When Faustina, the gay bride of Marc Antonius was rapturously enamoured with an histrionic favourite, she was only cured of her folly by a potion in which some of the comedian's blood had been introduced. Petrarch relates of Charlemagne, that this monarch was so fondly attached to a fair lady, that after her death he carried about her embalmed body in a superb coffin, until a venerable and learned bishop, who very wisely thought that a living beauty was preferable to the remains of a departed one, rebuked his sovereign for his irreligious and unnatural propensities, and revealed to him the important secret of his love arising from a charm that lay under the dead woman's tongue. Whereupon the bishop went to the corpse, and drew from it a ring, which the emperor had scarcely looked upon when he abhorred the former object of his attachment, and felt such an extraordinary fancy for the bishop that he could not dispense with his presence for a single moment, until the good prelate was so obseded with royal favour that he cast the ring into a lake. From that moment Charlemagne (his historian continues) "neglected all public business, and went to live in the middle of a fen in the vicinity of Aix, where he built a temple, near which he was finally buried." St. Jerome, in the Life of Hilarius, mentions a young man who so bephiltered a maiden that she fell desperately in love with him; and Sigismundus Schereczius, in his chapter _De Hirco Nocturno_, affirms that "unchaste women, by the help of these witches, the devil's kitchen-maids, have their lovers brought to them during the night, and carried back again, by a phantom flying in the air in the likeness of a goat." "I have heard," he adds, "divers confess that they have been so carried on a goat's back to their sweethearts many miles in a night." These wonderful potions were made of strange ingredients, for amongst them we find a man's blood chemically prepared, mandrake roots, dead men's clothes, candles, a certain hair in a wolf's tail, a swallow's heart, dust of a dove's heart, tongues of vipers, brains of a jackass, pebbles found in an eagle's nest, together with "_palliola quibus infantes obvoluti nascuntur_, _funis strangulati hominis_," &c. &c. &c. Cleghorn, in his History of Minorca, tells us that water in which a hedgehog has been allowed to run into corruption, was supposed to be possessed of similar exciting powers; and a pulverized bit of a caul, scrapings of nails, and chopped hair, are to this hour deemed equally effectual to obtain these desirable ends. Notwithstanding all these absurdities, it is undoubtedly true that certain articles of food have been considered as endowed with aphrodisiac properties; fish of various kinds, the mollusca and testaceous animals more especially. Juvenal attributes this quality to oysters, which, in this respect, with cockles and muscles have become vulgarly proverbial: Grandia quae mediis jam noctibus ostrea mordet.