An abbé sits to decide the wager and say who was to be considered the best Cupid catcher. First, the Duchesse maintains that it is the man who holds none above his lady-love save his God and his king. The Marquise does not care for saint and loyalist, so much as a man of pure thoughts and fine deeds who can play the paladin. The Comtesse chooses any wretch, any poor outcast, who would look to her as his sole saviour, and stretch his arms to her as love’s ultimate goal. The abbé had to reflect awhile. He took a pinch of snuff to clear his brain, and then, after deliberation, said—
“The love which to one, and one only, has reference,
Seems terribly like what perhaps gains God’s preference.”
White Witchcraft. (Asolando, 1889.) Magic is defined to be of two kinds—Divine and evil. Divine is white magic; black magic is of the devil. Amongst the ancients magic was considered a Divine science, which led to a participation in the attributes of Divinity itself. Philo-Judæus, De Specialibus Legibus, says: “It unveils the operations of Nature, and leads to the contemplation of celestial powers.” When magic became degraded into sorcery it was naturally abhorred by all the world, and the evil reputation attaching to the word, even at the present day, must be attributed to the fact that white witchcraft had a singular affinity for the black arts. Perhaps what is now termed “science” expresses all that was originally intended by the term white magic. The men of science of the past were not unacquainted with black arts, according to their enemies. Hence Pietro d’Abano, John of Halberstadt, Cornelius Agrippa, and other learned men of the middle ages, incurred the hatred of the clergy. Paracelsus is made expressly by Browning to abjure “black arts” in his struggles for knowledge. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, speaks of white witches. He says (Part II., sec. i.): “Sorcerers are too common: cunning men, wizards, and white-witches, as they call them, in every village, which, if they be sought to, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind—servatores, in Latin; and they have commonly St. Catherine’s wheel printed in the roof of their mouth, or in some part about them.”
[The Poem.] One says if he could play Jupiter for once, and had the power to turn his friend into an animal, he would decree that she should become a fox. The lady, if invested with the same power, would turn him into a toad. He bids Canidia say her worst about him when reduced to this condition. The Canidia referred to is the sorceress of Naples in Horace, who could bring the moon from heaven. The witch boasts of her power in this respect:—
“Meæque terra cedit insolentiæ.
(Ut ipse nosti curiosus) et Polo
An quæ movere cereas imagines,
Diripere Lunam.”
(Horat., Canid. Epod., xvii. 75, etc.)
Hudibras mentions this (Part II., 3);—
“Your ancient conjurors were wont
To make her (the moon) from her sphere dismount,
And to their incantations stoop.”
The Zoophilist for July 1891 gives the following, from Mrs. Orr’s Life of Browning, as the origin of the reference to the toad in the poem: “About the year 1835, when Mr. Browning’s parents removed to Hatcham, the young poet found a humble friend “in the form of a toad, which became so much attached to him that it would follow him as he walked. He visited it daily, where it burrowed under a white rose tree, announcing himself by a pinch of gravel dropped into its hole; and the creature would crawl forth, allow its head to be gently tickled, and reward the act with that loving glance of the soft, full eyes which Mr. Browning has recalled in one of the poems of Asolando.” The lines are:—
“He’s loathsome, I allow;
There may or may not lurk a pearl beneath his puckered brow;
But see his eyes that follow mine—love lasts there, anyhow.”