With Brinsley Sheridan, Friday was a sort of holiday; neither journeys were undertaken, nor new plays allowed to be produced, on that day.
I presume you were ashamed to adduce ornithoscopy, or the divination by birds, as an illustration. Do you forget the mystic influence of three crows on man’s destiny? But I will tell you an oriental fable; how an accomplished Jew, named Mosollam, puzzled an augur, by shooting a beautiful bird, from which the augur was about to prophecy on the fate of an expedition. “Why,” said Mosollam, “did not the bird foreknow the fate which awaited it? why did it not fly away—or why come at all?”
Astr. I believe the augur did or might answer, that “a prophet may be ordained to tell the fate of nations, but not his own.”
Ev. Another vague supposition, Astrophel: there is much virtue in these may be’s.
I have listened to your legends, and you will now listen to me, while I presume to illustrate my own proofs, searching for my causes in the beautiful eccentricities of nature alone; and a scholar like yourself, Astrophel, with whom I have so often chopped Oxford logic, will grant it is a precept in philosophy not to seek for more causes, than the explanation of the fact requires.
On this scroll I have sketched an arrangement of phantoms or ghosts, in two grand classes.
GHOSTS OF THE MIND’S EYE,
or
PHANTASMA.