What could have induced simple-minded Mr. De Loutherbourg to put trust in this arch-juggler? Can it have been that from the painter's native Strasbourg had come to him unimpeachable accounts of Cagliostro's feats during his stay there, which had preceded his nefarious expedition to Paris? But the artist is ever excitable, receptive, impressible--the ready prey of the dealer in illusion and trickery. De Loutherbourg is soon at the feet of the quack Gamaliel; soon he is proclaiming himself an inspired physician, practising mesmerism. Cosway and his wife declared themselves clairvoyants. Other painters of the period were dreaming dreams and seeing visions. Nor was it only the artist world that took up with, and made much of, Count Cagliostro and his strange doings. Wiser people than Mr. De Loutherbourg were led astray by the mountebank, though they did not wander so far from the paths of reason and right, nor publish so glaringly the fact of their betrayal into error. Cagliostro was the rage of the hour. The disciples of Dr. Mesmer were without number. It was in ridicule of general rather than class credulity that Mrs. Inchbald wrote (or adapted) her comedy of _Animal Magnetism_, produced on the stage of Covent Garden in 1788. A curious fanatical pamphlet, by one Mary Pratt, of Portland Street, Marylebone, was published in 1789. It was entitled, _A List of Curses performed by Mr. and Mrs. de Loutherbourg, of Hammersmith Terrace, without Medicine: By a Lover of the Lamb of God_, and was dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury in very high-flown terms. Mr. De Loutherbourg was described as 'a gentleman of superior abilities, well known in the scientific and polite assemblies for his brilliancy of talents as a philosopher and painter,' who, with his wife, had been made proper recipients of the 'divine manuductions,' and gifted with power 'to diffuse healing to the afflicted; whether deaf, dumb, lame, halt, or blind.' The Archbishop was therefore entreated to compose a form of prayer to be used in all churches and chapels, that nothing might prevent the inestimable power of the De Loutherbourgs from having its free course, and to order public thanksgiving to be offered up for the same. In her preface, Mrs. Pratt stated that her pamphlet had been published without the consent of Mr. De Loutherbourg, and that he had reprimanded her on account of it, and enjoined her positively to suppress it; but that on mature reflection she had considered it more advisable to offend an individual rather than permit thousands of her fellow-creatures to remain strangers to the precious gifts of the painter. 'I judged by my own private feelings,' she writes, 'that had I any relative either deaf, dumb, blind, or lame, how thankful I should be to find a cure (_more especially gratis_); therefore I suffered the pamphlet to be sold, in hopes that by circulating these most solemn truths, many poor afflicted people might come and be healed.'