At the siege of Breda, in 1625, when fatigue and abstinence had well nigh reduced the garrison to prostration and despair, the Prince of Orange practised this pious fraud on his soldiers:—He pretended to have obtained a charmed liquor, so concentrated, that (on the principles of homœopathy) four drops would saturate a gallon of water with restorative virtues; and with so much skill was this administered by the physicians, that a general restoration was speedily effected.
You remember, Astrophel, the temptation of Diocletian. From Flavius Vopiscus we learn, that he was paying the Druidess of Brabant, with whom he lodged. “When I am emperor,” he said, “I will be more generous.” “Nay,” said the Druidess, “you shall be emperor, when you have killed the BOAR.” He hunted and killed boars incessantly, but the purple was not offered to him. At length, the Emperor Numerianus was murdered by Arrius Aper. This was the eventful moment, and, transfixing the heart of Aper with his sword, he said, “I have slain the boar!” and the imperial crown was his.
Is not this, too, the counterpart of that seeming prophecy of the Weird Sisters, which made Macbeth a murderer and a king?
There was an enchanted stone at Scone, in Scotland, the palladium of Scottish liberty, for it was believed that the lord of that spot on which the stone lay, should bear sovereign sway. King Edward bore this talisman away in triumph; and Scotland, depressed by its loss, became a vassal of the English crown.
And this faith may invest the merest trifle with a spell. Sir Matthew Hale was presiding in his court on the trial of a witch. She had cured many diseases by a charm in her possession; and the evidence seemed conclusive of her guilt. But when the judge himself looked on this charm, behold! it was a scrap of paper, inscribed with a Latin sentence, which, in default of money, he himself, while on the circuit, had given many years before, in a merry mood, to mine host, by way of reckoning.
Among the many analogies to this story in ancient times, there was the potent poison-charm or antidote of Mithridates, King of Pontus. Its effect was supreme. And what its composition? twenty leaves of rue, one grain of salt, two nuts, and two dried figs!
Now you will remember that the wizard and the ministers of these charms, even among savages, were also their physicians, and, among pagans and papists, their priests. It is clear that the sensitiveness of mind and body under disease, when the first were consulted, and under the influence of superstitious fear, instilled by the priesthood, rendered them impressible to the most trifling causes.
Even in minds of superior natural energy, from the instilment of superstitious ideas in infancy, a blind faith will often become paramount. Such a mind, and so influenced, was Byron’s; and on such a faith he once stole an agate bead from a lady, who had told him it was an antidote to love. It failed: had it not, Byron might have been a happier man; but the world would have been ’reft of poesy, the brightest, yet the darkest, that ever flashed on the heart and mind of man.
Sir Humphrey Davy, you may recollect, “knew a man of very high dignity, who never went out shooting without a bittern’s claw fastened to his button-hole by a riband, which he thought ensured him good luck.”
To illustrate the innocence of your gipsy, Castaly, hear this story.