your desires are at once accomplished. He will request you to sit down
and favour him for a few minutes with the inspection of a button which
he places in your fist--a strange sensation of drowsiness steals over
your brain--and you are instantly in the power of the sorcerer. He
will set you down wherever you please. You may either gather grapes
in the vineyards of sunny Tuscany, or take an airing, on the top of
the Pyramids, or wander in a buffalo prairie, or study the habits of
the walrus and white bear on the frozen shores of Nova Zembla. We have
ourselves seen an enthusiastic sportsman, whilst under the influence of
this magical delusion, stalk an imaginary red-deer with considerable
effect through the midst of a crowded lecture-room; and, had he been
armed with a proper _couteau-de-chasse_, we entertain little doubt that
he would have gralloched a gaping urchin who happened to be standing
in real flesh and blood close to the spot where the spectral stag
rolled over at the discharge of his walking-stick. After this, who
shall deny magic? James VI. was right after all, and we ought to be
put in possession of a cheap reprint of his treatise on Demonology.
Everybody recollects Lord Prudhoe's account of the wonder-working
magician of Cairo, who required nothing more than a few drops of ink,
and the aid of a child, to conjure up the phantoms of living persons
from any quarter of the globe. The necessity of resorting to Cairo
for a repetition of that phenomenon is now superseded. One of the
magic crystals, known to Albertus Magnus and Cornelius Agrippa, has
lately been recovered, and is now preserved in London. It has its
legendary history, known to Horace Walpole, who kept it among his other
curiosities at Strawberry Hill; but its miraculous powers seem to have
been dormant, or, at all events, to have been unobserved, until a very
recent date. In short, we are gradually working our way to a region
which lies beyond the ken of science--a circumstance which cannot fail
to give intense gratification to poets and novelists, who have been
grievously trammelled for a long time in their legitimate functions, by
the priggish scrupulousness and materialism of the votaries of exact
science and analysis. Laud we the gods therefor! We may hope once more
to see poetry disentangled from the thraldom of the Philosophical
Institutions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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