William Bond - The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campell

You must presently after go to bed. The aforesaid Mr. Aubrey knew two gentlewomen that did thus when they were young maids, and they had dreams of those that married them.

But a great many of the wittiest part of your sex laugh at these common superstitions; but then they are apt to run into worse: they give themselves up to the reading of the cabalistical systems of sylphs, and gnomes, and mandrakes, which are very wicked and delusive imaginations.

I would not have you imagine, ladies, that I impute these things as infirmities and frailties peculiar to your sex. No; men, and great men too, and scholars, and even statesmen, and princes themselves, have been tainted with superstitions, and where they infect the minds of such great personages, they make the deeper impression, according to the stronger and more manly ideas they have of them. Their greater degree of strength in the intellect only subjects them to greater weaknesses; such was even the great Paracelsus, the wonder and miracle of learning in the age wherein he lived, and such were all his followers, scholars, statesmen, divines, and princes, that are talismanists.

These talismans that Paracelsus pretends to owe to the excogitation and invention of honest art, seem to me to be of a very diabolical nature, and to owe their rise to being dedicated by the author to the heathen gods. Thus the cabalists pretending to a vast penetration into arts and sciences, though all their thoughts are chimeras and extravagancies, unless they be helped by preternatural means, say they have found out the several methods appropriated to the several planets. They have appropriated gold to the sun on the Sunday, silver to the moon on the Monday, iron to Mars on the Tuesday, quicksilver to Mercury on the Wednesday, tin to Jupiter on the Thursday, copper or brass to Venus on the Friday, and lead to Saturn on the Saturday. The methods they take in forming these talismans are too long to dwell upon here. But the properties which they pretend belong to them are, that the first talisman or seal of the sun will make a man beloved by all princes and potentates, and cause him to abound with all the riches his heart can wish. The second preserves travellers from danger, and is favourable to merchants, tradesmen, and workmen. The third carries destruction to any place where it is put: and it is said that a certain great minister of state ordered one of these to be carried into England in the times of the revolution of government caused by Oliver Cromwell. The fourth they pretend cures fevers and other diseases; and if it be put under the bolster, it makes the proprietor have true dreams, in which he sees all he desires to know. The fifth, according to them, renders a man lucky and fortunate in all his businesses and undertakings. It dissipates 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,

Of all the writings delivered in an historical manner to the world, none certainly were ever held in greater esteem than those which give us the lives of distinguished private men at full length; and, as I may say, to the life. Such curious fragments of biography are the rarities which great men seek after with eager industry, and when found, prize them as the chief jewels and ornaments that enrich their libraries, and deservedly; for they are the beauties of the greatest men's lives handed down by way of example or instruction to posterity, and commonly handed down likewise by the greatest men. Since, therefore, persons distinguished for merit in one kind or other are the constant subjects of such discourses, and the most elegant writers of each age have been usually the only authors who choose upon such subjects to employ their pens, and since persons of the highest rank and dignity, and genii of the most refined and delicate relish, are frequently curious enough to be the readers of them, and to esteem them the most valuable pieces in a whole collection of learned works; it is a wonder to me that when any man's life has something in it peculiarly great and remarkable in its kind, it should not move some more skilful writer than myself to give the public a taste of it, because it must be at least vastly entertaining, if it be not, which is next to impossible, immensely instructive and profitable withal.

If ever the life of any man under the sun was remarkable, this Mr. Duncan Campbell's, which I am going to treat upon, is so to a very eminent degree.

It affords such variety of incidents, and is accompanied with such diversity of circumstances, that it includes within it what must yield entire satisfaction to the most learned, and admiration to persons of a moderate understanding. The prince and the peasant will have their several ends of worthy delight in reading it; and Mr. Campbell's life is of that extent, that it concerns and collects, as I may say, within itself, every station of life in the universe. Besides, there is a demand in almost every page that relates any new act of his, for the finest and closest disquisitions that learning can make upon human nature, to account how those acts could be done by him. For he daily practised, and still practises, those things naturally, which puts art to the rack to find out how nature can so operate in him; and his fleshly body, by these operations, is a living practical system, or body of new philosophy, which exceeds even all those that have hitherto been compounded by the labour and art of many ages.