Cardan, however, describes himself as amused, in his youth, with recollected images, similar to those which I have described, in the first chapter. Before he left his bed, in the morning, he saw a succession of figures, composed of brazen rings, like links of mail, (though he had never seen mail-armour at that time,) moving, in a circular direction, upwards, from right to left, till they disappeared. Castles, houses, animals, trees, men in different dresses; trumpeters, appearing to blow their trumpets, though no sound was heard; soldiers, and landscapes; all passed before him, in circular compartments. “Videbam ego imagines diversas quasi corporum æreorum. (Constare enim videbantur ex annulis minimis, quales sunt loricarum, cum tamen loricas nunquam eousque vidissem) ab imo lecti angulo dextro ascendentes per semicirculum, lenté et in sinistrum occidentes, ut prorsus non apparerenti Areium, domorum, animalium, equorum cum equitibus, herbarum, arborum, instrumentorum musicorum, hominum diversorum habituum, vestiumque variarum, tubicines præcipue cum tubis quasi sonantibus, nulla tamen vox aut sonus exandiebatur: præterea milites, populos, arva, formasque corporum usque ad hune diem mihi invisas: lucos et sylvas, aliaque quorum non memini, quandoque multarum rerum congeriem simul irruentium, non tamen ut se confunderent, sed ut ut properarent. Erant autem perspicua illa, sed non ita ut proinde esset, ac si non adessent, nec densa ut oculo pervia non essent. Sed ipsi circuli opaci erant spatia prorsus perspicua.”[8] Ben Jonson, also, falls under this description, from the _Heads of Conversation_, published by the executors of Drummond of Hawthornden, who have deprived posterity of Drummond’s original account of these interesting interviews. Jonson told him, that “when the king came to England, about the time that the plague was in London, he being in the country, at Sir Robert Cotton’s house with old Cambden, he saw in a vision his eldest son, then a young child and at London, appear unto him with the mark of a bloody cross on his forehead, as if it had been cut with a sword, at which amazed he prayed unto God, and in the morning he came unto Mr. Cambden’s chamber to tell him, who persuaded him it was but an apprehension, at which he should not be dejected. In the mean time there came letters from his wife of the death of that boy in the plague. He appeared to him, he said, of a manly shape, and of that growth he thinks he shall be at the resurrection.” “He said, that he had spent a whole night in looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians fight in his imagination.”[9] Such sights as youthful poets dream, On summer’s eve, by haunted stream!