Were I Guizot, or Florian,
Or "Oxford Historian,"
Or "Orator" like Dr Cremer,
In my grand paragraphs,
You should have all the laughs
Of the mob as they rushed from the steamer!
LETTERS ON THE TRUTHS CONTAINED IN POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.
II.—VAMPYRISM.
Dear Archy,—In acknowledging my former letter, you express an eager desire to learn, as you phrase it, "all about vampyrs, if there ever were such things." I will not delay satisfying your curiosity, wondering only how my friend, your late tutor, Mr H., should have left you in a state of uncertainty upon a point on which, in my time, schoolboys many years your juniors had fully made up their minds.
"Were there ever such things as vampyrs?" tantamne rem tam negligenter? I turn to the learned pages of Horst for a luminous and precise definition of the destructive and mysterious beings, whose existence you have ventured to consider problematical.
"A vampyr is a dead body, which continues to live in the grave, which it leaves, however, by night, for the purpose of sucking the blood of the living, whereby it is nourished, and preserved in good condition, instead of becoming decomposed like other dead bodies."
Upon my word, you really deserve—Since Mr George Combe has clearly shown in his admirable work "On the Constitution of Man, and its adaptation to the world around him," that ignorance is a statutable crime before Nature, and punishable, and punished by the laws of Providence,—you deserve, I say, unless you contrive to make Mr H. your substitute, which I think would be just, yourself to be the subject of the nocturnal visit of a vampyr. Your scepticism will abate pretty considerably, when you see him stealthily entering your room, yet are powerless under the fascination of his fixed and leaden eye—when you are conscious, as you lie motionless with terror, of his nearer and nearer approach,—when you feel his face, fresh with the smell of the grave, bent over your throat, while his keen teeth make a fine incision in your jugular, preparatively to his commencing his plain, but nutritive repast.
You would look a little paler the next morning, but that would be all for the moment; for Fischer informs us, that the bite of a vampyr leaves in general no mark upon the person. But he fearfully adds, "it (the bite) is nevertheless speedily fatal, unless the bitten person protect himself by eating some of the earth from the grave of the vampyr, and smearing himself with his blood." Unfortunately, indeed, these measures are only of temporary use. Fischer adds, "if through these precautions the life of the victim be prolonged for a period, sooner or later he ends with becoming a vampyr himself; that is to say, he dies, and is buried, but continues to lead a vampyr life in the grave, nourishing himself by infecting others, and promiscuously propagating vampyrism."
Now this is no romancer's dream. It is a succinct account of a superstition, which to this day survives in the east of Europe, where little more than a century ago it was frightfully prevalent. At that epoch, vampyrism spread like, an epidemic pestilence through Servia and Wallachia, causing innumerable deaths, and disturbing all the land with apprehension of the mysterious visitation, against which no one felt his life secure.