; he knew his friends the officers, that carried him over, were gone forward to the camp, and that there was no hope of finding them at Rotterdam, if he should go thither, and so he resolved, since he had had so many days punishment in Williamstadt, to have three or four days pleasure there too, by way of amends, before he would set out on his journey after his friends. But on the third night he got very much in drink; and as he went very boisterously and disorderly along, a sentry challenged him; and the want of the sense of hearing had like to have occasioned the loss of his life. The sentry fired at him and narrowly missed him; he was taken prisoner, not without some resistance, which was so far innocent, as that he knew not any reason why he should be seized; but very troublesome and unwarrantable in so orderly a town; so the governor's secretary, after the matter was examined into, judging it better for the unhappy gentleman's future safety, advised him to return home to his own country, and accordingly bespoke him a place in a Dutch ship called Yowfrow Catherine, for his passage to England.

Duncan Campbell had taken up this humour of rambling, first, of his own accord, and the troubles which he had run himself into by it, we may reasonably suppose had pretty well cured him of that extravagant itch; and there is little doubt to be made but that he rejoiced very heartily when he was got on board the ship to return to England; and that in his new resolutions he had reconciled himself to the prosecution of his former profession, and intended to set up for a predictor again as soon as he could arrive at London. But now fortune had not a mind to let him go off so; he had had his own fancy for rambling, and now she was resolved to have hers, and to give him his bellyful of caprice. Accordingly, when the Dutch ship, called Yowfrow Catherine, was making the best of her road for London, and each person in the vessel was making merry, filled with the hopes of a quick and prosperous passage, a French privateer appeared in sight, crowding all the sails she could, and bearing towards them with all haste and diligence. The privateer was double-manned, and carried thirty guns; the Dutch vessel was defenceless in comparison; and the people on board had scarce time to think, and to deplore that they should be made a prey of, before they actually were so, and had reason enough given them for their sorrow. All the passengers, to a single man, were stripped, and had French seamen's jackets in exchange for their clothes. Duncan Campbell had now a taste given him of the fate of war, as well as of the humour of travelling, and wished himself again, I warrant him, among his greatest crowd of consulters, as tiresome as he thought business to be, instead of being in the middle of a crew of sea savages. The town where the dumb prisoner was at last confined was Denain. There happened to be some English friars there, who were told by the others who he was, and to them he applied himself in writing, and received from them a great deal of civil treatment. But a certain man of the order of Recollects, happening to see him there, who had known him in England, and what profession he followed, caused him to be called to question, as a man that made use of ill means to tell fortunes. When he was questioned by a whole society of these religious men, he made them such pertinent and satisfactory answers in writing, that he convinced them he had done nothing for which he deserved their reprimand; and they unanimously acquitted him. The heads of his defence, as I have been informed, were these:--

First, he alleged that the second-sight was inborn and inbred in some men; and that every country had had examples of it more or less; but that the country of Scotland, in which he was educated from an infant, abounded the most of any with those sort of people; and from thence he said he thought he might very naturally draw this conclusion, that a faculty that was inborn and inbred to men, and grown almost a national faculty among a people who were remarkably honest, upright, and well-meaning people, could not, without some impiety, be imputed to the possessors of it as a sin; and when one of the fathers rejoined that it was remarked by several writers of the second-sight, that it must be therefore sinful, because it remained no longer among the people when the doctrines of Christianity were fully propagated, and the light of the gospel increased among them; and that afterwards it affected none but persons of vicious lives and an ill character; to this objection Mr. Campbell replied, that he knew most (even ingenious) writers had made that remark concerning the second-sight, but begged leave to be excused, if he ventured to declare that it was no better than a vulgar and common error; and the reasons were these, which he alleged in his own behalf; and to confirm his assertion, he told them men of undoubted probity, virtue, and learning, both of their own religion, viz., the Roman Catholic, and also of the reformed religion, and in several nations, had been affected, and continued all their lives to be affected, with this second-sighted power, and that there could be, therefore, no room to fix upon it the odious character of being a sinful and vicious, not to say that some called it still worse, a diabolical talent. He said he would content himself with making but two instances, because he believed those two would be enough to give content to them, his judges too, in that case. In his first instance he told them that they might find somewhat relating to this in Nicolaus Hemingius, who, in his tracts _de Superstitionibus Magicis_, printed at Copenhagen, anno 1575, informs the world, that Petrus Palladius, a bishop of See-landt, and professor of divinity at Copenhagen, could, from a part of his body affected, foretell from what part of the heavens tempests would come, and was seldom deceived. One of the fathers immediately asked him if he understood Latin? To this Duncan Campbell replied, No. Oh! said the friar, then, I don't remember that book was ever translated into English, that you mention. But, rejoined Duncan Campbell, the passage I mentioned to you, I have read in an English book, and word for word, according to the best of my memory, as I have written it down to you. In what English book? said the friar. I don't remember the name of the book, Duncan Campbell answered, but very well remember the passages, and that it was in a book of authority, and which bore a credit and good repute in the world; and you, being scholars, may, if you please, have recourse to the learned original, and I doubt not but you'll find what I say to be a truth. For the second instance, he told them, that in Spain, there are those they call Saludadores, that have this kind of gift. There was, continued he, in writing, one of your own religion, venerable fathers, and of a religious order, nay, a friar too, that had this gift. He was a noted Dominican, said he, and though I forget his name, you may, by writing a letter to England, learn his name. He was a devout Portuguese, belonging to Queen Catherine Dowager's chapel, and had the second-sight to a great degree, and was famous and eminent for it. They then asked him what was the full power he had to do by the second-sight. He answered, that as they had intimated that they had perused some of the skilful writers concerning the second-sight, he did not doubt but they had found, as well as he could tell them, that as to the extent of people's knowledge in that secret way, it reached both present, past, and future events. They foresee murders, drownings, weddings, burials, combats, manslaughters, &c., all of which there are many instances to be given. They commonly foresee sad events a little while before they happen; for instance, if a man's fatal end be hanging, they will see a gibbet, or rope about his neck; if beheading, they will see a man without a head; if drowning, they will see water up to his throat; if stabbing, they will see a dagger in his breast; if unexpected death in his bed, they will see a windingsheet about his head. They foretell not only marriages, but of good children; what kind of life men shall lead, and in what condition they shall die; also riches, honours, preferments, peace, plenty, and good weather. It is likewise usual with persons that have lost anything to go to some of these men, by whom they are directed how, with what persons, and in what place they shall find their goods. It is also to be noted that these gifts bear a latitude, so that some have it in a far more eminent degree than others; and what I have here written down to you, you need not take as a truth from me; but as it concerned me so nearly, I remember the passage by heart, and you will find it very near word for word in Dr. Beaumont's book Of Familiar Spirits. Aye, said the friars, but you have a genius too that attends you, as we are informed. So, replied Duncan Campbell, have all persons that have the second-sight in any eminent degree; and to prove this I will bring no less a witness than King James, who, in his Demonology, book the third and chapter the second, mentions also a spirit called Brownie, that was wont formerly to haunt divers houses, without doing any evil, but doing, as it were, necessary turns up and down the house; he appeared like a rough man, nay, some believed that their house was all the 'sonsier,' as they called it, that is, the more lucky or fortunate, that such spirits resorted there. With these replies the friars began to own they were very well satisfied, and acquiesced in the account he had given of himself as a very good, true, and honest account; but they told him they had still a farther accusation against him, and that was, that he practised magic arts, and that he used, as they had been informed, unlawful incantations. To this he made answer, that there were two kinds of magic, of which he knew they that were men of learning could not be ignorant. The art of magic, which is wicked and impious, continued he, is that which is professed, and has been professed at all times in the world, by witches, magicians, diviners, enchanters, and such like notorious profligates; who, by having an unnatural commerce with the devil, do many strange, prodigious, and preternatural acts, above and beyond all human wisdom; and all the arguments I ever did, or ever will deduce, continued he, from that black art, is a good and shining argument; it is this, O fathers: I draw a reason from these prodigious practices of wizards, magicians, enchanters, &c, and from all the heathen idolatry and superstition, to prove that there is a Deity; for from these acts of theirs, being preternatural and above human wisdom, we may consequently infer that they proceed from a supernatural and immaterial cause, such as demons are. And this is all the knowledge I ever did or ever will draw from that black hellish art. But, fathers, there is another kind of art magic, called natural magic, which is directly opposite to theirs, and the object of which art is to do spiritual good to mankind, as the object of theirs is to torment them, and induce them to evil. They afflict people with torments, and my art relieves them from the torments they cause. The public profession of these magical arts has, as you know, fathers, it is a common distinction, between black and white magic, been tolerated in some of the most famous universities of Christendom, though afterwards for a very good reason in politics, making it a public study to such a degree was very wisely retrenched by prohibition. If this, therefore, be a fault in your own opinions, hear my accusers, but if not, you will not only excuse, but commend me.

The friars were extremely well pleased with his defence, but one of them had a mind to frighten him a little if he could, and asked him what he would say if he could produce some witches lately seized, that would swear he had been frequently at their unlawful assemblies, where they were making their waxen images and other odd mischievous inventions in black magic, to torment folks; what if I can produce such evidence against you, wrote the father to him, by way of strengthening the question, will you not own that we have convicted you then? And when he had wrote the note, he gave it Duncan Campbell, with a look that seemed to express his warmth and eagerness in the expostulation. Duncan Campbell took the paper and read it, and far from being startled, returned this answer, with a smile continuing in his face while he wrote it. No, said he, fathers, by your leave, they will only prove me a good magician by that oath, and themselves more plainly witches. They will prove their love to torment good folks, and only show their hatred to me, an innocent man, but wise enough to torment them by hindering them from tormenting others. The fathers were well pleased with the shrewdness of the answer; but Duncan Campbell had a mind to exert his genius a little farther with the good friar, who thought likewise he had put him a very shrewd question; so taking up another sheet of paper, Fathers, said he, shall I entertain you with a story of what passed upon this head, between two religious fathers, as you all of you are, and a prince of Germany, in which you will find that mine ought to be reputed a full answer to the question the last learned father was pleased to propose to me? The story is somewhat long, but very much to the purpose and entertaining; I remember it perfectly by heart, and if you will have patience while I am writing it, I do not doubt but that I shall not only satisfy you, but please you and oblige you with the relation. The author I found it in, quotes it from Fromannus, (I think the man's name was so, and I am sure my author calls him a very learned man,) in his third book of Magical Incantation, and though I do not understand the language the original is writ in, yet I dare venture to say upon the credit of my English author, from whom I got the story by heart, that you will find me right whenever you shall be pleased to search.

The friars were earnest for the story, and expressed a desire that he would write it down for them to read, which he did in the following words. Note--that I have since compared Mr. Duncan Campbell's manuscript with the author's page out of which he took it, and find it word for word the same; which shows how incomparable a memory this deaf and dumb gentleman has got, besides his other extraordinary qualifications. The story is this:--

A prince of Germany invited two religious fathers, of eminent virtue and learning, to a dinner. The prince, at table, said to one of them: Father, think you we do right in hanging persons, who are accused by ten or twelve witches, to have appeared at their meetings or sabbaths? I somewhat fear we are imposed on by the devil, and that it is not a safe way to truth, that we walk in by these accusations; especially since many great and learned men everywhere begin to cry out against it, and to charge our consciences with it; tell me, therefore, your opinion. To whom the fathers, being somewhat of an eager spirit, said; What should make us doubtful in this case? Or what should touch our consciences, being convicted by so many testimonies? Can we make it a scruple, whether God will permit innocent persons should be so traduced? there is no cause for a judge to stick at such a number of accusations, but he may proceed with safety. To which, when the prince had replied, and much had been said _pro_ and _con_ on both sides about it, and the father seemed wholly to carry the point, the prince at length concluded the dispute; saying, I am sorry for you, father, that in a capital cause you have condemned yourself, and you cannot complain if I commit you to custody; for no less than fifteen witches have deposed that they have seen you, ay, start not! you your ownself, at their meetings; and to show you that I am not in jest, I will presently cause the public acts to be brought for you to read them. The father stood in a maze, and with a dejected countenance had nothing here to oppose but confusion and silence, for all his learned eloquence.

As soon as Mr. Campbell had wrote down the story, the fathers perused it, and seemed mightily entertained with it. It put an end to all farther questions, and the man whom they had been trying for a conjuror, they joined in desiring, upon distinct pieces of paper, under their several hands, to come frequently and visit them, as being not only a harmless and innocent, but an extraordinary well-meaning, good, and diverting companion. They treated him for some time afterwards during his stay, with the friendship due to a countryman, with the civility that is owing to a gentleman, and with the assistance and support which belonged to a person of merit in distress. Money they had none themselves, it seems, to give him, being Mendicants by their own profession; but they had interest enough to get him quite free from being prisoner; he participated of their eleemosynary table, had a cell allowed him among them in what they call their Dormitory; he had an odd coat and a pair of trowsers made out of some of their brown coarse habits, by the poor unfashionable tailor, or botcher, belonging to the convent, and at last they found means of recommending him to a master of a French vessel that was ready to set sail, to give him a cast over the channel to England; and to provide him with the necessaries of life till he got to the port. This French vessel was luckier than the Dutch one had been before to our dumb gentleman; it had a quick and prosperous passage, and arrived at Portsmouth; and as soon as he landed there, he having experienced the misfortunes and casualties that a man in his condition, wanting both speech and hearing, was liable to, in places where he was an utter stranger to everybody, resolved to make no stay, but move on as fast as he could towards London. When he came to Hampton town, considering the indifferent figure he made in those odd kind of clothes, which the poor friars had equipped him with, and that his long beard and an uncombed wig added much to the disguise, he was resolved to put on the best face he could, in those awkward circumstances, and stepped into the first barber's shop he came at to be trimmed and get his wig combed and powdered. This proved a very lucky thought to him; for as soon as he stepped into the first barber's shop, who should prove to be the master of it, but one Tobit Yeats, who had served him in the same capacity at London, and was but newly set up in the trade of a barber-surgeon, at Hampton town, and followed likewise the profession of schoolmaster. This Tobit Yeats had shaved him quite, before he knew him in that disguise; and Mr. Campbell, though he knew him presently, had a mind to try if he should be known himself first; at length the barber finding him to be a dumb man, by his ordering everything with motions of the hand and gestures of the body, looked at him very earnestly, remembered him, and in a great surprise called for pen, ink, and paper, and begged to know how he came to be in that disguise; whether he was under any misfortune, and apprehension of being discovered, that made him go in so poor and so clownish a habit, and tendered him any services, as far as his little capacity would reach, and desired him to be free, and command him; if he was able to assist him in anything. These were the most comfortable words that Duncan Campbell had read a great while. He took the pen and paper in his turn; related to him his whole story, gave the poor barber thanks for his good natured offer, and said he would make so much use of it, as to be indebted to him for so much money as would pay the stage-coach, and bear him in his travelling expenses up to London, from whence he would speedily return the favour with interest. The poor honest fellow, out of gratitude to a master whose liberality he had formerly experienced, immediately furnished Mr. Duncan Campbell with that little supply, expressing the gladness of his heart that it lay in his power; and the stage-coach being to set out within but a few hours, he ran instantly to the inn to see if he could get him a place. By good luck, there was room, and but just room for one more, which pleased Duncan Campbell mightily, when he was acquainted with it by his true and trusty servant the barber; for he was as impatient to see London again, it seems, as he had been before to quit it. Well, he had his wish; and when he came to London, he had one wish more for Fortune to bestow upon him, which appeared to begin to grow kind again, after her fickle fit of cruelty was over; and this wish was, that he might find his former lodgings empty, and live in the same house as he did when he followed his profession. This too succeeded according to his desire, and he was happily fixed once more to his heart's content in his old residence, with the same people of the house round about him, who bore him all that respect and affection, and showed all that readiness and willingness to serve him on every occasion and at every turn, which could be expected from persons that let lodgings in town to a gentleman, whom they esteemed the best tenant they ever had in their lives, or ever could have.

Immediately the tidings of the dumb gentleman's being returned home from beyond sea, spread throughout all the neighbourhood; and it was noised about from one neighbourhood to another, till it went through all ranks and conditions, and was known as well in a day or two's time, all the town over, as if he had been some great man belonging to the state, and his arrival had been notified to the public in the gazette, as a person of the last importance. And such a person he appeared indeed to be taken for, especially among the fair sex, who thronged to his doors, crowd after crowd, to consult with him about their future occurrences in life.

These curious tribes of people were as various in their persons, sex, age, quality, profession, art, trade, as they were in the curiosity of their minds, and the questions they had intended to propound to this dumb predictor of strange events, that lay yet as embryos in the womb of time, and were not to come, some of them, to a maturity for birth, for very many years after; just as porcelain clay is stored up in the earth by good artificers, which their heirs make china of, half a century, and sometimes more than an age, afterwards.

These shoals of customers, who were to fee him well for his advice, as we may suppose, now he stood in need of raising a fresh stock, were unquestionably as welcome and acceptable to him as they appeared too troublesome to him before, when he was in a state of more wealth and plenty.

Fortune, that does nothing moderately, seemed now resolved, as she had been extremely cruel before, to be extremely kind to him. He had nothing to do from early in the morning till late at night, but to read questions, and resolve them as fast as much-frequented doctors write their prescriptions and recipes, and like them also to receive fees as fast. Fortune was indeed mightily indulgent to the wants she had so suddenly reduced him to, and relieved him as suddenly by these knots of curiosos, who brought him a glut of money. But one single fair lady, that was one of his very first consulters after his return, and who had received satisfactory answers from him in other points, before he went abroad, proved, so good fortune would have it, worth all the rest of his customers together, as numerous as they were, and as I have accordingly represented them.

This lady was the relict or widow of a gentleman of a good estate, and of a very good family, whose name was Digby, and a handsome jointure she had out of the estate. This lady, it seems, having been with him in former days, and seen him in a more shining way of life, (for he had taken a humour to appear before all his company in that coarse odd dress made out of the friar's habit, and would not be persuaded by the people of the house to put on a nightgown till he could provide himself with a new suit,) was so curious, among other questions, as to ask him whether he had met with any misfortunes, and how he came to be in so slovenly and wretched a habit? Here Mr. Campbell related the whole story of his travels to her, and the crosses and disappointments he had met with abroad. The tears, he observed, would start every now and then into her eyes when she came to any doleful passage, and she appeared to have a mighty compassionate kind of feeling, when she read of any hardship more than ordinarily melancholy that had befallen him. Mr. Campbell, it is certain, had then a very good presence, and was a handsome and portly young man; and as a great many young gentlemen derive the seeming agreeableness of their persons from the tailor and peruke-maker, the shoemaker and hosier, so Mr. Campbell's person, on the other hand, gave a good air and a good look to the awkward garb he had on; and I believe it was from seeing him in this odd trim, as they called it, the ladies first took up the humour of calling him 'the handsome sloven:' add to this that he looked his misfortune in the face with a jolly countenance, and smiled even while he was penning the relation of his calamities; all which are certainly circumstances that first sooth a generous mind into a state of compassion, and afterwards heighten it in the breast wherein it is conceived. Hence it came that this pretty and good natured widow, Mrs. Digby, when she had expressed her commiseration of him by her looks, began to take the pen and express it in very tender terms. Neither did she think that expression in words a sufficient testimony of the compassion she bore to him; the generosity of her mind did lead her to express it in a more substantial manner still, and that was to show it plainly by a very benevolous action. She laid a purse of twenty guineas before the table, and at the same time smiling, pointed to the table, as signifying her desire that he would accept it, and running to the door, dropped a curtsy, and skuttled away; and by the same civil act as she obliged him, she put it out of his power to refuse being so obliged; so that, though the present was very handsome, the manner of giving it was still handsomer. If being a handsome young man of merit in distress, and bearing his misfortunes with an equal mind, are powerful motives to excite compassion in the mind of a generous lady, so the generosity of a young agreeable widow, expressed in so kind and so benevolous a way, to a young gentleman, when he had been tasting nothing but the bitter draughts of fortune before, must stir up an affection in a mind that had any sense of gratitude; and truly just such was the effect that this lady's civility had upon Mr. Duncan Campbell. He conceived from that moment a very great affection for her; and resolved to try whether he could gain her, which he had no small grounds to hope, from the esteem which she appeared to bear towards him already. I remember Mr. Dryden makes a very beautiful observation of the near alliance there is between the two passions of pity and love in a woman's breast, in one of his plays. His words are these; For pity still foreruns approaching love, as lightning does the thunder. Mr. Bruyere, a most ingenious member of the French Academy, has made another remark, which comes home to our present purpose. He says, That many women love their money better than their friends; but yet value their lovers more than their money. According to the two reflections of these fine writers upon the tempers of the fair, Mr. Campbell had hopes enough to ground his courtship upon; and it appeared so in the end, by his proving successful; she from being a very liberal and friendly client, became at last a most affectionate wife. He then began to be a housekeeper, and accordingly took a little neat one, and very commodious for his profession, in Monmouth-court. Here I must take leave to make this observation; that if Mr. Campbell inherited the talents of his second-sighted mother, he seemed likewise to be an heir to his father, Mr. Archibald Campbell, both in his strange and accidental sufferings by sea, and likewise in his being relieved from them after as accidental and strange a manner, by an unexpected marriage, just like his father's. And here we return again to take a new survey of him in the course of his public practice as a predictor. The accounts I shall give of his actions here, will be very various in their nature from any I have yet presented to the reader; they are more mysterious in themselves, and yet I shall endeavour to make the manner of his operating in this kind as plain as I think I have the foregoing ones, and then I flatter myself they must afford a fresh entertainment for every reader that has any curiosity and a good taste for things of so extraordinary a kind. For what I have all along propounded to myself from the beginning and in the progress to the end of this history, is to interweave entertaining and surprising narratives of what Mr. Campbell has done, with curious and instructive inquiries into the nature of those actions, for which he has rendered himself so singularly famous. It was not, therefore, suitable to my purpose, to clog the reader with numerous adventures, almost all of the same kind, but out of a vast number of them to single some few of those that were most remarkable, and that were mysteries, but mysteries of very different sorts. I leave that method of swelling distorted and commented trifles into volumes, to the writers of fable and romance; if I was to tell his adventures, with regard, for example, to women, that came to consult him, I might perhaps have not only written the stories of eleven thousand virgins that died maids, but have had relations to give of as many married women and widows, and the work would have been endless. All that I shall do therefore is to pick out one particular, each of a different kind, that there may be variety in the entertainment. Upon application to this dumb man, one is told in the middle of her health, that she shall die at such a time; another, that she shall sicken, and upon the moment of her recovery, have a suitor and a husband; a third, who is a celebrated beauty with a multitude of admirers round about her, that she shall never become a wife; a fourth, that is married, when she shall get rid of an uneasy husband; a fifth, that hath lost her goods, who stole them, where and when they shall be restored; a sixth, that is a merchant, when he shall be undone, and how and when he shall recover his losses, and be as great on the Exchange as ever; a seventh, that is a gamester, which will be his winning, and which his losing hour; an eighth, how he shall be involved in a law-suit, and whether the suit will have an adverse or a prosperous issue; a ninth, that is a woman, with choice of lovers, which she shall be most happy with for life; and so on to many others, where every prediction is perfectly new and surprising, and differs from the other in almost every circumstance. When a man has so extensive a genius as this at foretelling the future occurrences of life, one narrative of a sort is enough in conscience to present the reader with, and several of each kind would not methinks be entertaining, but tiresome; for he that can do one thing in these kinds by the power of prediction, can do ten thousand; and those who are obstinate in extenuating his talents, and calling his capacity in question, and that will not be convinced by one instance of his judgment, would not own the conviction if ten thousand instances were given them. The best passages I can recommend to their perusal are those where persons who came purposely to banter him under the colour of consulting him, and covered over their sly intentions with borrowed disguises, and came in masquerades, found all the jest turned upon themselves in the end, which they meant to our famous predictor, and had the discouragement of seeing their most concealed and deepest laid plots discovered, and all their most witty fetches and wily contrivances defeated, till they were compelled universally to acknowledge, that endeavouring to impose upon the judgment of our seer by any hidden artifice and cunning whatsoever, was effectually imposing upon their own. His unusual talent in this kind was so openly known, and so generally confessed, that his knowledge was celebrated in some of the most witty weekly papers that ever appeared in public. Isaac Bickerstaff, who diverted all the _beau monde_, for a long space of time with his lucubrations, takes occasion in several of his papers to applaud the speculations of this dumb gentleman in an admirable vein of pleasantry and humour, peculiar to the writer, and to the subject he writ upon. And when that bright author, who joined the uttermost facetiousness with the most solid improvements of morality and learning in his works, laid aside the title of a Tatler, and assumed the name of a Spectator and censor of men's actions, he still, every now and then, thought our Duncan Campbell a subject worthy enough to employ his farther considerations upon. I must take notice of one letter sent concerning him to the Spectator, in the year 1712, which was at a time when a lady wanted him, after he had removed from Monmouth-street to Drury-lane.

MR. SPECTATOR,--

About two years ago I was called upon by the younger part of a country family, by my mother's side related to me, to visit Mr. Campbell, the dumb man; for they told me that was chiefly what brought them to town, having heard wonders of him in Essex. I, who always wanted faith in such matters, was not easily prevailed on to go; but lest they should take it ill, I went with them, when, to my own surprise, Mr. Campbell related all their past life; in short, had he not been prevented, such a discovery would have come out, as would have ruined their next design of coming to town, viz., buying wedding clothes. Our names, though he had never heard of us before, and we endeavoured to conceal, were as familiar to him as to ourselves. To be sure, Mr. Spectator, he is a very learned and wise man. Being impatient to know my fortune, having paid my respects in a family Jacobus, he told me, after his manner, among several other things, that in a year and nine months I should fall ill of a new fever, be given over by my physicians, but should with much difficulty recover; that the first time I took the air afterwards, I should be addressed to by a young gentleman of a plentiful fortune, good sense, and a generous spirit. Mr. Spectator, he is the purest man in the world, for all he said is come to pass, and I am the happiest she in Kent. I have been in quest of Mr. Campbell these three months, and cannot find him out; now hearing you are a dumb man too, I thought you might correspond and be able to tell me something; for I think myself highly obliged to make his fortune, as he has mine. It is very possible your worship, who has spies all over this town, can inform me how to send to him; if you can, I beseech you be as speedy as possible, and you will highly oblige your constant reader and admirer,

DULCIBELLA THANKLEY.

THE SPECTATOR'S ANSWER.

Ordered, that the inspector I employ about wonders, inquire at the Golden-lion opposite to the Half-moon tavern, in Drury-lane, into the merit of this silent sage, and report accordingly. Vide the 7th volume of Spectators, No. 474, being on Wednesday, September the 3rd, 1712.

But now let us come to those passages of his life the most surprising of all, during the time that he enjoyed this reputation, and when he proved that he deserved the fame he enjoyed. Let us take a survey of him while he is wonderfully curing persons labouring under the misfortune of witchcraft, of which the following story will be an eminent instance, and likewise clear up how he came by his reputation in Essex, as mentioned in the above-mentioned letter to the Spectator.

In the year 1709, Susanna Johnson, daughter to one Captain Johnson, who lived at a place adjacent to Rumford, in Essex, going one morning to that town to buy butter at the market, was met there by an old miserable looking woman, just as she had taken some of her change of the marketwoman, in copper, and this old woman rather demanded than begged the gentlewoman to give her a penny. Miss Johnson reputing her to be one of those hateful people that are called sturdy beggars, refused it her, as thinking it to be no act of charity, and that it would be rather gratifying and indulging her impudence, than supplying or satisfying her indigence. Upon the refusal, the old hag, with a face more wrinkled still, if possible, by anger, than it was by age, took upon her to storm at young Miss Johnson very loudly, and to threaten and menace her; but when she found her common threats and menaces were of no avail, she swore she would be revenged of the young creature in so signal a manner, that she should repent the denial of that penny from her heart before she got home, and that it should cost her many pounds to get rid of the consequences of that denial and her anger. The poor innocent girl despised these last words likewise, and, getting up on horseback, returned homewards; but just as she got about half way, her horse stopped, and no means that she could use would make him advance one single step; but she stayed awhile, to see if that would humour him to go on. At last the beast began to grow unruly, and snorted and trembled as if he had seen or smelt something that frightened him, and so fell a kicking desperately, till he threw the girl from the saddle, not being able to cling to it any longer, though a pretty good horsewoman of her years; so much were the horse's motions and plungings more than ordinarily violent.

As Providence would have it, she got not much harm by the fall, receiving only a little bruise in the right shoulder; but she was dreadfully frightened. This fear added wings to her feet, and brought her home as speedily of herself as she usually came on horseback. She immediately, without any other sign of illness than the palid colour with which fear had disordered the complexion of her face, alarmed all the family at home with the story, took her bed upon it, complained of inward rackings of the belly, and was never at ease unless she lay doubled up together, her head to her knees, and her heels to her rump, just like a figure of 8. She could not be a single moment out of that posture without shrieking out with the violence of anxious torments and racking pains.

In this condition of misery, amidst this agony of suffering, and in this double posture, was the poor wretched young gentlewoman brought to town; physicians were consulted about her, but in vain; she was carried to different hospitals for assistance, but their endeavours likewise proved ineffectual; at last she was conducted to the College of Physicians; and even the collective wisdom of the greatest sages and adepts in the science of physic was posed to give her any prescription that would do her service, and relieve her from the inexplicable malady she laboured under. The poor incurable creature was one constant subject of her complaining mother's discourse in every company she came into. It happened at last, and very providentially truly, that the mother was thus condoling the misfortune of her child among five or six ladies, and telling them, among other things, that by the most skilful persons she was looked upon to be bewitched, and that it was not within the power of physic to compass her recovery. They all having been acquainted with our Mr. Duncan Campbell, unanimously advised her to carry her daughter to his house, and consult with him about her. The mother was overjoyed at these tidings, and purposed to let no time slip where her child's health was so deeply concerned. She got the ladies to go with her and her child, to be eye-witnesses of so extraordinary a piece of practice, and so eminent a trial of skill.

As soon as this dismal object was brought into his room, Mr. Duncan Campbell lifted up her head and looked earnestly in her face, and in less than a minute's time signified to the company, that she was not only bewitched, but in as dreadful a condition almost as the man that had a legion of fiends within him.

At the reading of these words the unhappy creature raised up her head, turned her eyes upwards, and a smile, a thing she had been a stranger to for many months, overspread her whole face, and such a kind of colour as is the flushing of joy and gladness, and with an innocent tone of voice she said, she now had a firm belief she should shortly be delivered. The mother and the rest of the company were all in tears, but Mr. Campbell wrote to them that they should be of good heart, be easy and quiet for a few moments, and they should be convinced that it was witchcraft, but happily convinced by seeing her so suddenly well again. This brought the company into pretty good temper; and a little after, Mr. Campbell desired she might be led up stairs into his chamber and left there alone with him for a little while; this occasioned some small female speculation, and as much mirth as their late sorrow, alleviated with the hopes of her cure, would permit.

This you may be sure was but a snatch of mirth, just as the nature of the thing would allow of; and all sorts of waggery being laid instantly aside, and removed almost as soon as conceived, the poor young thing was carried in that double posture up stairs. She had not been much above half an hour there, when by the help only of Mr. Campbell's arm she was led down stairs, and descended into that roomful of company as a miracle appearing in a machine from above; she was led backward and forward in the room, while all gazed at her for awhile with joyful astonishment, for no arrow was ever more straight than she. Mr. Campbell then prevailed with her to drink a glass of wine, and immediately after she evacuated wind, which she had not done for some months before, and found herself still more amended and easy; and then the mother making Mr. Campbell some small acknowledgment at that time, with the promise of more, and her daughter giving thanks, and all the company commending his skill, took their leaves and departed, with great demonstrations of joy. I shall here, to cut the story short, signify, that she came frequently afterwards to make her testimonials of gratitude to him, and continues to enjoy her health to this very day, at Greenwich, where she now lives, and will at any time, if called upon, make oath of the truth of this little history, as she told me herself with her own mouth.

The next thing, therefore, it behoves me to do in this chapter, is, to give some satisfactory account of magic, by which such seeming mysterious cures and operations are brought about.

This task I would perform in the most perspicuous and most convincing manner I can; for magic, I know, is held to be a very hard and difficult study by those learned, and universally unlawful and diabolical by those unlearned, who believe there is such a science attainable by human genius. On the other hand, by some learned men, who believe there is no such science, it is represented as an inconsistent system of superstitions and chimeras; and again laughed at as such by the unlearned, who are of an incredulous temper; what I would therefore undertake to do in this place is to show the learned men, who believe there is such an art, that the attainment to a tolerable knowledge of the manner how magical practices may be brought about, is no such difficult matter as they have represented it to themselves; and by doing this I shall make the system of it so plain, that while the learned approve of it, the unlearned too, who are not of an unbelieving kind, may understand clearly what I say; and the learned men who have rejected this science as chimerical, may be clearly convinced it is real; and then there is nothing left but obstinate unbelieving ignorance, which I shall not here pretend by arguments to lead into sense, but leave it to the work of time. In fine, I will endeavour to induce men of sense to say, that what has been accounted mysterious, is delivered in a plain, easy, and convincing manner, and to own that they approve, while men of the lower class of understanding shall confess and acknowledge that they themselves understand it; and that what has hitherto been represented as arduous and difficult to a great genius, is adapted and rendered not only clear, but familiar to persons of middling talents. In this work, therefore, I shall follow the strictest order I can, which of all things render a discourse upon any subject the most clear; and that it may be plain to the commonest capacity, I will first set down what order I intend to follow.

First, I will speak of magic in general.

Secondly, Of magic under its several divisions and subdivisions.

Thirdly, Concerning the object of art, as it is good or bad.

Fourthly, Of the persons exercising that art in either capacity, of good or bad, and by what means they become capacitated to exercise it.

In the fifth place, I shall come to the several objections against the art of magic, and the refutation of those objections.

The first objection shall be against the existence of good and bad spirits; the refutation of which will consist in my proving the existence of spirits, both good and bad, by reason and by experience.

The second objection that will be brought, is to contain an allegation that there are no such persons as witches now, and an argument to support that allegation, drawn from the incapacity and impossibility of any thing's making, while itself is incarnate, a contract with a spirit. This objection will be answered by proving the reality of witches from almost universal experience, and by explaining rationally the manner how the devils hold commerce with witches; which explanation is backed and authorised by the opinion of the most eminent divines, and the most learned physicians.

From hence, sixthly and lastly, We shall conclude on the side of the good magic, that as there are witches on the one hand that may afflict and torment persons with demons, so on the other hand there are lawful and good magicians that may cast out demons from people that are possessed with them.

And first as to magic in general. Magic consists in the spirit by faith, for faith is that magnet of the magicians by which they draw spirits to them, and by which spirits they do great things, that appear like miracles.

Secondly, Magic is divided into three sorts, viz., divine, natural, and diabolical. And natural magic is again subdivided into two kinds, simple and compound; and natural compound magic is again likewise divided into two kinds, viz., natural-divine magic, and natural-diabolical magic. Now, to give the reader a clear and a distinct notion of each several species of magic here mentioned, I set down the following definitions: Divine magic is a celestial science, in which all operations that are wonderfully brought about, are performed by the Spirit of God. Natural magic is a science in which all the mysterious acts that are wrought, are compassed by natural spirits. But as this natural magic may be exercised about things either in a manner indifferent in themselves, or mere morally good, and then it is mere natural magic; or else about things theologically good, and transcendently bad; and then it is not merely and natural magic, but mixed and compound. If natural magic be exercised about the most holy operations, it is then mixed with the divine, and may then be called, not improperly, natural-divine magic. But if natural magic troubles itself about compassing the wickedest practices, then is it promiscuous with the demoniacal, and may not improperly be called natural-diabolical magic.

Thirdly, The object of this art is doing wonders out of the ordinary appearing course of nature, which tend either to great good or bad, by the help and mediation of spirits good and bad.

Fourthly, As to the persons exercising that art in either way, whether good or bad, and by what means they become capacitated to act it, the notion of this may be easily deduced from the notions of the art itself, as considered above in its each different species; for as all magic consists in a spirit, every magician acts by a spirit.

Divine magicians, that are of God, are spoke of in the sacred Book, and therefore I shall not mention the passages here, but pass them over, as I ought in a book like this, with a profound and reverential silence, as well as the other passages which speak of natural and demoniacal magicians; and in all I shall speak of them in this place, I shall only speak of them with regard to human reason and experience, and conclude this head with saying, that natural magicians work all things by the natural spirits of the elements; but that witches and demoniacal magicians, as Jannes and Jambres in Egypt were, work their magical performances by the spirit of demons, and it is by the means of these different spirits that these different magicians perform their different operations.

These things thus distinctly settled and explained, it is now we must come and ground the dispute between those who believe there are no such things as magicians of any kind, and those who assert there are of all the kinds above specified.

Those who contend there are, have recourse to experience, and relate many well-witnessed narratives, to prove that there have been in all times, and that there are still, magicians of all these kinds. But those who contend that there are no such persons, will give no ear to what the others call plain experience; they call the stories, let whatever witnesses appear to justify them, either fabulous legends invented by the authors, or else tricks of intellectual legerdemain imposed by the actors, upon the relators of those actions. Since, therefore, they say, though the believers in magic brag of experience never so much, it may be but a fallible experience; they reasonably desire to know whether these gentlemen that stand for magic can answer the objections which they propose, to prove that the practice of magic, according to the system laid down, is inconsistent with reason, before they will yield their assent. Let the stories be never so numerous, appear never so credible, these unbelieving gentlemen desire to be tried by reason, and aver till that reason is given they will not be convinced by the number of stories, because, though numerous, they are stories still; neither will they believe them because they appear credible, because seeming so is not being so, and appearances, though never so fair, when they contradict reason, are not to be swallowed down with an implicit faith as so many realities. And thus far, no doubt, the gentlemen who are on the unbelieving side are very much in the right of it. The learned gentlemen, on the other hand, who are persuaded of this mighty mysterious power being lodged in the hands of magicians, answer, that they will take upon them to refute the most subtle objections brought by the learned unbelievers, and to reconcile the practicability of magical mysteries by the capacity of men who study that art, to right rules and laws of reasoning, and to show that some stories, though never so prodigious, which are told of magicians, demand the belief of wise men on two accounts; because as experience backs reason on the one hand, reason backs experience on the other, and so the issue of the whole argument, whether there are magicians or not, is thrown upon both experience and reason. These arguments on each side, I shall draw up fairly _pro_ and _con_; for I do not pretend to be the inventor of them myself, they belong to other authors many years ago; be it enough for me to boast of, if I can draw them up in a better and closer form together than they have yet appeared in. In that I take upon myself a very great task; I erect myself as it were into a kind of a judge; I will sum up the evidences on both sides, and I shall, wherever I see occasion, intimate which side of the argument bears the most weight with me; but when I have enforced my opinion as far as I think needful, my readers, like a jury, are still at liberty to bring in their verdict just as they themselves shall see fit; and this naturally leads me where I promised to come to in the fifth part of this discourse, to the several objections against the power of art magic, and the refutation of those objections.

_The First Objections being against the Existence of Spirits, and the Refutations thereof._

The first objection which they who reject magic make use of, is, denying that there are any such things as spirits, about which, since those who defend the art say it entirely exerciseth itself, the objectors contend, that if they can make out that there are no such beings as spirits, all pretensions to the art must be entirely groundless, and for the future exploded.

To make this part out, that there are no spirits, the first man they produce on their side is undoubtedly one of very great credit and authority, inasmuch as he has justly borne for many centuries the title of a prince of philosophers. They say that Aristotle in his book _de Mundo_, reasons thus against the existence of spirits, viz., That since God can do all things of himself, he doth not stand in need of ministering angels and demons. A multitude of servants showing the weakness of a prince.

The gentlemen who defend the science make this reply, they allow the credit and authority of Aristotle as much as the objectors; but as the objectors themselves deny all the authorities for the spirits, and desire that reason may be the only ground they go upon, so the refuters, on their parts desire, that Aristotle's _ipse dixit_ may not be absolutely passed upon them for argument; but that his words may be brought to the same touchstone of reason, and proved if they are standard. If this argument, say they, will hold good, Aristotle should not suppose intelligences moving the celestial spheres; for God sufficeth to move all without ministering spirits; nor would there be need of a sun in the world, for God can enlighten all things by himself, and so all second causes were to be taken away; therefore, there are angels and ministering spirits in the world, for the majesty of God, not for his want of them, and for order, not for his omnipotency. And here if the objectors return and say, who told you that there are spirits; Is not yours a precarious hypothesis? May not we have leave to recriminate in this place? Pray, who told Aristotle that there were intelligences that moved the celestial spheres? Is not this hypothesis as precarious as any man may pretend that of spirits to be? And we believe there are few philosophers at present who agree with Aristotle in that opinion; and we dare pronounce this to be ours, that Aristotle took his intelligences from the Hebrews, who went according to the same whimsical, though pretty notion, which first gave rise to the fiction of the nine muses. But more than all this, it is a very great doubt among learned men, whether this book _de Mundo_ be Aristotle's or no.

The next thing the objectors bring against the existence of spirits, is, that it is nonsense for men to say that there are such beings of which it is impossible for a man to have any notion, and they insist upon it that it is impossible for any man to form an idea of a spiritual substance. As to this part, the defendants rejoin, that they think our late most judicious Mr. Locke, in his elaborate and finished Essay on the Human Understanding, has fairly made out, that men have as clear a notion of a spiritual substance as they have of any corporeal substance, matter, or body; and that there is as much reason for admitting the existence of the one, as of the other; for that if they admit the latter, it is but humour in them to deny the former. It is in book the 2nd, chap. 29, where he reasons thus: "If a man will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general he will find he has no other idea of it, but only a supposition of he knows not what support of such quality which are capable of producing simple ideas in us, which qualities are commonly called accidents. Thus, if we talk or think of any particular sort of corporeal substance, as horse, stone, &c., though the idea we have of either of them be but the complication or collection of those several simple ideas, or sensible qualities which we use to find united in the thing called horse, or stone; yet because we cannot conceive how they should subsist alone, not one in another, we suppose them to exist in, and be supported by some common subject; which support we denote by the name of substance, though it be certain we have no clear or distinct idea of that thing we suppose a support. The same happens concerning the operations of our mind, viz., thinking, reasoning, and fearing, &c., which we concluding not to subsist of themselves, and not apprehending how they can belong to body, we are apt to think these the actions of some substance which we call spirit; whereby it is evident, that having no other notion of matter, but something wherein those many sensible qualities which affect our senses do subsist, by supposing a substance wherein thinking, knowing, doubting, and a power of moving, &c., do subsist, we have as clear a notion of the nature or substance of spirit, as we have of body: the one being supposed to be, without knowing what is, the substratum to those simple ideas which we have from without; and the other supposed, with a like ignorance of what it is, to be the substratum of these operations which we experiment in ourselves within. It is plain, then, that the idea of corporeal substance in matter, is as remote from our conceptions and apprehensions as that of spiritual substance, and therefore from our not having any notion of the substance of spirit, we can no more conclude its not existence, than we can for the same reason deny the existence of body; it being as rational to affirm there is no body, because we cannot know its essence, as it is called, or have the idea of the substance of matter, as to say, there is no spirit, because we know not its essence, or have no idea of a spiritual substance." Mr. Locke also, comparing our idea of spirit with our idea of body, thinks there may seem rather less obscurity in the former than the latter. Our idea of body he takes to be an extended solid substance, capable of communicating motion by impulse; and our idea of soul is a substance that thinks, and has a power of exciting motion in body by will or thought. Now, some perhaps will say they comprehend a thinking thing, which perhaps is true; but, he says, if they consider it well, they can no more comprehend an extended thing; and if they say, they know not what it is thinks in them, they mean they know not what the substance is of that thinking thing; no more, says he, do they know what the substance is of that solid thing; and if they say they know how not how they think, he says, neither do they know how they are extended, how the solid parts are united, or where to make extension, &c.

The learned Monsieur le Clerc, who generally knows how far human reason can bear, argues consonantly to what is before delivered by Mr. Locke, in his _Coronis_, added to the end of the fourth volume of his Philosophical Works, in the third edition of them, where he writes as followeth:--

"When we contemplate the corporeal nature, we can see nothing in it but extension, divisibility, solidity, mobility, and various determinations of quantity, or figures; which being so, it were a rash thing, and contrary to the laws of right reasoning, to affirm other things of bodies; and consequently from mere body nothing can be deduced by us, which is not joined in a necessary connection with the said properties; therefore those who have thought the properties of perceiving by sense, of understanding, willing, imagining, remembering, and others the like, which have no affinity with corporeal things, to have risen from the body, have greatly transgressed in the method of right reasoning and philosophising, which hath been done by Epicurus, and those who have thought as he did, having affirmed our minds to be composed of corporeal atoms: but whence shall we say they have had their rise? truly, they do not owe their rise to matter, which is wholly destitute of sense and thought, nor are they spontaneously sprung up from nothing, it being an ontological maxim of most evident truth, that nothing springs from nothing."

Having thus given the reader the first objections made against the existence of spirits, and the refutations thereof, I must now frankly own on which side my opinion leans; and for my part, it seems manifest to me that there are two beings; we conceive very plainly and distinctly, viz., body and spirit, and that it would be as absurd and ridiculous to deny the existence of the one as of the other; and really, if the refuters have got the better in their way of reasoning, they have still a much greater advantage over the objectors, when they come to back these reasons with fresh arguments drawn from experience. Of this, there having been many undoubted narratives given in the foregoing pages, concerning the apparitions of spirits, I shall refer the reader back again to them, and only subjoin here one or two instances, which may, if required, be proved upon oath, of spirits seen by two persons of our Duncan Campbell's own acquaintance. In the year 1711, one Mrs. Stephens and her daughter were together with Mr. Campbell, at the house of Mr Ramell, a very great and noted weaver at Haggerstone, where the rainy weather detained them till late at night. Just after the clock struck twelve, they all of them went to the door to see if the rain had ceased, being extremely desirous to get home. As soon as ever they had opened the door and where all got together, there appeared before them a thing all in white, the face seemed of a dismal palid hue, but the eyes thereof fiery and flaming, like beacons, and of a saucer size. It made its approaches to them till it came up within the space of about three yards of them, there it fixed and stood like a figure agaze, for some minutes; and they all stood likewise stiff, like the figure, frozen with fear, motionless, and speechless; when all of a sudden it vanished from their eyes, and that apparition to the sight was succeeded by a noise, or the appearance of a noise, like that which is occasioned by the fighting of twenty mastiff dogs.

Not long after, Mrs. Anne Stephens, who lived in Spitalfields, a woman well known by her great dealings with mercers upon Ludgate-hill, sitting in her house alone, and musing upon business, happened by accident to look behind her, and saw a dead corpse, to her thinking, lie extended upon the floor, just as a dead corpse should be, excepting that the foot of one leg was fixed on the ground, as it is in a bed when one lies with one knee up; she looked at it a long while, and by degrees at last stole her eyes from so unpleasing and unexpected an object. However, a strange kind of a curiosity overcame her fears, and she ventured a second time to turn her head that way, and saw it, as before, fixed for a considerable time longer, but durst not stir from her seat; she again withdrew her eyes from the horrible and melancholy spectacle, and resumed the courage, after a little reflection, of viewing it again, and resolved to ascertain herself if the vision was real, by getting up from her seat and going to it, but upon this third retrospection she found it vanished. This relation she writ down to Mr. Duncan Campbell, and has told before Mrs. Ramell, her own sister, and many other very creditable persons. Now as to these arguments from experience, I shall also deliver my opinion; I dispute not but that learned men, who have obstinate prepossessions, may produce plausible arguments why all things should be thought to be done by imposture which seem strange to them, and interfere with their belief; and truly thus far their humour may be indulged, that if only one person relates a very strange and surprising story, a man may be more apt to think it is possible for that person to lie, than that so strange a relation should be true; but if a considerable number of persons, of several countries, several religious, several professions, several ages, and those persons looked upon to be of as great sagacity as any the country afford, agree in relations of the same kind, thought very strange and are ready to vouch the truth of them upon oath, after having well considered circumstances, I think it a violation of the law of nature to reject all these relations as fabulous, merely upon a self-presuming conceit, unless a man can fairly show the things to be impossible, or can demonstrate wherein those persons were imposed on; for from hence I form the following conclusive argument. What is possible according to reason, grows probable according to belief; where the possibility is attested to have reduced itself into action by persons of known credit and integrity. Now, not only the possibility of the existence of spirits, but the actual existence thereof is proved above by logical demonstration; therefore are we to believe both by the course of logical reason and moral faith, that those existences have appeared to men of credit, who have attested the reality thereof upon oath.

_Second Objection against the Existence of Witches._

These objectors go on to say, that provided they should allow there is an existence of spirits, yet that would be still no argument how magic should subsist, because they deny that it is impossible for a man in his body to have a commerce, much less make a contract, with spirits; but here again the refuters allege they have both experience and reason on their sides. As a joint argument of reason and experience, they tell you, that the numerous witches which have in all countries been arraigned and condemned upon this occasion, are evident testimonies of this commerce and contract being held and made with spirits. They pretend to say, that these objectors call not their, the refuters, judgment so much in question, who contend that there is a magic art, as they call in question the judgment of all the wisest legislative powers in Christendom, who have universally agreed in enacting penal laws against such capital offenders.

But here the objectors return and say, that it being impossible for us to show the manner how such a contract should be made, we can never, but without reason, believe a thing to be, of which we can form no perfect idea. The refuters, on the other hand, reply with the learned Father le Brune, it is manifest that we can see but two sorts of beings, spirits and bodies; and that since we can reason but according to our ideas, we ought to ascribe to spirits what cannot be produced by bodies. Indeed the author of the Republic of Learning, in the month of August, anno 1686, has given us a rough draught for writing a good tract of witchcraft, which he looks upon as a desideratum; where among other things, he writes thus: Since this age is the true time of systems, one should be contrived concerning the commerce that may be betwixt demons and men.

On this passage Father le Brune writes thus: "Doubtless here the author complies with the language of a great many persons, who, for want of attention and light, would have us put all religion in systems. Whatever regard I ought to have for many of those persons, I must not be afraid to say, that there is no system to be made of those truths, which we ought to learn distinctly by faith, because we must advance nothing here, but what we receive from the oracle. We must make a system to explain the effects of the loadstone, the ebbing and flowing of the sea, the motion of the planets; for that the cause of these effects is not evidently signified to us, and many may be conceived by us; and to determine us, we have need of a great number of observations, which by an exact induction may lead us to a cause that may satisfy all the phenomena. It is not the same in the truths of religion, we come not at them by groping, it were to be wished men spoke not of them, but after a decisive and infallible authority. It is thus we should speak of the power of demons, and of the commerce they have with men; it is of faith, that they have power, and that they attack men, and try to seduce them divers ways. It is true, indeed, they are sometimes permitted to have it over the just, though they have it not ordinarily, but over those that want faith, or fear not to partake of their works; and that to the last particularly, the disordered intelligences try to make exactly succeed what they wish; inspiring them to have recourse to certain practices by which those seducing spirits enter into commerce with men." Thus far Father le Brune. But still these objectors demand to know by what means this commerce may be held between demons and men, and urge us to describe the manner; or pretend that they have still reason to refuse coming into the belief of a thing which we would impose upon them, though wholly ignorant of it ourselves; to that the refuters answer thus; that both Christian divines and physicians agree as to the manner how, which they are so curious in inquiring after, that demons stir up raptures and ecstacies in men, binding or loosing the exterior senses, and that either by stopping the pores of the brain, so that the spirits cannot pass forth, as it is done naturally by sleep, or by recalling the sensitive spirits from the outward senses to the inward organs, which he there retains; so the Devil renders women witches ecstatical and magicians, who while they lie fast asleep in one place, think they have been in divers places, and done many things. This the learned objectors say proceeds from no demon, but from the disease called an epilepsy; but, on the other hand, the more learned refuters insist upon it, that these ecstacies are not epileptic seizures; this, say they, appears from Bodin, in his Theatre of Universal Nature, where he says, That those who are wrapped by the Devil, feel neither stripes nor cuttings, nor no wresting of their limbs, nor burning tortures, nor the application of a red hot iron; nay, nor is the beat of the pulse, nor the motion of the heart perceived in them; but afterwards, returning to themselves, they feel most bitter pains of the wounds received, and tell of things done at six hundred miles' distance, and affirm themselves to have seen them done. The ingenious Dr. Ader, makes an admirable physical distinction between this kind of ecstacy and a syncope, or stupor caused by narcotic medicines. Sennertus, in his Institutio Medica, writes of the demoniacal sopor of witches, who think they are carried through the air, dance, feast, and have copulation with the devil, and do other things in their sleep, and afterwards believe the same things waking. Now, he says, whether they are really so carried in the air, &c., or being in a profound sleep, or only dream they are so carried, and persist in that opinion after they are awake, these facts or dreams cannot be natural; for it cannot be that there should be so great an agreement in dreams, of persons differing in place, temperament, age, sex, and studies, that in one night, and at the same hour, they should, in concert, dream of one and the same such meeting, and should agree as to the place, number, and quality of the persons, and the like circumstances; but such dreams are suggested from a preternatural cause, viz., from the devil to his confederate, by the divine permission of an Almighty power, where punishments are to be permitted to be inflicted upon reprobate sinners.

Whence also, to those witches, sincerely converted, and refusing to be any more present at those diabolical meetings, those dreams no longer happen, which is a proof that they proceeded not before from a natural cause.

Here begins the great point of the dispute as to that branch of magic which we call natural magic. The objectors may tell us, that they will freely own that there may be an existence of spirits, that there may be an existence of witches, that by a divine power men may be influenced so far as to have a communication with good spirits, and that from thence they may become spiritual-divine magicians, they will likewise, perhaps, as freely grant, that by the intervention of a demon, things preternatural may be brought about by persons who have studied the demoniacal magic; but then what they principally insist upon is, that it must be contradictory to all human reason to imagine that there can be such a thing as natural magicians; and thus far they may form their argument. They say, that the persons, who contend for the magic art, own, that all that is brought about by magic, is by the assistance and help of a spirit, and that consequently what is effected by it must be preternatural; now, they say, it is a thing inconsistent, by a natural power, to bring about a preternatural effect; therefore, there can be no such thing as natural magic, which has within itself the efficacy of destroying those acts done by magicians in the diabolical.

To this the refuters take leave to reply, that the foundation upon which the argument is built is wrong grounded; they have admitted that, in diabolical art magic, there may be a commerce held between men and spirits, by which several preternatural effects may be brought about; and the reason they assign for it there is, because there is a preternatural agent concerned therein, the devil; but then, say they, in natural magic you can pretend to no such agent, and therefore to no such preternatural effect. This argument contains within it two fallacies; first, as to the commerce held between a man and a demon, there is nothing preternatural in getting the acquaintance; the will of the man is entirely natural, either naturally good, or naturally corrupted; the black spirit that converseth with him, it is acknowledged is not so, but it is from the will of the man, not from the power vested in the devil, that the acquaintance first grows, therefore the acquaintance itself is natural, though it arises from the last corruption and depravations of nature; but being made with a preternatural existence, though the cause of the acquaintance be corruptedly natural, yet the intermediate cause or means after that acquaintance is not so, and therefore the effect of that intermediate cause may be wonderful, and seem to be out of the ordinary course of nature. Now, since it is generally allowed that there are natural spirits of the elements, as well as divine and infernal, what we have to prove is only this, that man by natural magic may have a commerce with natural spirits of their elements, as witches may have with the spirits or demons. Now, as we said before, the commerce itself depends upon the will of the person, and is therefore natural, and consequently may as well subsist between the one as the other; for the devil cannot force a man to hold a commerce with him whether he will or no. The second fallacy is calling the effect preternatural, no otherwise than as it connotates the agent that brought it about, which is a spiritual agent; for the effect is, in itself considered, natural, and brought about by second causes that are natural, by the devil's penetration, who is subtle enough to make use of them for such and such ends. Now men, by natural spirits, which are of a faculty thoroughly subtle, may as well with natural second causes compass the remedy of an evil spirit, as the devil is able to infect men with it. From these speculations a farther plain consequence may be deduced, how a man may, by the pure force of natural magic, cure a person that is infested with evils by a demon; for how is it that a demon infests anybody with his evil motions? It is true, he is a preternatural agent, but the evil effect he does is brought about by natural causes. For how does a demon stir up raptures or ecstacies in men? Why he does it, as we are told above, by binding or loosing the exterior senses, by stopping the pores of the brain, so that the spirits cannot pass forth; and this the art of physic can compass by its drugs, and sleep causes the same thing very naturally of itself; therefore, as the evil itself is natural, the remedy, that is natural, will certainly overcome it. But then, say you, why cannot those persons be cured by physicians? I answer, not because their remedies are not in themselves sufficient to cure the evils themselves, but because generally physicians do not administer their drugs as Christians, but as physicians; and when they prescribe them to the sick they generally prescribe to them only purely considered as patients, not as Christians, and therein they come to fail; because the agent, the devil, is a subtle spirit, that brings the evil, and alters its situation before the remedy, which would master it otherwise, can take any effect; which agent, the devil, is employed by the horrible and impious faith of the antiphysician, viz., the black magician; but if the physician would act the Christian at the same time, so far as to have a faith that things ordained in the course of nature for the good of man, would have its effects in spite of a devil, if taken with a good faith by the patient; that all good things ordained to be for the natural recovery of men, if they took it with thankfulness to the sender, would have due effect; why then the natural spirits of the elements would resist the farther agency of the demoniacal spirit, and then nothing but the natural evil, caused at first by the demon, remaining in the person, without the farther superintendency of the demon, might demonstratively be taken away by the mere natural remedy or medicine. And thus good and pious physicians, making use of such proper remedies as their skill teaches them, and having an honest faith, that the goods of nature intended for the use and benefit of man, if received by the patient with the same good faith, is above the power of the devil to frustrate, may not improperly be called natural magicians. These arguments of mine I shall now take leave to back by experience.

Besides, what we have urged from reason, concerning the power of natural magic, we shall only subjoin, that divines themselves hold that natural magic, and also natural divinations and prophecies, are proved by quotations from that venerable writ which is their guide; and bring proofs from the same also, that by natural magic demons are also cast forth, but not all kinds of demons, and so many works of efficacy are wrought by natural magic: they tell you, such was the Pythonissa that raised the apparition to Saul, which appeared in a body of wind and air. Thus, if a person by natural magic should cast out demons, it does not follow that this was also from divine magic; and if demons are cast out by natural magic, by one that is in the fear of God, it does not follow that he is a true magician of God; but if it exorbitates to demoniacal, then it is condemned: and when natural magic keeps within its bounds, the divines tell us it is not condemned in the venerable book, which is the Christian's sure guide. But, inasmuch as the lawfulness even of natural magic has been called in question by others, I shall, in an Appendix joined to this treatise, examine that matter, both according to the reasons of our English laws, and according to the best stated rules of casuistry that I am a master of; still submitting my judgment to the superior judgment of those who are professed divines and lawyers; and if my opinions prove erroneous, I am willing to retract them; and therefore, in this place, there remains nothing farther for me to do, but only, as I have shown, on the one hand, how natural magic, and its powerful operations, are proved by reason, to show, on the other hand, how far reason in these cases is likewise backed and supported by well-evidenced practice, and notorious experience. And to do this, after having mentioned one memorable instance, which I refer the reader to in the body of the book, concerning the performances of Mr. Greatrix, to which a Lord Orrery was a witness, in Ireland; I shall, to avoid prolixity, bring the other testimonials of practice, from the success which our Duncan Campbell himself has had in this way on other occasions.

In the year 1713, lived in Fenchurch-street, one Mr. Coates, a tobacco-merchant, who had been for many years sorely tormented in his body, and had had recourse for a cure to all the most eminent physicians of the age, even up to the great Dr. Ratcliff himself; but all this mighty application for relief was still in vain; each doctor owned him a wonder and a mystery to physic, and left him as much a wonder as they found him. Neither could the professors of surgery guess at his ailment, or resolve the riddle of his distemper; and after having spent, from first to last, above a thousand pounds in search of proper remedies, they found the search ineffectual; the learned all agreed that it could proceed from nothing else than witchcraft; they had now indeed guessed the source of his illness, but it was an illness of such a kind that, when they had found it out, they thought themselves not the proper persons to prescribe to him any remedies. That task was reserved, it seems, for our Duncan Campbell, who, upon somebody's information or other, was sent for to the bewitched patient Mr. Coates, who found him the wonder that the others had left him, but did wonders in undertaking and compassing his cure. I remember, one of the ingredients made use of was boiling his own water, but I cannot tell how it was used; and, upon turning over the books of some great physicians since, I have found, that they themselves have formerly delivered that as one part of the prescriptions for the cure of patients in like cases. But as there are other things which Mr. Campbell performs, that seem to require a mixture of the second-sight, and of this natural magic, before they can be brought about, I will entertain the reader with one or two passages of that sort likewise, and so conclude the history of this so singular a man's life and adventures.

In the year 1710, a gentlewoman lost about six pounds' worth of Flanders lace, and inasmuch as it was a present made to her husband, she was concerned as much as if it had been of twenty times the value; and a lady of her acquaintance coming to visit her, to whom she unfolded, among other things in discourse, this little disaster, the lady, smiling, replied with this question, Did you never hear, madam, of Mr. Duncan Campbell? It is but making your application to him, things that are lost are immediately found; the power of his knowledge exceeds even the power of laws; they but restrain, and frighten, and punish robbers, but he makes thieves expiate their guilt by the more virtuous way of turning restorers of the goods they have stolen. Madam, rejoined the losing gentlewoman, you smile when you tell me this; but really, as much a trifle as it is, since it was a present to my husband, I cannot help being sensibly concerned at it, a moment's disappointment to him in the least thing in nature, creates in me a greater uneasiness than the greatest disappointment to my single self could do in things of moment and importance. What makes me smile, said the lady, when I speak of it, or think of it, is the oddness and peculiarity of this man's talent in helping one to such things; but, without the least jest, I assure you, that I know, by experience, these things come within the compass of his knowledge; and I must seriously tell you, for your farther satisfaction, that he has helped me, and several of my friends, to the finding again things lost, which were of great value. And is this, without laughing, true? said the losing fair, very gravely and demurely, like a person half believing, and desirous to be fully confirmed in such a belief. The lady she advised with did then ascertain her of the truth of the matter, alleging that, for a single half-guinea, he would inform her of her things, and describe the person that conveyed them away. No sooner was this gentlewoman convinced, but she was eager for the trial; solicited her friend to conduct her to Mr. Campbell, and, upon the first word of consent, she was hooded and scarfed immediately, and they coached it away in a trice to Mr. Campbell's house, whom they luckily found within.

The ladies had not been long seated before he wrote down the name of this new client of his, exactly as it was, viz., Mrs. Saxon. Then she was in good hopes, and with much confidence propounded to him the question about the lace. He paused but a very little while upon the matter, before he described the person that took it, and satisfied her that in two or three days she would be mistress of her lace again, and find it in some book, or corner of her room. She presented him a half-guinea, and was very contentedly going away, but Mr. Campbell very kindly stopped her, and signified to her, that, if she had no more to offer to him, he had something of more importance to reveal to her. She sat full of expectation while he wrote this new matter; and the paper he delivered to her contained the following account: As for the loss of a little bit of lace, it is a mere trifle; you have lost a great many hundreds of pounds, which your aunt (naming her name) left you, but you are bubbled out of that large sum. For while you was artfully required down stairs about some pretended business or other, one Mr. H--tt--n, conveyed your aunt's Will out of the desk, and several other things of value; and writing down the names of all the persons concerned, which put Mrs. Saxon in a great consternation, he concluded this paper, with bidding her go home with a contented mind, she should find her lace in a few days; and as she found that prediction proved true, she should afterwards come and consult about the rest.

When she came home, it seems, big at first with the thoughts of what she had been told, she rifled and ransacked every corner, but no lace was to be met with; all the next day she hunted in the like manner, but frightened the whole time as if she thought the devil was the only person could bring it, but all to no purpose; the third day her curiosity abated, she gave over the hopes of it, and took the prediction as a vain delusion, and that what she gave for it was only more money thrown away after what had been lost before. That very day, as it commonly happens in such cases, when she least dreamt of it, she lighted on it by accident and surprise. She ran with it in her hand immediately to her husband, and now she had recovered it again, told him of the loss of it, and the whole story of her having been at Mr. Campbell's about it; and then, amplifying the discourse about what he had told her besides, as to more considerable affairs, she said she resolved to go and consult him a little farther about them, and begged her husband to accompany her. He would fain have laughed her out of that opinion and intent, but the end was, she persuaded him into it, and prevailed upon him to seem at least very serious about the matter, and go with her to the oracle, assuring him there was no room for doubting the same success.

Well, to Mr. Campbell's they accordingly came; and after Mr. Saxon, in deference to his wife's desire, had paid our predictor a handsome complement of gold, Mr. Duncan Campbell saluted him in as grateful a manner, with the assurance that there was in Kent a little country house, with some lands appertaining to it, that was his in right of his wife; that he had the house, as it were, before his eyes, that though he had never substantially seen it, nor been near the place where it stood, he had seen it figuratively as if in exact painting and sculpture; that particularly it had four green trees before the door, from whence he was positive, that if Mr. Saxon went with him in quest of it, he should find it out, and know it as well the moment he come near it, as if he had been an inhabitant in it all his life.

Mr. Saxon, though somewhat of an unbeliever, yet must naturally wish to find it true, you may be sure, and yet partly doubting the event, and partly pleased with the visionary promise of a fortune he never expected, laughed very heartily at the oddness of the adventure, and said he would consider whether it would not savour too much of Quixotism, to be at the expense of a journey on such frolics, and on such a chimerical foundation of airy hopes, and that then he would call again and let Mr. Campbell know his mind upon that point.

In every company he came into, it served for laughter and diversion; they all, however, agreed it was worth his while, since the journey would not be very expensive, to go it by way of frolic. His wife, one morning, saying that she did remember some talk of a house, and such things as Mr. Campbell had described, put him forward upon the adventure; and upon Mr. Saxon's proposing it to his brother Barnard, Mr. Barnard favoured the proposal as a joke, and agreed upon the country ramble. They came on horseback to Mr. Campbell's with a third horse, on which the dumb predictor was mounted, and so on they jogged into Kent, towards Sevenoaks, being the place which he described. The first day they set out was on a Saturday morning in June, and about five that afternoon they arrived at the Black Bull, at Sevenoaks, in Kent. It being a delicate evening, they took an agreeable walk up a fine hill, gracefully adorned with woods, to an old seat of the Earl of Dorset. Meeting by the way with an old servant of the earl, one Perkin, he offered Mr. Barnard, who it seems was his old acquaintance, to give them all a sight of the fine ancient seat.

After they had pleased themselves with viewing the antique nobility of that stately structure, this Perkin went back with them to their inn, the Bull, at Sevenoaks. They that could talk, were very merry in chat; and the dumb gentleman, who saw them laugh and wear all the signs of alacrity in their countenances, was resolved not to be behind with their tongues, and by dint of pen, ink, and paper, that he made signs should be brought in, was resolved, if one might be said to crack without noise, to crack his jest as well as the best of them; for it may be truly said of him, that he seldom comes into any, even diverting company, where he is not the most diverting man there, and the head, though we cannot call him the mouth, of the cheerful society. After having eyed this Perkin a little, and being grown, by his art, as we may suppose, as familiar with the man's humour as if he had known him as many years as Mr. Barnard, Pray, Mr. Barnard, quoth he, in writing, how comes it, you, that are so stanch and so stiff a whig, should be so acquainted and so particularly familiar with such an old Papist, and so violent a Jacobite, as I know that Mr. Perkin (whom I never saw nor had any notice of in my life) to be? And pray, replied Mr. Barnard, what reason have you beyond a pun to take him for a Jacobite? Must he be so because his name is Perkin? I do assure you, in this you show yourself but little of a conjurer; if you can tell no more of houses than you do of men, we may give over the search after the house you spoke of. (Here the reader must understand they discoursed on their fingers, and wrote by turns.) Mr. Campbell replied, seriously, Laying a wager is no argument in other things, I own, but in this I know it is, because I am sure, after we have laid the wager, he will fairly confess it among friends, since it will go no farther; and I, said Mr. Campbell, will lay what wager you will apiece with you all round. Hereupon, Mr. Barnard, who had known him a great many years, was the first that laid, and many more, to the number of five or six, followed his example; the decision of the matter was deferred till next day at the return of the old man to the inn, they being about to break up that night and go to bed.

The next day being Sunday, the landlord carried his guests to see the country, and after a handsome walk, they came through the churchyard. They were poring upon the tombs; no delight can be greater to Mr. Campbell than that; and really, by the frequent walks he usually takes in Westminster abbey, and the churchyards adjacent to this metropolis, one would imagine he takes delight to stalk along by himself on that dumb silent ground, where the characters of the persons are only to be known, as his own meaning is, by writings and inscriptions on the marble. When they had sufficiently surveyed the churchyard, it grew near dinner-time, and they went homewards; but before they had got many yards out of the churchyard, Mr. Campbell makes a full stop, pointing up to a house, and stopping his friends a little, he pulls out of his pocket a pencil and paper, and notes down the following words: That, that is the house my vision presented to me; I could swear it to be the same, I know it to be the same, I am certain of it. The gentlemen with him remarked it, would not take any farther notice at that time intending to inquire into it with secrecy, and so went on to the inn to dinner.

As merry as they had been the night before after supper, they were still more innocently cheerful this day after dinner, till the time of service begun. When the duty of the day was performed and over, they returned to divert and unbend their minds with pleasant but harmless conversation. I suppose nobody but a set of very great formalists will be offended with scandal or scruples, that to travellers just ready to depart the town, Mr. Perkin came on that good day and decided the wagers, by owning to all the company, secrecy being first enjoined, that he was a Roman Catholic, though nobody of the family knew it in so many years as he had lived there, which was before Mr. Campbell was born. This and other innocent speeches afforded as much cheerfulness as the Lord's-day would allow of.

On the next day, being Monday, they sent for one Mr. Toland Toler, an attorney of the place, to find out to whom that house belonged, but by all the inquiry that could possibly be made with convenient secrecy, nobody could find it out for a long time; but at last it came to light and appeared to be justly to a tittle as Mr. Campbell had predicted.

Being now satisfied, the next day our three travellers returned for London; and the two vocal men were very jocular upon their adventure, and by their outward gesticulations gave the prophetical mute his share of diversion. Mr. Barnard, as they passed into a farmhouse-yard, remarked that all the hogs fell a grunting and squeaking more and more as Mr. Campbell came nearer, (who, poor man! could know nothing of the jest, nor the cause of it, till they alighted and told it him by signs and writing,) said to Mr. Saxon, laughing, Now we have found out our house, we shall have only Mr. Campbell home again by himself--we have no farther need of the devil that accompanied him to the country, up to town with us, there are other devils enow to be met with there he knows; and so this, according to the fashion of his predecessor devils, is entered into the herd of swine.

However, the event of this journey, to cut the story short, procured Mr. Saxon a great insight, upon inquiry, into several affairs belonging to him, of which he would otherwise have had no knowledge; and he is now engaged in a chancery suit to do himself justice, and in a fair way of recovering great sums of money, which, without the consultation he had with this dumb gentleman, he had in all likelihood never dreamt of.

In the year 1711, a gentleman, whose name shall be, in this place, Amandus, famed for his exquisite talents in all arts and sciences, but particularly for his gentlemanlike and entertaining manner of conversation, whose company was affected by all men of wit, who grew his friends, and courted by all ladies of an elegant taste, who grew his admirers; this accomplished gentleman, I say, came to Mr. Campbell, in order to propound a question to him, which was so very intricate, and so difficult to answer, that, if he did answer it, it might administer to himself and the ladies he brought with him, the pleasure of admiration in seeing a thing so wonderful in itself performed; or, on the other hand, if he did not make a satisfactory reply to it, then it might afford him and the ladies a very great delight, in being the first that puzzled a man who had had the reputation for so many years of being capable of baffling all the wittiest devices and shrewd stratagems that had been from time to time invented to baffle his skill and explode his penetration in the second-sight, and the arts which he pretended to. The persons whom Amandus brought with him, were the illustrious Lady Delphina, distinguished for her great quality, but still more celebrated for her beauty, his own lady, the admired Amabella, and a young blooming pretty virgin whom we will call by the name of Adeodata, about which last lady, the question was to be put to Mr. Campbell. Adeodata, it seems, was the natural daughter of this very fine gentleman, who had never let her into the knowledge of her own birth, but had bred her up from her infancy under a borrowed name, in the notion that she was a relation's daughter, and recommended to his care in her infancy. Now the man that had the second-sight was to be tried; it was now to be put to the proof if he could tell names or no? Amandus was so much an unbeliever as to be willing to hazard the discovery. Amabella and Delphina were strangers to her real name, and asked Duncan Campbell, not doubting but he would set down that which she ordinarily went by. Amabella had indeed been told by Amandus, that Adeodata was the natural daughter of a near friend of his; but who this near friend was remained a secret: that was the point which lay upon our Duncan Campbell to discover. When the question was proposed to him, what her name was, he looked at her very steadfastly, and shook his head, and after some time he wrote down that it would be a very difficult name for him to fix upon. And truly so it proved; he toiled for every letter till he sweated; and the ladies laughed incontinently, imagining that he was in an agony of shame and confusion at finding himself posed. He desired Amandus to withdraw a little, for that he could not so well take a full and proper survey of ladies' faces when a gentleman was by. This disturbance and perplexity of his afforded them still more subject of mirth; and that excuse was taken as a pretence, and a put-off to cover his shame the better, and hide from one at least, that he was but a downright bungler in what he pretended to be so wonderful an artist. However, after two hours hard sweat and labour, and viewing the face in different shades and lights, (for I must observe to the reader that there is a vast deal of difference, some he can tell in a minute or two with ease, some not in less than four or five hours, and that with great trouble) he undeceived them with regard to his capacity. He wrote down that Adeodata's real name was Amanda, as being the natural daughter of Amandus. Delphina and Amabella were surprised at the discovery; and Amandus, when he was called in, owning it a truth, his wife Amabella applauded the curious way of her coming by such a discovery, when Adeodata was just marriageable, took a liking to her as if her own daughter, and everything ended with profit, mirth, and cheerfulness. I could add a thousand more adventures of Mr. Campbell's life, but that would prove tedious; and as the town has made a great demand for the book, it was thought more proper to conclude it here. The most diverting of all, are to be found best to the life in original letters that passed between Mr. Campbell and his correspondents, some select ones of which will be shortly published in a little pocket volume, for the farther entertainment of such readers as shall relish this treatise; in which the author hopes he shall be esteemed to have endeavoured at the intermingling of some curious disquisitions of learning, with entertaining passages, and to have ended all the merriest passages with a sober, instructive, and edifying moral, which even to those who are not willing to believe the stories, is reckoned sufficient to recommend even fables themselves.

APPENDIX.

It is not that Mr. Duncan Campbell stands in need of my arguments, to prove that he is in no respect liable to the Acts of Parliament made against fortuntellers, &c., that I undertake the writing of this Appendix, the true reason thereof being, the more completely to finish this undertaking; for having, in the body of the book itself, fully proved a second-sight, and that the same frequently happens to persons, some of them eminently remarkable for piety and learning, and have from thence accounted for the manner of Mr. Campbell's performing those things he professes, to the great surprise, and no less satisfaction of all the curious who are pleased to consult him; and at the same time proved the lawfulness of such his performances from the opinions of some of the most learned in holy science; I thought it not improper to add the following short Appendix, being a summary of several acts of parliament made against fortune-tellers, conjurers, Egyptians, sorcerers, pretenders to prophecy, &c., with some proper remarks, suited to our present purpose, as well to satisfy them who are fantastically wise, and obstinately shut their eyes against the most refulgent reason, and are wilfully deaf to the most convincing and persuasive arguments, and thereupon cry out, that Mr. Campbell is either an impostor and a cheat, or at least a person who acts by the assistance of unlawful powers; as also to put to silence the no less waspish curs, who are always snarling at such whom providence has distinguished by more excellent talents than their neighbours. True merit is always the mark against which traducers level their keenest darts; and wit and invention oftentimes join hands with ignorance and malice to foil those who excel. Art has no greater enemy than ignorance; and were there no such thing as vice, virtue would not shine with half its lustre. Did Mr. Campbell perform those wonderful things he is so deservedly famous for, as these cavillers say, by holding intelligence with infernal powers, or by any unjustifiable means, I am of opinion he would find very few, in this atheistical age, who would open their mouths against him, since none love to act counter to the interest of that master they industriously serve. And did he, on the other hand, put the cheat upon the world, as they maliciously assert, I fancy he would then be more generally admired, especially in a country where the game is so universally, artfully, and no less profitably played, and that with applause since those pretenders to wisdom merrily divide the whole species of mankind into the two classes of knaves and fools, fixing the appellation of folly only upon those whom they think not wise, that is, wicked enough to have a share with them in the profitable guilt.

Our laws are as well intended by their wise makers to screen the innocent, as to punish the guilty; and where their penalties are remarkably severe, the guilt they punish is of a proportionable size. Art, which is a man's property, when acquired, claims a protection from those very laws which false pretenders thereto are to be tried and punished by, or else all science would soon have an end; for no man would dare make use of any talent providence had lent him, and his own industrious application had improved, should he be immediately tried and condemned by those statutes, which are made to suppress villains, by every conceited and half-learned pedant.

It is true, indeed, those excellent statutes, which are made against a sort of people, who pretend to fortune-telling and the like, are such as are well warranted, as being built upon the best foundation, viz., religion and policy; and were Mr. Campbell guilty of any such practice as those are made to punish, I openly declare, that I should be so far from endeavouring to defend his cause, that I would be one of the first that should aggravate his crime, thereby to enforce the speedier execution of those laws upon him, which are made against such offenders. But when he is so far from acting, that he doth not even pretend to any such practice, or for countenancing the same in others, as is manifest from the many detections he has made of that sort of villany, which the book furnishes us with, I think myself sufficiently justified for thus pleading in his defence.

I cannot but take notice, in reading the statutes made against such offenders, our wise legislature hath not in any part of them seemed so much as to imply that there are in reality any such wicked persons as they are made against, to wit, conjurors, &c., but that they are only pretenders to those infernal arts, as may reasonably be inferred from the nature of the penalties they inflict; for our first laws of that sort only inflicted a penalty which affected the goods and liberty of the guilty, and not their lives, though indeed they were afterwards forced to heighten the punishment with a halter; not that they were better convinced, as I humbly conceive, but because the criminals were most commonly persons who had no goods to forfeit, and to whom their liberty was no otherwise valuable but as it gave them the opportunity of doing mischief. Indeed our law-books do furnish us with many instances of persons who have been tried and executed for witchcraft and sorcery, but then the wiser part of mankind have taken the liberty to condemn the magistrate, at that time of day, of too much inconsideration, and the juries of an equal share of credulity; and those who have suffered for such crimes, have been commonly persons of the lowest rank, whose poverty might occasion a dislike of them in their fellow-creatures, and their too artless defence subject them to their mistaken justice; so that, upon the whole, I take the liberty to conclude, and I hope not without good grounds, that those laws were made to deter men from an idle pretence to mysterious and unjustifiable arts, which, if too closely pursued, commonly lead them into the darkest villany, not only that of deceiving others, but, as far as in them lie, making themselves slaves to the devil; and not to prevent and hinder men from useful inquiries, and from the practice of such arts, which though they are in themselves mysterious, yet are, and may be lawful.

I would not, however, be thought, in contradiction to my former arguments, to assert that there never were, or that there now are no persons such as wizards, sorcerers, &c., for by so doing I should be as liable to be censured for my incredulity, as those who defame Mr. Campbell on that account are for their want of reason and common honesty. Holy and profane writ, I confess, furnishes us with many instances of such persons; but we must not from thence hastily infer, that all those men are such who are spitefully branded with the odious guilt; for were it in the devil's power to make every wicked man a wizard, and woman a witch, he soon would have agents enough to shake this lower world to atoms but the Almighty, who restrains him, likewise restrains those.

Having premised thus much, I shall now proceed to consider some of the Acts of Parliament themselves; the persons against whom they were made, and the necessity of making the same. And some of the first Acts we meet with, were those which were made against a sort of people called Egyptians; persons who, if in reality such, might, if any, be suspected of practising what we call the black art, the same having been for many ages encouraged in their country; nay, so much has it been by them favoured, that it was introduced into their superstitious religion, if I may without an absurdity call it so, and made an essential part thereof; and, I believe, Mahometanism has not much mended the matter, since it has imperiously reigned there, or in any respect reformed that idolatrous nation. Now the mischief these persons might do, being so much in the devil's power, among the unwary, was thought too considerable not to be provided against; and therefore our wise legislature, the more effectually to prevent the same, by striking at the very foundation, made an act in 22 Henry VIII. 8: That if any, calling themselves Egyptians, do come into this realm, they shall forfeit all their goods; and being demanded, shall depart the realm within fifteen days, upon pain of imprisonment; and the importers of them, by another act, were made liable to a heavy penalty. This act was continued by the 1 Philip and Mary. Conjuration, witchcraft, enchantment, and sorcery, to get money, or consume any person in his body, members, or goods, or to provoke any person to unlawful love, was by the 33 Henry VIII. 14. and the 5 Elizabeth 16. and the 1 James I. 12. made felony; and by the same 33 Henry VIII. 14. it was made felony to declare to another any false prophecies upon arms, &c., but this act was repealed by the 1 Edward VI. 12., but by another act of the 3 and 4 of Edward VI. 15. it was again enacted, That all such persons who should pretend to prophecies, &c., should, upon conviction, for the first offence forfeit ten pounds, and one year's imprisonment; and for the second offence, all his goods, and imprisonment for life. And by the 7 Edward VI. 11. the same was made to continue but till the then next sessions of parliament. And by the 5 Elizabeth 15. the same act was again renewed against fantastical prophesiers, &c., but both those acts were repealed by the 1 James I. 12.

Thus far we find, that for reasons of state, and for the punishment of particular persons, those acts were made and repealed, as occasion required, and not kept on foot, nor indeed were they ever made use of, as I can remember in my reading, against any persons whose studies led them into a useful inquiry into the nature of things, or a lawful search into the workings of nature itself, by which means many things are foretold long before they come to pass, as eclipses and the like, which astrologers successfully do, whose art has been in all ages held in so great esteem that the first monarchs of the East made it their peculiar study, by which means they deservedly acquired to themselves the name of Magi, or wise men; but, on the contrary, were provided against persons profligate and loose, who, under a pretence and mask of science, commit vile and roguish cheats; and this will the more plainly appear, if we consider the letter and express meaning of the following Acts, wherein the persons I am speaking of, are described by such characters, which sufficiently prove the assertion; for in the 39 of Elizabeth 4. it was enacted, That all persons calling themselves scholars, going about begging, seafaring men pretending losses of their ships and goods at sea, and going about the country begging, or using any subtle craft, feigning themselves to have knowledge in physiognomy, palmistry, or any other the like crafty science, or pretending that they can tell destinies, fortunes, or such like fantastical imaginations, shall be taken and deemed rogues, vagabonds, sturdy beggars, and shall be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and whipped till his or her body be bloody. And by the 1 James I. 12. for the better restraining of the said offences, and for the farther punishing the same, it was farther enacted, That any person or persons using witchcraft, sorcery, &c., and all their aiders, abettors, and counsellors, being convicted, and attainted of the same offences, shall suffer pain of death, as felons, without the benefit of clergy; or to tell and declare in what place any treasure of gold and silver should or might be found in the earth, or other secret places; or where goods or things lost or stolen should be found or become; or to provoke any person to unlawful love, such offender to suffer imprisonment for one whole year without bail or mainprise, and once in every quarter of the said year shall in some market-town, or upon the market-day, or at any such time as any fair shall be kept there, stand openly in the pillory by the space of six hours, and there shall openly confess his or their offence; and for the second offence shall suffer death as felons, without the benefit of clergy.

That these laws were made against a set of villains, whose natural antipathy to honesty and labour furnished them with pretensions to an uncommon skill, thereby the more easily to gull and cheat the superstitiously credulous, and by that means discover from them some such secrets that might farther them in perpetrating the more consummate villany, is plain from the very words and expressions of the very Acts themselves, and the description of the persons they are made against; and not, as I before observed, to prevent and hinder men from the lawful inquiry after useful, delightful, and profitable knowledge.

Mr. Campbell, who has been long a settled and reputable inhabitant in many eminent parts of the city of London, cannot, I am sure, be looked upon as one of those these Acts of Parliament were made against, unless we first strip the Acts themselves of their own natural, express, and plain meaning, and clothe them with that which is more obscure, unnatural, forced, and constrained a practise; which, if allowed, would make them wound the innocent and clear the guilty, and render them not our defence but our greatest evil; they would, by that means, become a perfect enigma, and be so far from being admired for their plainness, that they would be even exploded like the oracles of the heathen for their double meaning.

If Mr. Campbell has the second-sight, as is unquestionable, from the allowed maxim, that what has been may be again, and by that means can take a view of contingences and future events; so long as he confines these notices of approaching occurrences to a good purpose, and makes use of them only innocently and charitably to warn persons from doing such things, that according to his conceptions would lead them into misfortune, or else in putting them upon such arts that may be of use and benefit to themselves and posterity, always having a strict regard to morality and religion, to which he truly adheres; certainly, I think, he ought so much the more to be admired for the same, by how much the more this his excellent knowledge is surpassing that of other men, and not be therefore unjustly upbraided with the injurious character of a cheat, or an ill man: however, this I will presume to affirm, and I doubt not but to have my opinion confirmed by the learned sages of the law, that this his innocent practice, and I venture to add, honest one too, doth by no means entitle him to the penalties of the before-mentioned laws made against fortune-tellers, and such sort of profligate wretches; which it is as great an absurdity to decry, as it would be to call him, who is a settled and reputable inhabitant, a stroller or wandering beggar.

Again; it is true that Mr. Campbell has relieved many that have been supposed to have been bewitched, as is related and well attested in the book of his life; but will any one from thence argue that he himself is a real conjurer, or wizard, because he breaks the chains by which those unhappy wretches were bound? No, surely; for if that were the case, we might then as well indict the physician who drives away a malignant distemper, and roots out its latent cause by his mysterious skill in plants and drugs; or conclude that the judge, who condemns a criminal, is for the same reason guilty of the self-same crime for which the offender is so by him condemned. Persons who delight in such unnatural conclusions, must certainly be in love with the greatest absurdities, and must entirely abandon their natural reason before they can be brought to conclude that the Prince of Darkness would assist men in destroying his own power.

The best answer I can afford those men is silence; for if they will not argue upon the principles of reason, or be guided by her dictates, I think them no more fit to be contended with in a rational and decent manner than bedlamites, and such who are bereft of all understanding. A rod is the best argument for the back of a fool, and contempt the best usage that ought to be shown to every headstrong and ignorant opponent.

In a word, I know of no branch of Mr. Campbell's practice that bears the least resemblance to those crimes mentioned in the foregoing Acts. That he can and doth tell people's names at first sight, though perfect strangers to him, is confessed by all who have made the curious inquiry at his hands; but what part of the Acts, I would fain know, is that against? Knowledge, and a clear sight into things not common, is not only an allowable, but a commendable qualification; and whether this knowledge in him be inherent, accidental, or the result of a long study, the case is still the same; since we are assured he doth it by no unlawful intelligence, or makes use of the same to any ill purpose, and therefore is undoubtedly as lawful as to draw natural conclusions from right premises. Hard is the fate of any man to be ignorant, but much harder would his lot be if he were to be punished for being wise; and, like Mr. Campbell, excelling others in this kind of knowledge.

Much more might be said in defence of Mr. Campbell and the art he professeth, but as the arguments which are brought against him by his enemies on the one hand, are trivial and ill-grounded, I therefore think they deserve no farther refutation; so on the other, his innocency is too clear to require it.

After having thus taken a survey of Mr. Campbell's acts, with regard to their legality according to the statutes and the laws of the nation wherein he lives, we will consider next, whether, according to the stated rules of casuistry, among the great divines eminent for their authority, it may be lawful for Mr. Campbell to predict, or for good Christian persons to visit his house, and consult him about his predictions. I have upon this head examined all the learned casuists I could meet with in ancient times, for I cannot meet, in my reading, with any moderns that treat thoroughly upon this case, or I should rather have chosen them, because, perhaps, the second-sight was less known in those ancient days than it has been since, and so might escape their notice.

My design is first to give the reader a distinct summary of all that has been said of this matter, and to do it as succinctly and briefly as possible, and then to argue myself from what they agree upon as to this man's particular case.

That the reader may have recourse to the authors themselves, if they have a curiosity, and find that I do not go about to impose upon their judgments, I will here tell the reader where he may find the whole contents of the following little abstract of divinity and casuistry, because it would be a tedious piece of work to set down the words of each of them distinctly, and quote them every one round at the end of their several different sentences, which tend to the same meaning, but I will strictly keep to the sense of them all; and I here give the reader their names, and the places, that he may consult them himself, if his inclination leads him to be so curious: Thomas Aquinas, iv. _Distin._ 34. _Quaestio._ 1. _Art. 3_; Bona, ii. _Dist. 7. Art. 2. Quaest._ 1; Joannes Major, iv. _Dist. 34. Quaest. 2_; Sylvester, _Verbo Malefico. Quaest. 8_; Rosella, _Verb Impedimentum_, xv. cap. 18; Tabiena, _Verb. Impedimentum_, 12 vers.; Cajetan, tom. ii. _Opusc. 12. de Malefic_; Alphonsus, _a Cast._ lib. x. _de Justa Haereticorum Punitione_, cap. 15; Cosmus Philiarchus, _de Offic. Sacerdot_, p. 2. lib. iii. cap. 11; Toletus, _in Summa._ lib. iv., cap. 16; Spineus, _in Tract. de Strigibus_; Petrus Binsfield, _in Tract. de Confessionibus Maleficorum_.

These divines have generally written upon impious arts of magic, which they call by the name of divination; and this divination, as they term it, they divide into two kinds; the one, in which the devil is expressly invoked, to teach hidden and occult things; the other, in which he is tacitly called upon to do the same. An express invocation is made by word or deed, by which a real pact is actually made with the devil, and that is a sin that affects the death of the soul, according to the laws of theology, and ought to affect the death of the body, according to civil and political laws. The tacit invocation of demons is then only, when a man busies himself so far with such persons, that it is meet and just that the devil should be permitted to have to do with him, though it was opposite to the intention of the man.

But then this express invocation is again subdivided into several species, according to the divers manners by which the devil instructs these men.

The first is enchantment, which I need not describe, and of which I will speak no more, because it is what everybody knows to be detestable, and nobody ought to know the art thereof.

The second is divination by dreams, when any instructions are expected from the devil by way of dream, which is a capital crime.

The third is called necromancy, which is, when by the use of blood and writing, or speaking certain verses, the dead seem to rise again, and speak and teach future things. For though the devil cannot recall a soul departed, yet he can, as some have thought, take the shape of the dead corpse, himself actuate it by his subtlety, as if it was informed with a soul. And some affirm, that by the divine permission the devil can do this, and spake so in the case of Samuel and Saul. But divines of a more solid genius attribute that power only to the Deity, and say, with reason, that it is beyond the devil's capacity. But it is certain this was a divination done in dead animals by the use of their blood, and therefore the word is derived from the Greek [Greek: nekron], which signifies dead, and [Greek: Manthea], which signifies divination.

The fourth species is called divination by the Pythians, which was taken from Apollo, the first diviner, as Thomas Aquinas says in his _Secunda Secundae, Quaest. 95. Art. 3_.

The fifth is called geomancy, which is when the devil teaches anything by certain signs appearing in the earthly bodies, as in wood, iron, or polished stones, beryls, or glass.

The sixth is named hydromancy, as when a demon teaches anything by appearances in the water.

The seventh is styled aeromancy; and it is when he informs people of such things by figures in the air.

The eighth is entituled pyromancy; that is, when it instructs people by forms appearing in the fire.

The ninth is termed aruspicy; which is when by signs appearing in the bowels of sacrificed animals the demon predicts at altars.

Thus far as to express divination, or invocation of the devil, which is detestable; and the very consulting of persons that use such unlawful means is, according to the judgment of all casuists, the high road to eternal damnation.

Now as to tacit divination, or invocation of the devil, that is divided into two subaltern kinds. The first kind is, when for the sake of knowing hidden things, they make use of a vain and superstitious disposition existing in things to judge from; which disposition is not of a sufficient virtue to lead them to any real judgment. The second kind of tacit divination is, when that knowledge is sought by the disposition of those things which men effect on purpose and of their own accord, in order to come by and acquire that knowledge.

Both these kinds of tacit divination are again subdivided into several species, as are particularly mentioned by St. Thomas, _Secunda Secundae, Quaest. 95, Art. 3_; Gregory de Valentine, tom. iii. _Disput. 6. Quaest. 12. Puncto 2_; Toletus, _in Summa._ lib. iv. cap. 15; and Michael Medina, lib. ii. _de Recta in Deum fide: post Sanctum Augustinum_. lib. ii. _de Doct. Christ._ cap. 19. _et seq_.

The first of these kinds of tacit divination contains under it the following several species:--

The first species is called Genethliacal, which is when from the movement or situation of the stars, men's nativities are calculated and inquired into so far, as that from such a search they pretend to deduce the knowledge of human effects, and the contingent events that are to attend them. This Thomas Aquinas and Sixtus Quintus condemns; but I shall, with humility and submission to greater judgments, inquire hereafter into their reasons, and give my opinion why I think this no evil art; but I submit my opinion, if, after it is given, it is thought erroneous.

The second is augury, when anything is predicted from the chattering of birds, or the voice of animals, and this may be either lawful or unlawful. If it comes from natural instinct, for brutes having only a sensitive soul, have their organs subject to the disposition of the greater bodies in which they are contained, and principally of all to the celestial bodies, his augury is not amiss. For if when crows are remarked to caw, as the vulgar phrase is, more than ordinary, it is, judging according to the instinct of their nature, if we expect rain, and we may reasonably depend upon it, we shall be right if we foretell rain to be at hand. But sometimes the devils actuate those brute animals to excite vain ideas in men, contrary to what the instinct of their nature compels them to. This is superstitious and unlawful, and forbid in holy writ.

The third is aruspicy, when from the flight of birds, or any other motion of any animals whatsoever, persons pretend to have an insight and a penetrative knowledge into occult and hidden matters.

The fourth consists in omens, when, for example, a man from any words which others may have spoken on purpose, or by accident, pretends to gather a way of looking into and knowing anything of futurity.

The fifth is chiromancy, which consists in making a pretence to the knowledge of future things by the figures and the lines of the hands; and if it be by consulting the shoulder-bones of any beast, it goes by the name of spatulamancy.

* * * * *

As the first kind of divination, by a tacit invocation of the devil is divided into the five species above mentioned; so also is the second kind of tacit divination, or invocation of the devil, divided into two species by St. Thomas of Aquin.

_Secunda Secundae, questione nonagesima quinta articulo tertio_, and too tedious to insert here.

Now all these ways are by these divines counted wicked, and I set them down that people may avoid them. For how many gipsies and pretenders to chiromancy have we in London and in the country? How many that are for hydromancy, that pretend in water to show men mighty mysteries? And how many in geomancy, with their beryls and their glasses, that, if they are not under the instigation of the devil, propagate the scandal at least by being cheats, and who ought to be punished to the utmost severity, as our English laws enact? Mr. Campbell, who hates, contemns, and abhores these ways, ought, methinks, to be encouraged by their being restrained; and people of curious tempers, who always receive from him moral and good instructions, which make them happy in the conduct of life, should be animated in a public manner to consult him, in order to divert the curious itch of their humours from consulting such wicked impostors, or diabolical practisers, as too frequently abound in this nation, by reason of the inquisitive vulgar, who are more numerous in our climate, than any I ever read of.

But now to argue the case of conscience with regard to his particular practice by way of the second-sight, whether, _in foro conscientiae_, it is lawful for him to follow it, or others to consult him? The divines above mentioned having never had any notice of that faculty in all likelihood, or if they had, never mentioned it, makes it a point more difficult for me to discuss; but I think they have stated some cases, by the making of which my premises, I can deduce from all the learned men I have above quoted, a conclusion in favour of our Mr. Duncan Campbell, and of those who consult him; but my opinion shall be always corrected by those who are wiser than myself, and to whom I owe entire submission. I take leave to fix these premises from them first, and to form my argument from them afterwards in the following manner:--

First, It is allowed by all these divines, that a knowledge which one may have of future things within the order of nature, is and may be lawful.

Secondly, They imply, that where justice is not violated, it is lawful both to predict and to consult.

Thirdly, Many of them, but particularly Aureolus, puts this question: Is it lawful to go to one that deals in the black art, to persuade them to cure any innocent body that another necromancer or dealer in the black art may have maliciously afflicted and tormented with pains? And some of these casuists, particularly Aureolus, say, it is lawful on such an occasion to go to such a conjurer, because the end is not conjuration, but freeing a person from it.

But I take leave to dissent from these great men, and think they are in a double mistake; first, in stating the question, and then in making such an answer, provided the question had been stated right.

The question is founded upon this supposition, which is passed by as granted, viz., that one necromancer could release a person bewitched by another, which is absolutely false; for it is against the nature of the devil to be made an instrument to undo his own works of impiety. But admitting and not granting this to be possible, and the question to be rightly stated, why still these casuists are out in their answer. It is lawful, reply they, because the end of going to the conjurers, is not conjuration, but freeing a good person from it; but the end is not the point here to be considered, it is the medium, which is bad, that is to be considered. It is by conjuration, according to their hypothesis, the other conjuration is to be dissolved; and does not the common rule, that a man must not do evil that good may come of it, forbid this practice? And to speak my opinion plainly in that case, the friend that should consult a conjurer for that end, would be only so kind to put his own soul in danger of being guilty of hell torments, to relieve his afflicted friend from some bodily pains, which it would be a virtue in him to suffer with patience and resignation.

Others, almost all divines, indeed, agree, that it is and may be lawful to go to a conjurer that torments another, and give him money not to afflict the patient any longer; because that is only feeing him to desist from acting after his conjuring manner.

These premises thus settled, if we allow the second-sight to be inborn and inbred, and natural and common to some families, which is proved in the book; and if all that Mr. Campbell has predicted in that second-sighted way terminates with moral advice, and the profit of the consulter, and without the violation of justice to others, as the book shows all throughout; if he can relieve from witchcraft, as it seems oath is to be had he can, which no one that deals in black art can do, why then I need not draw the conclusion, every reader will do it naturally; they will avow all the strictest laws of casuistry and morality to be in favour of Mr. Campbell and his consulters.

VERSES

TO MR. CAMPBELL,

ON THE

HISTORY OF HIS LIFE AND ADVENTURES.

I court no muse amidst the tuneful throng, Thy genii, Campbell, shall inspire my song; The gentle summons every thought obeys, Wakens my soul, and tunes it all to lays. Among the thousand wonders thou hast shown, I, in a moment, am a poet grown; The rising images each other meet; Fall into verse, and dance away with feet: Now with thy Cupid and thy lamb I rove[A], Through ev'ry bloomy mead and fragrant grove. A thousand things I can myself divine, Thy little genii whispers them to mine; Beyond the grave I see thy deathless fame, The fair and young all singing Campbell's name; And Love himself--for Love and thou art friends, He joins the chorus, and his dart defends. What noisy talker can thy magic boast? Let those dull wretches try who scorn thee most. O, sacred silence! let me ever dwell, With the sweet muses, in thy lonely cell! Or else bind up, in thy eternal chain, Scandal and noise, and all that talk in vain.

M. FOWKE.

TO MRS. FOWKE,

OCCASIONED BY THE FOREGOING VERSES

Sweet nightingale! whose artful numbers show, Expressive eloquence to silent woe, Sing on, and in thy sex's power presume, By praising Campbell, to strike nations dumb.

Whene'er you sing, silent, as he, they'll stand, Speak by their eyes, grow eloquent by hand: Tongues are confusion, but as learnt by you, All but Pythagoras's doctrine's true; Campbell and he taught silence--had he heard How much thy lays to silence were preferr'd, He had recanted from thy powerful song, And justly wish'd each organ had a tongue.

But could he see, what you, in every line, Prophetic tell of Campbell's sight divine, Like Croesus's sons his loosened nerves must break, And ask the cause--or make his Campbell speak.

G. S.

* * * * *

TO MR. CAMPBELL.

Milton's immortal wish[B] you sure must feel, To point those fates which you to all reveal; If second-sight so much alarms mankind, What transports must it give to know thy mind? Thy book is but the shadow of thy worth, Like distant lights, which set some picture forth. But if the artist's skill we nearer trace, And strictly view each feature of the face, We find the charm that animates the whole, And leave the body to adore the soul. Milton's immortal wish you sure must feel, To point those fates which you to all reveal.

I. PHILIPS.

* * * * *

THE PARALLEL

TO MR. CAMPBELL.

As Denham sings, mysterious 'twas, the same Should be the prophet's and the poet's name[C]; But while the sons of genius join to praise, What thine presaging dictates to their lays, The things they sweetly sing, and you foreshow, Open the Sampson riddle to our view; Strong are thy prophecies, their numbers sweet, And with the lion combs of honey meet.

Late on fantastic cabalistic schemes, Of waking whimsies, or of feverish dreams, New cobweb threads of poetry were spun, In gaudy snares, like flies, were witlings won, Their brains entangled, and our art undone.

Pope, first, descended from a monkish race, Cheapens the charms of art, and daubs her face; From Gabalis[D] his mushroom fictions rise, Lop off his sylphs--and his Belinda[E] dies; The attending insects hover in the air, No longer than they're present is she fair; Some dart those eyebeams, which the youths beguile, And some sit conquering in a dimpling smile. Some pinch the tucker, and some smooth the smock. Some guard an upper, some a lower lock; But if these truant body-guards escape, In whip the gnomes and strait commit a rape; The curling honours of her head they seize, Hairs less in sight, or any hairs they please; But if to angry frowns her brow she bends, Upon her front some sullen gnome descends, Whisks through the furrows with its airy form, Bristles her eyebrows and 'directs the storm.'

As wide from these are Addisonian themes, As angels' thoughts are from distempered dreams; Spenser and he, to image nature, knew, Like living persons, vice and virtue drew: At once instructed and well pleas'd we read, While in sweet morals these two poets lead, No less to wisdom than to wit pretence, They led by music, but they led to sense.

But Pope scarce ever force to fancy joins, With dancing-master's feet equips his lines, Plumes empty fancy, and in tinsel shines. Or if by chance his judgment seems to lead, Where one poor moral faintly shows its head, 'Tis like a judge, that reverently drest, Peeps through the pageants at a lord may'r's feast; By starts he reasons, and seems wise by fits, Such wit's call'd wisdom, that has lost its wits.

Unnam'd by me this witling bard had been, Had not the writer's caused the reader's sin; But less by comedies and lewd romances, Are ruin'd, less by French lascivious dances, Than by such rhymers' masqueraded fancies.

From such the root of superstition grew, Whose old charms fertile, daily branch'd in new; From such chimeras first inspired, the fair The conj'rer's ring approach'd, and Jesuit's chair; Throng'd to the doors where magic rogues divin'd, And sold out _ignes fatui_ to the mind.

Wizards and Jesuits differ but in name, Both demon's envoys, and their trade the same; Weak wills they lead, and vapour'd minds command, And play the game into each others' hand; Like spiritual jugglers at the cup and ball, Rising by foolish maids, that long to fall. Some into love they damn, and some they pray, For greensick minds are caught a different way; To the same end, tho' several paths, they run, Priests to undo and maids to be undone; Some blacker charms, some whiter spells cajole, As some lick wall and some devour a coal. Here ladies, strong in vapours, see men's faces Imprinted in the conjurer's dazzling glasses, There, when, in spring time, the too praying priest, Toasts, and does something better,--to the best A spouse is promised on next Baptist's[F] feast. First some young contrite rake's enjoined to marry, Lest--madam's forc'd to squeak for't--or, miscarry: In June, the lass does to the fields repair, Where good sir Domine just took the air. When, O strange wonder! near a plaintain root, She finds a coal--and so a spouse to boot. She longs to dream and to secure the sport That very day the youth design'd--must court, He does--she struck with rapture and delight. Bespeaks her fancy--strongly--dreams at night. The yielding fair, the ravish'd youth obtains, A maid she passes--so his child's free gains, He has the pleasure, yet is sav'd the pains. Thus when priest's wench--to cure the growing evil Poor St. John Baptist must forerun the devil.

But if the ladies fall, at fall of leaf, Or in the winter--still there's fresh relief; Let her lace close four months, and if she can, St. Agnes[G] heals the breach and brings the man. Thus a lewd priest to vapour'd virgins cants, And into pimps reverts his vestal saints.

O! dire effects of mask'd impiety! And shall they, Christian muse! have aids from thee; Wilt thou, like witty heathens, lewdly given, To a Gehenna metamorphose Heaven? Wilt thou?--O no--forbid th' unhallow'd song, Such profanations to Rome's bard belong. Let one, who gods and goddesses adores, Paint them like rakes and bullies, bawds, and whores.

Our genii, Campbell, shall be all divine, Shall high o'er theirs as much distinguish'd shine, As o'er such priests or chiromancers, thine. Thine, which does future time's events command To leap to sight, and in thy presence stand; Thine, whose eyes glowing with a gifted ray, New roads of life o'er wisdom's Alps survey, And guide benighted travellers to day. Let me, for once, a daring prophet be, Mark from this hour--and poetry thoul't see Date a new era from thy book and thee; Thy book, where, thro' the stories, thou hast laid, All moral wisdom's to the mind convey'd; And thus far prophecies each page, that all Must rise by virtues, or by vices fall.

Poets shall blush to see their wit outdone, Resume their reason and assert its throne, Shall fables still for virtue's sake commend; And wit the means, shall wisdom make its end.

Who hopes to please, shall strive to please by pains, Shall gaining fame, earn hard whate'er he gains And Denham's morals join to Denham's strains. Here paint the Thames[H] 'when running to the sea Like mortal life to meet eternity.' There show both kings and subjects 'one excess, Makes both, by striving, to be greater, less.' Shall climb and sweat, and falling, climb up still, Before he gains the height of Cooper's Hill.

In Windsor Forest, if some trifling grace Gives, at first blush, the whole a pleasing face, 'Tis wit, 'tis true; but then 'tis common-place. The landscape-writer branches out a wood, Then digging hard for't finds a silver flood. Here paints the woodcock quiv'ring in the air, And there, the bounding stag and quaking hare. Describes the pheasant's scarlet-circled eye, And next the slaught'ring gun that makes him die. From common epithets that fame derives, By which his most uncommon merit lives. 'Tis true! if finest notes alone could show, (Tun'd justly high or regularly low,) That we should fame to these mere vocals give, Pope more, than we can offer, should receive. For, when some gliding river is his theme, His lines run smoother than the smoothest stream; Not so when thro' the trees fierce Boreas blows, The period blust'ring with the tempest grows. But what fools periods read for periods' sake? Such chimes improve not heads, but make 'em ache; Tho' strict in cadence on the numbers rub, Their frothy substance is whip-syllabub; With most seraphic emptiness they roll, Sound without sense, and body without soul.

Not such the bards that give you just applause, Each, from intrinsic worth, thy praises draws, Morals, in ev'ry page, where'er they look, They find divinely scatter'd thro' thy book: They find thee studious with praiseworthy strife, To smooth the future roads of human life, To help the weak, and to confirm the strong, Make our griefs vanish, and our bliss prolong, With Phineus' equal find thy large desert, And in thy praise would equal Milton's art.

Some fools, we know, in spite of nature born, Would make thee theirs, as they are mankind's scorn, For still 'tis one of truth's unerring rules, No sage can rise without a host of fools. Coxcombs, by whose eternal din o'ercome, The wise in just revenge, might wish them dumb, Say on the world your dumbness you impose, And give you organs they deserve to lose. Impose, indeed, on all the world you would, If you but held your tongue, because you could; 'Tis hard to say, if keeping silence still, In one, who, could he speak, would speak with skill, Is worse, or talk in these, who talk so ill. Why on that tongue should purposed silence dwell, Whence every word would drop an oracle? More fools of thy known foresight make a jest, For all bate greatest gifts who share the least, (As Pope calls Dryden the often to the test[I]) Such from thy pen, should Irwin's sentence[J] wait, And at the gallows own the judge of fate. Or, while with feeble impotence they rail, Write wonders on, and with the wise prevail.

Sooner shall Denham cease to be renown'd, Or Pope for Denham's sense quit empty sound, To Addison's immortal heights shall rise, Or the dwarf reach him in his native skies. Sooner shall real gipsies grow most fair, Or false ones mighty truths like thine declare, Than these poor scandal-mongers hit their aim, And blemish thine or Curll's acknowledg'd fame.

Great Nostradamus thus, his age advis'd, The mob his counsels jeer'd, some bards[K] despis'd Him still, neglecting these his genius fir'd, A king encourag'd, and the world admir'd; Greater (as times great tide increas'd) he grew, When distant ages proved what truths he knew; Thy nobler book a greater king received, Whence I predict, and claim to be believ'd, That by posterity, less fame shall be To Nostradamus granted, than to thee; Thee! whom the best of Kings does so defend, And (myself barring) the best bards commend.

H. STANHOPE.

Whitehall, June 6th, 1720.

[A] See Mr. Campbell's Life, p. 43.

[B] To see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight, PARADISE LOST.

[C] (Vates) See the Progress of Learning.

[D] See the History of the Count de Gabalis, from whence he has taken the machinery of his Rape of the Lock.

[E] Mrs. F--m--r.

[F] See the Dedication of Mr. Campbell's Life.

[G] See Mr. Campbell's Dedication.

[H] See Cooper's Hill.

[I] See many places of his notes on Homer.

[J] See Mr. Campbell's Life, page 80.

[K] Alluding to this verse, "sed cum falsa Damus, nil nisi Nostra Damus."

THE END OF DUNCAN CAMPBELL.

* * * * *

TRANSCRIBER NOTES:

Punctuation corrected without note.

Archaic spellings have been retained.

The following corrections have been made:

page iv: "two" changed to "too" (too long to dwell upon).

page 8: "dedelighted" changed to "delighted" (however, delighted extremely in this way).

page 13: "off" changed to "of" (night not be despaired of.).

page 14: "a" added for continuity (for she that can dally with a heart).

page 15: "governer" changed to "governor" (who is the governor of Uma).

page 25: "Willis" changed to "Wallis" (An Extract from Dr. Wallis).

page 36: "hiting" changed to "hitting" (that he seldom missed hitting).

page 44: "vension" changed to "venison" (to bring a side of venison to me).

page 47: "be" added for continuity (no demonstrative proof is to be had on either side).

page 143: "their" changed to "there" (and left there alone).

page 153: "know" changed to "known" (by persons of known credit).

page 180: "inbord" changed to "inborn" (if we allow the second-sight to be inborn).

page 180: "onger" changed to "longer" (not to afflict the patient any longer).