What a splendid necromancer was Cleopatra, dissolving poor Antony, rich pearls, and the Roman Empire in the drugged cup of her beauty. We see the Duumvir now in that Alexandrian palace, under her wildering magic. The air without twinkles with the clash of impatient Roman shields, and the earnest gleamings of battle-axes, hungry to hew for him a way through living Romans up to the Capitoline hill; but he, at the feet of the sorceress, swearing oaths falser than Abigail Williams’s, in Salem court-house, tosses away from him the round globe of empire as carelessly as the ragged Egyptian harlequin in the next square flings up his cup and balls for the passing amusement of the idle crowd. Then, too, the Maid of Orleans, who subtends such a brilliant Arc in the annals of France;—but why iterate history, which is but a biographical dictionary of characters who, by the impact of enthusiasms, genius, delusive heroism, or passion-working frenzies, have given to others, individuals, communities, armies, or nations, philters of delirious patriotism, love-potions, noble discontents under real or fancied wrongs, which have whirled them on to glory, to sudden graves, to state coronations, or have lifted them up to Calvaries of glorious self-sacrifices higher than themselves, and loftier than the ages which have grown upwards as they gazed? Delusions, whether in Salem, Chicago, New York, or any other place afflicted with common councils and their accompanying symptoms, municipal debts, are as catching as measles, and lead often to eruptions just as disagreeable. The semiannual frenzies which, year after year, seize whole communities, men, women, and children, persons tall or short, fat or lean, blond or brunette, making them rush simultaneously and with hot celerity to throw away or alter their last six months’ garments, bonnets, hats, or foot-clothings, because Madame Folie in Good-for-nothing Street, Paris, thinks it for her interest that they should, and to betake themselves all to other garments, bonnets, hats, and foot-clothing of another cut and color,—cuts and colors uniform for all ages, sizes, and complexions,—are quite as unaccountable to people at a distance, and even to themselves a year after, as the Salem delusion now, when we take it up in our long historic fingers, and measure it by the rule of good, cool, common sense. The panics of the stock exchange, starting out of a rumor in some obscure corner, and swelling into tense statements and positive beliefs, which grasp even cool business brains and well-filled purses, and shake both empty on the winds, find their strange echoes back from the study of wise but momentarily deluded Cotton Mathers and the disordered judgment-seats of Salem magistrates.