The history of the life and adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell : $b a gentleman, who, tho' deaf and dumb, writes down any stranger's name at first sight, with their future contingencies of fortune
General
The history of the life and adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell : $b a gentleman, who, tho' deaf and dumb, writes down any stranger's name at first sight, with their future contingencies of fortune
Campbell, Duncan, 1680?-1730; Deaf people -- Great Britain -- Biography; Occultism -- Early works to 1900; Prophets -- Great Britain -- Biography
melancholy, drives away all importunate cares, and banishes panic fears
from the mind. The sixth, by being put into the liquor which any one
drinks, reconciles mortal enemies, makes them intimate friends: it gains
the love of all women, and renders the proprietor very dexterous in the
art of music. The seventh makes women be easily brought to bed without
pain; and if a horseman carries it in his left boot, himself and his
horse become invulnerable.
This, Paracelsus and his learned followers say, is owing to the
influence of the stars; but I cannot help arguing these acts of
diabolical impiety. But as these arts are rarely known among the
middling part of mankind, I shall neither open their mysteries, nor
inveigh against them any farther.
The persons who are most to be avoided are your ordinary fortune-telling
women and men about this town, whose houses ought to be avoided as a
plague or a pestilence, either because they are cheats and impostors, or
because they deal with black arts, none of them that I know having any
pretensions to the gift of a second-sight. Among many, a few of the most
notorious that I can call to mind now, are as follow. The first and
chiefest of these mischievous fortune-tellers is a woman that does not
live far from the Old Bailey. And truly the justice hall in that place
is the properest place for her to appear at, where, if she was tried for
pretending to give charms written upon paper with odd scrawls, which she
calls figures, she would be probably convicted, and very justly
condemned, and doomed to have her last journey from the Old Bailey to
Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The other is a fellow that lives in
Moorfields, in which place those who go to consult him ought to live all
their lifetimes, at the famous palaces of the senseless men: he is the
successor of the famous Dr. Trotter, whose widow he married; and from
being a tailor and patching men's garments, he now cuts flourishes with
his shears upon parchment, considers the heavens as a garment, and from
the spangles thereupon he calculates nativities, and sets up for a very
profound astrologer. The third is an ignorant fellow that caws out
strange predictions in Crow-alley, of whose croaking noise I shall here
take no notice, he having been sufficiently mauled in the most ingenious
Spectators. These and such counterfeits as these, I would desire all
gentlemen and ladies to avoid. The only two really learned men that I
ever knew in the art of astrology, were my good friends Dr. Williams and
Mr. Gadbury; and I thought it necessary to pay this esteem to their
names, let the world judge of them what it will. I will here say no
more, nor hinder you any longer, gentlemen and ladies, from the
diversion which my good old friend, who is now departed this life, has
prepared for you in his book, which a young gentleman of my acquaintance
revised, and only subscribe myself,
Yours, &c.,
DUNCAN CAMPBELL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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