And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine."
The sanguinary Jew, while he leans upon an altar, on which lies a knife inscribed "bloody," sacrifices to his revenge an unfortunate insect which he caught carelessly wandering on the environs of his head.
Beneath is Mrs. Tofts, of Godalming, well known in the annals of credulity; in the violence of her paroxysm, she breaks a dram glass with her teeth.[123]
Next to Mrs. Tofts is a possessed shoeblack, coolly clearing his stomach of a quantity of hob-nails and iron staples.[124] In his hand he holds a quart bottle, in which the model of a spirit is closely cribbed—confin'd; but the imprisoned sprite forcing the cork, mounts into the regions of air with a lighted taper in its hand.[125] The book on which our sable professor of necromancy has deposited his basket, is King James's Demonology;[126] this, with Whitfield's Journal, which lies among the implements of his art, covertly intimate the sources where he had sought and found inspiration.
The ridicule is wound up by a Turk, whom we see through a window smoking his tube of Trinidado; lifting up his eyes with astonishment at the scene, he breathes a grateful ejaculation, and thanks his Maker that he was early initiated in the divine truths of the Koran, is out of the pale of this church, and has his name engraven on the tablets of Mahomet.
As all the decorations which are displayed in this temple of credulity, superstition, and fanaticism are suitable to the congregation, the carved figures on the pulpit are worthy of the preacher. We are in the first compartment presented with the apparition which warned Sir George Villiers of the Duke of Buckingham's danger from the knife of Felton;[127] in the second, with Julius Cæsar's ghost reproaching Brutus; and in the third, with the ghost of Mrs. Veale, which appeared to Mrs. Bargrave,[128]—because a very large impression of Drelincourt upon Death lay in the bookseller's warehouse, and would not move without a marvellous relation of an apparition.
Beneath is a figure of the Tedworth drummer, who so wickedly disturbed the family of Mr. Mompesson;[129] and in the frame below, a representation of Fanny, the phantom of Cock Lane, with her hammer in her right hand. These two notable memorials of credulity are placed as a kind of headpiece to a mental thermometer, which ascertains the different degrees of heat in the blood of an enthusiast. When the liquid ascends, it rises from lukewarm to love-heat,—ecstasy! convulsion fits,—madness,—and terminates in raving, which is properly obscured by clouds, and above the ken of human comprehension. In its falling state, the progress of religious depression is most accurately marked. From low spirits it sinks to sorrow, agony, settled grief, despair, madness,—suicide! The whole rests on Wesley's Sermons, and Glanville On Witches.[130]
On the preacher's left hand, suspended to a ring inserted in a human nostril, hangs the scale of vociferation. A natural tone is at the bottom, but the speaker's tone is described by the distended mouth above the scale, crying Blood! blood! blood! and inscribed "Bull roar."