'I have for some time employed myself in the same practice, but with deeper knowledge and more extensive views. While my contemporaries were touching needles and raising weights, or busying themselves with inclination and variation, I have been examining those qualities of magnetism which may be applied to the accommodation and happiness of common life. I have left to inferior understandings the care of conducting the sailor through the hazards of the ocean, and reserved to myself the more difficult and illustrious province of preserving the connubial compact from violation, and setting mankind free for ever from the torments of fruitless vigilance and anxious suspicion.
'To defraud any man of his due praise is unworthy of a philosopher. I shall therefore openly confess that I owe the first hint of this inestimable secret to the Rabbi Abraham Ben Hannase, who, in his treatise of precious stones, has left this account of the magnet: "The calamita, or loadstone, that attracts iron, produces many bad fantasies in man. Women fly from this stone. If, therefore, any husband be disturbed with jealousy, and fear lest his wife converses with other men, let him lay this stone upon her while she is asleep. If she be pure she will, when she wakes, clasp her husband fondly in her arms; but if she be guilty she will fall out of bed, and run away."
'With these hopes I shall, in a short time, offer for sale magnets armed with a particular metallic composition, which concentrates their virtue and determines their agency.
'I shall sell them of different sizes, and various degrees of strength. I have some of a bulk proper to be hung at the bed's head, as scarecrows, and some so small that they may be easily concealed. Some I have ground into oval forms, to be hung at watches; and some, for the curious, I have set in wedding rings, that ladies may never want an attestation of their innocence. Some I can produce so sluggish and inert that they will not act before the third failure, and others so vigorous and animated that they exert their influence against unlawful wishes, if they have been willingly and deliberately indulged. As it is my practice honestly to tell my customers the properties of my magnets I can judge by the choice of the delicacy of their sentiments. Many have been contented to spare cost by purchasing only the lowest degree of efficacy, and all have started with terror from those which operate upon the thoughts. One young lady only fitted on a ring of the strongest energy, and declared that she scorned to separate her wishes from her acts, or allow herself to think what she was forbidden to practise.
'I am, &c., 'Hermeticus.'
CHAPTER XVII.
THACKERAY'S FAMILIARITY WITH THE WRITINGS OF THE SATIRICAL ESSAYISTS—Continued.
Characteristic Passages from the Works of the 'Early Humourists,' from Thackeray's Library, illustrated by the Author's hand with original Marginal Sketches suggested by the Text—The 'Mirror,' Edinburgh, 1779-80—Introduction—The Society in which the 'Mirror' and 'Lounger' originated—Notice of Contributors—Paragraphs and Pencillings.
Preface to the 'Mirror.'