Conclusion.
It is well known in history, that the rising of the Hungarian saved the falling fortunes of Maria Theresa. The enthusiasm of this sensitive and energetic people, once awakened, knew no bounds. All the country nobles, with their followers, took up arms. Croatia alone supplied twelve thousand men. Immense sums of money, to support the army, were offered by the clergy; and, out of the most distant provinces, sprang up, as the soldiers sown by the teeth of Cadmus from the earth, those countless savage hordes, who under the name of Pandours carried terror into every part of Europe. From the moment of the "insurrection," as it is called, of the Hungarian nobility, the aspect of affairs began to change. The Elector of Bavaria, who, to the grief of Maria Theresa, had received the imperial crown of Germany, so long in the possession of the House of Hapsburg, chiefly by the influence of French intrigues, under the name of Charles the Seventh, was driven from his States. England and Holland were won over to the cause of the persecuted Queen; and both, especially the former, lent her large sums. The whole British nation was interested in her favour. The English nobility, instigated by the Duchess of Marlborough, offered her a subscription collected to the amount of a hundred thousand pounds; but this sum Maria Theresa nobly refused, accepting nothing that was not granted to her by the nation in Parliament assembled. By the valour of Hungarian arms, the French were at length driven out of Bohemia; and what still more contributed to the peace shortly after obtained from a great portion of the Queen's enemies, was the result of the bloody field of Hanau, which turned out entirely to the advantage of Maria Theresa and her noble allies, and at which half of the noblesse of France was either killed or wounded.
It was shortly after this great battle, in which so many bold spirits fell on either side, that a catafalk was erected at the upper end of the middle aisle belonging to the glorious Gothic Church of St Stephen's in Vienna. The service for the dead had been performed with pomp. The priests had retired from the aisle. But still, upon the steps, covered with black cloth, and illumined from above by many wax-lights, knelt two personages. The one was a female, dressed in deep mourning, who appeared to be praying fervently. A group of attendants, both male and female, in the attire of the court mourning of the day, stood at a little distance from her. The other was an old man, in a well-worn hussar dress, who had thrown himself forward on to the upper step, upon another side of the catafalk, and had buried his face in his hands. At length the female rose, gave a last look at that dark mass, which concealed a coffin, and, within, a corpse; and then, drawing her veil over her face, moved slowly towards a side-door, followed by her attendants, with a respect paid only to a royal personage. A crowd of beggars surrounded the door, where an Imperial carriage waited; and distributing the contents of a heavy purse among them, the lady said, with broken voice,
"Pray for the soul of Otmar, Baron Bartori, who died in battle for his Queen."
MESMERIC MOUNTEBANKS.
In an age of utilitarian philosophy and materialism, we are proud to stand forth as the champion of he Invisible World. Maga and Magic are words which we cannot dissociate from one another, either in sound or in affection. The first was the mistress of our youth—our literary mother—our guide and instructress in the paths of Toryism, good-fellowship, and honour. Fain would we hope that, in maturer years, we have rendered back to the eldest-born of Buchanan some portion of the deep debt of gratitude which from our childhood upwards we have incurred. We have ever striven to comport ourselves in sublunary matters as beseemeth one who has sat at the feet of Christopher, imbibed the ethical lore of a Tickler, and received the sublimest of peptic precepts and dietetic instruction from the matchless lips of an Odoherty. Her creed is ours, and no other—the bold, the true, and the unwavering—and when we die, bewept, as we trust we shall be by many a youth and maiden of the next generation, we shall ask no better epitaph for our monument than that selected by poor John Keats, though with the alteration of a single word—"Here lieth one whose name is writ in Maga."
Magic, however—not Maga—is the theme of our present article; nor do we scruple at the very outset to proclaim ourselves a devout and fervent believer in almost every known kind of diablerie, necromancy, and witchcraft. We are aware that in the present day such confessions are very rare, and that when made by some reluctant follower of the occult faith, they are always accompanied with pusillanimous qualifications, and weak excuses for adherence to opinions which, in one shape or another, pervade the population of Christendom, and pass for current truth throughout the extensive realm of Heathenesse. So much the better. We like a fair field and no auxiliaries; and we are here to do battle for the memory and fair fame of Michael Scott, Doctor Faustus, and the renowned Cornelius Agrippa.
Sooth to say, we were born and bred long before Peter Parley had superseded the Fairy Tales, and poisoned the budding faculties of the infancy of these realms with his confounded philosophical nonsense, and his endless editions of Copernicus made Easy. Our nurserymaid, a hizzie from the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire, was a confirmed and noted believer in dreams, omens, tatie-bogles, and sundry other kinds of apparitions. Her mother was, we believe, the most noted spaewife of the district; and it was popularly understood that she had escaped at least three times, in semblance of an enormous hare, from the pursuit of the Laird of Lockhart's grews. Such at least was the explanation which Lizzy Lindsay gave, before being admitted as an inmate of our household, of the malignant persecution which doomed her for three consecutive Sundays to a rather isolated, but prominent seat in the Kirk of Dolphington Parish: nor did our worthy Lady-mother see any reason to doubt the accuracy of the statement. For was it not most natural that the daughter—however comely—and Lizzy was as strapping a lass as ever danced at a kirn—of a woman who had the evil reputation of divining surreptitious fortunes by means of the sediment of a tea-cup—of prophesying future sweethearts in exchange for hoarded sixpences—and of milking dry her neighbours' cows by aid of cantrips and an enchanted hair rope—was it not most natural, we say, that the daughter of the witch should have been looked upon with a suspicious eye by the minister, who used annually to preach four sermons in vituperation of Her of Endor, and by the Elders, whose forefathers had turned out doggedly for the Covenant, and among whom still circulated strange and fantastic tales of bodily apparitions of the Evil One to the fugitives in the muir and the wilderness—of hideous shapes, which disturbed the gathered conventicle by the sides of the lonely burn—of spells, which made the buff-coats of their adversaries impenetrable as adamant to leaden bullet or the sweep of the Cameronian steel?