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,
A babbler in the land!""

Claudian in I Con. Stilichon. i. 24, &c.

Tennyfon, The
Talking Oak.

Ant. and Cleop,
Act ii. Sc. ii.

Moliere, Le
Mifanthrope,
A&t i. Sc. i.

Evening Solace,
Currer Bell,
Poems, p. 122.

T. Jackson's
Works, ii. 42.
Folio.

Vol ii. p. 17.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Ignorance corrected.

"Pardon what I have spoke,

For 'tis a ftudied, not a prefent thought,
By duty ruminated."

"Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils font,
J'accoutume mon âme à fouffrir qu'ils font :

Et je crois qu'à la cour, de même qu'à la ville,
Mon flegme eft philofophe autant que votre bile."

"But there are hours of lonely mufing,
Such as in evening filence come,
When, foft as birds their pinions clofing,

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
enthufiaftic movements of admiration towards
old gentlemen, who spoke the worst English,
who were occafionally fretful in their temper,
and who had never moved in a higher fphere
of influence than that of parish overseer; and
that the way in which I have come to the
conclufion that human nature is loveable,-
the way I have learnt fomething of its deep
pathos, its fublime myfteries,-has been by
living a great deal among people more or less
common-place and vulgar, of whom you
would perhaps hear nothing very furprising if
you were to inquire about them in the neigh-
bourhoods where they dwelt. Ten to one
most of the small shopkeepers in their vicinity
faw nothing at all in them." A very comfort-
ing paffage, I will venture to affert, and one
which one delights to fet against fuch lines as
thefe of Pope's.

"Vice with fuch giant ftrides comes on amain,
Invention ftrives to be before in vain ;

Feign what I will, and paint it e'er so strong,
Some rifing genius fins up to my song."

Notwithstanding the Superftitions of the People, glanced at in the preceding chapter, take them as a whole, by THE SEA-BOARD

Epilogue to
Satires, Dialogue

II.