Dr. Mead tells us of an Oxford student, who ordered the passing bell to be rung for him, and went himself to the belfry to instruct the ringers. He returned to his bed only to die.
A Bourbon prince thought himself dead, and refused to eat until his friends invited him to dine with Turenne and other French heroes long since departed.
There was a tradesman who thought he was a seven-shilling piece, and advertised himself thus: “If my wife presents me for payment, don’t change me.” Accuse me not of transatlantic plagiarism.
Bishop Warburton tells us of a man who thought himself a goose pie; and Dr. Ferriday, of Manchester, had a patient who thought he had swallowed the devil.
So indeed thought Luther. As in Hudibras,
“Did not the devil appear to Martin
Luther in Germany for certain?”
In Paris there lived a man who thought he had with others been guillotined, and when Napoleon was emperor, their heads were all restored, but in the scramble he got the wrong one.
And there is the “Visitor of Phantaste” in the old play of “Lingua,” who exclaims: “No marvel, for when I beheld my fingers, I saw they were as transparent as glass.”
You perceive that the illusions of Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” are not all fictions: the maids who fancied they were turned into bottles, were not more in error than these philosophers with their maladie imaginaire.