No head is a vacuum. Some, like a paltry cottage, are ill accommodated, dark, and circumscribed; others are capacious as Westminster-hall. Though none are immense, yet they are capable of immense furniture. The more room is taken up by knowledge, the less remains for credulity. The more a man is acquainted with things, the more willing to “give up the ghost.” Every town and village, within my knowledge, has been pestered with spirits, which appear in horrid forms to the imagination in the winter night—but the spirits which haunt Birmingham, are those of industry and luxury.
If we examine the whole parish, we cannot produce one old “witch;” but we have numbers of young, who exercise a powerful influence over us. Should the ladies accuse the harsh epithet, they will please to consider, I allow them, what of all things they most wish for, power—therefore the balance is in my favour.
If we pass through the planetary worlds, we shall be able to muster two conjurers, who endeavoured to “shine with the stars.” The first, John Walton, who was so busy in casting the nativity of others, that he forgot his own. Conscious of an application to himself, for the discovery of stolen goods, he employed his people to steal them. And though, for many years confined to his bed by infirmity, he could conjure away the property of others, and, for a reward, conjure it back again.
The prevalence of this evil, induced the legislature, in 1725, to make the reception of stolen goods capital. The first sacrifice to this law was the noted Jonathan Wild.
The officers of justice, in 1732, pulled Walton out of his bed, in an obscure cottage, one furlong from the town, now Brickiln-lane, carried him to prison, and from thence to the gallows—they had better have carried him to the work-house, and his followers to the anvil.
To him succeeded Francis Kimberley, the only reasoning animal, who resided at No. 60, in Dale-end, from his early youth to extreme age. A hermit in a crowd! The windows of his house were strangers to light. The shutters forgot to open; the chimney to smoke. His cellar, though amply furnished, never knew moisture.
He spent threescore years in filling six rooms with such trumpery as was just too good to be thrown away, and too bad to be kept. His life was as inoffensive as long. Instead of stealing the goods which other people used, he purchased what he could not use himself. He was not difficult in his choice of the property that entered his house; if there was bulk, he was satisfied.
His dark house, and his dark figure, corresponded with each other. The apartments, choked up with lumber, scarcely admitted his body, though of the skeleton order. Perhaps leanness is an appendage to the science, for I never knew a corpulent conjurer. His diet, regular, plain, and slender, showed at how little expense life might be sustained. His library consisted of several thousand volumes, not one of which, I believe, he ever read; having written, in characters unknown to all but himself, his name, the price, and the date, in the title-page, he laid them by for ever. The highest pitch of his erudition was the annual almanack.
He never wished to approach a woman, or be approached by one. Should the rest of men, for half a century, pay no more attention to the fair, some angelic hand might stick up a note like the arctic circle over one of our continents, “this world to be let.”
If he did not cultivate the acquaintance of the human species, the spiders, more numerous than his books, enjoyed an uninterrupted reign of quiet. The silence of the place was not broken; the broom, the book, the dust, or the web, was not disturbed. Mercury and his shirt performed their revolutions together; and Saturn changed his with his coat. He died in 1756, as conjurers usually die, unlamented.[63]