Her ennemies, if any were";
Conf. Amant. bk. v. (ii. 195).
'The Oriental writers relate that Giamschid, one of their kings, the Solomon of the Persians and their Alexander the Great, possessed among his inestimable treasures cups, globes, and mirrors, of metal, glass, and crystal, by means of which he and his people knew all natural as well as supernatural things. The title of an Arabian book translated from the Persian is—The Mirror which reflects the World. There is this passage in an ancient Turkish poet: "When I am purified by the light of heaven, my soul will become the mirror of the world, in which I shall discern all abstruse secrets." Monsieur Herbelot is of opinion that the Orientals took these notions from the patriarch Joseph's cup of divination and Nestor's cup in Homer, on which all nature was symbolically represented. Our great countryman Roger Bacon, in his Opus Majus, a work entirely formed on the Aristotelic and Arabian philosophy, describes a variety of Specula, and explains their construction and uses. This is the most curious and extraordinary part of Bacon's book, which was written about the year 1270. Bacon's optic tube, with which he pretended to see future events, was famous in his age, and long afterwards, and chiefly contributed to give him the name of a magician. This art, with others of the experimental kind, the philosophers of those times were fond of adapting to the purposes of thaumaturgy; and there is much occult and chimerical speculation in the discoveries which Bacon affects to have made from optical experiments. He asserts (and I am obliged to cite the passage in his own mysterious expressions) "omnia sciri per Perspectivam, quoniam omnes actiones rerum fiunt secundum specierum et virtutum multiplicationem ab agentibus hujus mundi in materias patientes," &c.[[146]] Spenser feigns that the magician Merlin made a glassy globe, and presented it to King Ryence, which showed the approach of enemies, and discovered treasons (F. Q. iii. 2. 21). This fiction, which exactly corresponds with Chaucer's Mirror, Spenser borrowed from some romance, perhaps of King Arthur, fraught with Oriental fancy. From the same sources came a like fiction of Camoens in the Lusiad (canto x), where a globe is shown to Vasco de Gama, representing the universal fabric or system of the world, in which he sees future kingdoms and future events. The Spanish historians report an American tradition, but more probably invented by themselves, and built on the Saracen fables in which they were so conversant. They pretended that some years before the Spaniards entered Mexico, the inhabitants caught a monstrous fowl, of unusual magnitude and shape, on the lake of Mexico. In the crown of the head of this wonderful bird there was a mirror or plate of glass, in which the Mexicans saw their future invaders the Spaniards, and all the disasters which afterwards happened to their kingdom. These superstitions remained, even in the doctrines of philosophers, long after the darker ages. Cornelius Agrippa, a learned physician of Cologne about the year 1520, and author of a famous book on the Vanity of the Sciences, mentions a species of mirror which exhibited the form of persons absent, at command. In one of these he is said to have shown to the poetical Earl of Surrey the image of his mistress, the beautiful Geraldine, sick and reposing on a couch. Nearly allied to this was the infatuation of seeing things in a beryl, which was very popular in the reign of James I, and is alluded to by Shakespeare....
'The Naked Sword, another of the gifts presented by the strange knight to Cambuscan, endued with medical virtues, and so hard as to pierce the most solid armour, is likewise an Arabian idea. It was suggested by their skill in medicine, by which they affected to communicate healing qualities to various substances, and by their knowledge of tempering iron and hardening all kinds of metal. It is the classical spear of Peleus, perhaps originally fabricated in the same regions of fancy; see ll. 236-246.
'The sword which Berni, in the Orlando Innamorato, gives to the hero Ruggiero, is tempered by much the same sort of magic:—
"Il brando con tal arte fabbricato,
Che taglia incanto, ed ogni fatagione[[147]]";
Orl. Innamor. ii. 17, st. 5.
So also his continuator Ariosto:—
"Non vale incanto, ov'ella mette il taglio[[148]]";