_Bu co com iudh be in Pune u be fa for fath tre fa be at lu fa tur u fa | mer ta tur i e fad u prob lu bar to ta is i iudh be i na is to ta bar i co be i na | ba do ba fa ain e fad u Puni fad u ar be iudh us tan do co taib be sni mo._ [9] It appears that the Royal Irish Academy had refused to publish these speculations in its Transactions. We are surprised they should have admitted some others of the same stamp, to which reference is made further on. [10] "Now, as Serapio was about to have added something of the same nature, the stranger, taking the words out of his mouth--I am wonderfully pleased, said he, to hear discourses upon such subjects as these; but am constrained to claim your first promise, to tell the reason wherefore now the Pythian prophetess no longer delivers her oracles in poetic numbers and measures. Upon which Theo interposing--It cannot be denied, said he, but that there have been great changes and innovations in reference to poetry and the sciences, yet it is as certain that from all antiquity oracles have been delivered in prose. For we find in Thucydides that the Lacedaemonians, desirous to know the issue of the war then entered into against the Athenians, were answered in prose." * * * "And so of Dinomenes the Sicilian, Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus and Timarchus; and, which is more, the oracular answers, according to which Lycurgus conferred the form of the Lacedaemonian commonwealth, were also so given."--_Plutarch. Moral._ [11] _Death of Wallenstein_, Act v. Scene 1, (Coleridge's Translation,) relating to his remembrances of the younger Piccolomini. [12] "_Like the dry corpse which stood upright._"--See the _Second_ Book of Kings, chap. xiii. v. 20 and 21. Thirty years ago this impressive incident was made the subject of a large altar-piece by Mr Alston, an interesting American artist, then resident in London. [13] "_African Obeah._"--Thirty-years ago it would not have been necessary to say one word of the Obi or Obeah magic; because at that time several distinguished writers (Miss Edgeworth, for instance, in her Belinda) had made use of this superstition in fictions, and because the remarkable history of Three-finger'd Jack, a story brought upon the stage, had made the superstition notorious as a fact. Now, however, so long after the case has probably passed out of the public mind, it may be proper to mention--that when an Obeah man, _i. e._, a professor of this dark collusion with human fears and human credulity, had once woven his dreadful net of ghostly terrors, and had thrown it over his selected victim, vainly did that victim flutter, struggle, languish in the meshes; unless the spells were reversed, he generally perished; and without a wound except from his own too domineering fancy.