did exist in this country, it exists no more. Perhaps too I have known one of the last cafes of the husband's being confined after the accouchement of the wife-the traditional joke Blanco White called it of the Afturians against the Gallegos-but, you are right as to more general, and if I might fo call them, innocent fuperftitions, they are fure to remain, and outlying districts, fuch as the Weald of Suffex, -mountainous diftricts, fuch as Wales, Scotland, Westmoreland and Cumberland,—these will have the most of them." He mufed with himself for a minute, and then continued. "But I confider it an ill fign to fee how eafily educated people are led aftray, because it is a fort of encouragement to the uneducated. For example, what can be more ridiculous than the whole history of Spirit-rapping, which any one who knows how to use the galvanic wire is mafter of at once,-what more injurious than appealing to the voices of the dead, as was done of old time by the Babylonian figureflinger', the heathens, and the Jew?-I am afraid, after all, and with all our increase of 1 There is reason to suspect that the magic lantern was known to the Babylonians. See Perkins's Works, ii. 462, and cf. Ezek. xxi. 21. VOL. II. U Nat. Culverwel's Light of Nature, c. xiii. P. 116. 4to. 1654. knowledge, we are no better than our fathers, and as easily gulled as they. As Decker fays in the Gull's Horn Book, 'Come, come; it would be but a bald world, but that it wears a periwig!' "And I will inftance it in this wife. Some few years ago when Hat and Table-turning (people's heads were turned before) was in the afcendant, and that fort of folly rampant, I chanced to be returning home one evening, when I heard a fhout from fome adjoining houfes inhabited by the best people to do in the neighbourhood. It was a fummer's evening, and the fhout that rent the air was, 'IT TURNS! IT TURNS!' Those good people, many of them, at least, were as much deceived as my poorest and most ignorant Parishioners, and it is from people like to these that a clever Romanist would reap his richest harvest! And after all, there is no novelty in Hat or Table-turning. There is nothing new under the fun,-and it is but a well-bound edition of the old fieve and fhears, known from Agroo in Theocritus' downwards 1 The line in Theocritus here alluded to is, "EÎTе кal 'Aypoiù τἀλαθέα, κοσκινόμαντις.” Idyll. iii. 31. See Hudibras, Part II. Canto iii. 569, and Gray's notes. On naming the real thief, the fieve with the fhears stuck in the rim, fuddenly turned round. to every old woman in the land, and of courfe not paffed by in Hudibras, who calls it, 'The oracle of fieve and fhears That turns as certain as the fpheres.' How the old Greeks would laugh at us who pretend to be fo wife in our generation! 'Scilicet in vulgus manant exempla regentum, Utque ducum lituos, fic mores, caftra fequuntur!' "Such is a fample of the Superftitions contained in my Note-Book, where you may read them for yourself by the score, and at your leifure. But, for the present, I must ftop, or fome one might fay, 'I found him garrulously given, Claudian in I Con. Stilichon. i. 24, &c. Tennyfon, The Ant. and Cleop, Moliere, Le Evening Solace, T. Jackson's Vol ii. p. 17. CHAPTER XXVIII. Ignorance corrected. "Pardon what I have spoke, For 'tis a ftudied, not a prefent thought, "Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils font, Et je crois qu'à la cour, de même qu'à la ville, "But there are hours of lonely mufing, The heart's beft feelings gather home." "Though no man be wife without much knowledge, yet a man may know many things, and not be very wife." GNORANCE is manifold, but, in our converse with the people, our own ignorance needs quite as much correction as theirs. Α paffage from Adam Bede will ferve to exemplify what I mean. "Human converfe, I think fome wife man has remarked, is not rigidly fincere. But I herewith discharge my confcience, and declare that I have had quite "Vice with fuch giant ftrides comes on amain, Feign what I will, and paint it e'er so strong, Notwithstanding the Superftitions of the People, glanced at in the preceding chapter, take them as a whole, by THE SEA-BOARD Epilogue to II. |