'Sciences,' by M. Eusebe Salverte, and in the Letters on Natu'ral Magic,' by Sir David Brewster, an attempt has been made to break the rod of the magician, to desecrate his implements and his processes, and to admit the uninitiated footstep within the verge of his mystic circle. Those who were formerly defrauded by his impostures, might now enrich themselves by his art; and those who once dreaded his power, might now wield his sceptre.

But though the physics of necromancy were thus unmasked, its ethics still remained to be explored. In the history of human irrationality, two classes of impostors of very different characters present themselves to our notice, those who wilfully deluded their species, and those who permitted their species to delude themselves. The first of these classes consisted of the selfish tyrants who upheld their unnatural power by systematic delusion; and of the grovelling mountebanks who quenched their avaricious thirst at the fountains of credulity and ignorance. The second class comprehended spirits of a nobler mould. It embraced the fanciful speculators whom the love of fame and of truth urged onward in a fruitless research; and those great lights of knowledge and of virtue, who, while they stood forward as the landmarks of the age in which they lived, had neither the intellectual nor the moral courage to divest themselves of the supernatural lustre with which the ignorance of the vulgar had encircled them.

The thrones and shrines which delusion once sustained, even in the civilized quarter of the globe, are for ever fallen; and that civil and religious liberty which in past ages was kept down by the marvellous exhibitions of science to the senses, is now maintained by its application to the reason of man. The charlatans, whether they be moral or physical, form a race which is never extinct. They migrate to the different zones of the social system; and though they change their place, and their object, and their victims, yet their character and their motives remain the same. The philosophical mind, therefore, is not disposed to study either of these varieties of impostors ;-but the other two families, who compose the second class, are objects of paramount interest. The eccentricities, and even the obliquities of great minds, merit the scrutiny of the metaphysician and the moralist; and they derive a peculiar interest from the state of society in which they are exhibited. Had Cardan and Cornelius Agrippa lived in modern times, their vanity and self-importance would have been checked by the forms of society; and their innocent pretensions would have disappeared, even if they were displayed, amid the blaze of their genius and knowledge. But educated in dark times, and nurtured in the midst of ignorance and supersti

tion, their genius and their character bore the impress of their age. The dampness of a Boeotian climate must have tarnished the most polished mind, and the foul precipitate of so malarious an atmosphere, must have infected every thing upon which it fell. Had history transmitted to us correct details of the conduct of the leading alchymists and scientific magicians of the dark ages, or had we possessed biographical accounts of them written by themselves, we should have been able to analyze their actions and their opinions, and trace them to the ordinary principles by which the human mind is in every age influenced and directed; but when a great man has once become an object either of interest or of wonder, and, still more, when he is considered as the possessor of knowledge and skill which transcend the capacity of the age, he is soon transformed into the hero of romance. His deeds are exaggerated, his powers overrated; and he becomes the subject of idle legends, which acquire a firmer hold on credulity from the slight sprinkling of truth with which they are seasoned. To disclaim the possession of lofty attributes, is not the practice of great men. But even this species of humility, when it is exercised, would defeat its object. It would call forth a deeper homage, and would only establish the demigod more firmly on his shrine.

The history of learning furnishes us with many examples of this species of delusion, in which a great mind submits itself to vulgar adulation, and renounces unwillingly, if it renounces at all, the unenviable reputation of supernatural agency. In cases where self-interest and ambition are the basis of this peculiarity of temperament, and in an age when the conjurer and the alchymist were the companions, and even the idols of princes, it is easy to follow out the process by which a gifted sage retains his ascendency among the ignorant. The hecatomb which is sacrificed to the magician, he receives as an oblation to his science; and, conscious of possessing real endowments, the idol devours the meats that are offered him, without analyzing the motives and expectations under which he is fed.

But even when the idolater and his god are not placed in this transverse relation, the love of power or of notoriety is sufficient to induce good men to lend a too willing ear to vulgar testimony in favour of themselves; and in our own times it is not common to repudiate the unmerited cheers of a popular assembly, or to offer a contradiction to fictitious tales, which record our talents or our courage, our charity or our piety.

The conduct of the scientific alchymists of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, presents to the metaphysician and the moralist a problem of very difficult solution. When we consider that

a gas, a fluid, or a solid, may consist of the very same ingredients in different proportions ;-that a virulent poison may differ from the most wholesome food, only in the difference of quantity of the very same elements;-that gold and silver, and lead and mercury, and indeed all the metals, may be extracted from transparent crystals, which scarcely differ in their appearance from a piece of common salt or a bit of sugarcandy;—and that diamond is nothing more than charcoal ;-we need not greatly wonder at the extravagance of the expectations that the precious metals, and the noblest gems, may be procured from the basest materials. These expectations, too, must have been often raised by the strange results of their unremitted experiments. The most ignorant compounder of simples could not fail to witness the magical transformation of chemical actions; and every new product must have added to the probability that the tempting doublets of gold and silver might be thrown from the dice-box with which he was gambling.

But when these precious metals were actually found in lead and copper, which are often alloyed with them, by the action of powerful reagents, it was natural to suppose that they had been actually formed during the process; and men of well-regulated minds even might have thus been led to embark in new adventures to procure a more copious supply, without any insult having been offered to sober reason, or any injury inflicted on sound morality.

When an ardent and ambitious mind, however, is once dazzled with the fascination of some lofty pursuit, where gold is the object, or fame the impulse, it is by no means an easy step to pause in a doubtful career, and to make a voluntary shipwreck of the reputation which has been staked. Hope still cheers the aspirant from failure to failure, till the loss of fortune, and the decay of credit, disturb the serenity of his mind, and hurry him on to the last resource of baffled ingenuity and disappointed ambition. The philosopher thus becomes an impostor; he abandons himself to dissimulation; and by the pretended transmutation of the baser metals into gold, or the discovery of the philosopher's stone, he attempts to sustain his sinking reputation, and recover the fortune he has lost. The communication of the Great Secret is now the staple commodity with which he is to barter, and the grand talisman with which he is to conjure. It can be imparted only to a chosen few,-to those among the opulent who merit it by their virtues, and can acquire it by their diligence; and the divine vengeance is threatened against its disclosure. A process commencing in fraud, and terminating in mysticism, is conveyed to the wealthy aspirant; and the grand mystery passes from rogue

to fool, till its base coin is nailed to the counter of some honest purchaser.

Another extravagance of the alchymists was the art of forming the Universal Medicine, by which all diseases could be healed, and longevity secured. The great success of the Arabian physicians in the application of mercurial preparations to diseases which had resisted every other medicine, naturally led men of ardent minds to entertain the most sanguine expectations of discovering other medicines which might be still more efficacious. If the course of a violent complaint was instantly arrested by the power of mercury, it was not absolutely impossible that a more powerful and universal restorative might present itself to the diligent enquirer. Such an expectation, however extravagant, was calculated to advance rather than to retard the healing art; and there can be no doubt that it led to many beneficial results. Availing himself of these substantial discoveries, the daring empiric actually maintained that he possessed the universal medicine, and promised to confer longevity upon his patients. Were Paracelsus, the celebrated assertor of these dogmas, to reappear in the present age, he would probably defend himself by the declaration that his Universal Medicine was mercury, and that the longevity which he promised was the diminished mortality of our species.

Entertaining these views of the alchymy and magic of former times, and regarding the subject as one of curious enquiry, we looked forward with some interest to the perusal of Mr Godwin's volume. We did not expect that he would give us any insight into the science of the necromancers, but we did anticipate accurate and amusing details of their lives and achievements, and counted upon finding much sagacious, though not very sound speculation respecting those principles of human nature, in which such a system of delusion had its origin, and that extraordinary combination of sincerity and fraud by which it was so long maintained.

In this expectation, however, we have been greatly disappointed. Though Mr Godwin's volume is well written, and to a certain extent interesting, yet it is neither a work of learning nor of judicious compilation; and still less is it a work exhibiting any philosophical sagacity, or furnishing us with any clue through the intellectual labyrinths of Necromancy. He acknowledges, indeed, that to show the modes in which the delusion acts upon the person through whom it operates, is not properly the scope ' of his book;' and that its main purpose is to exhibit a fair delineation of the credulity of the human mind. In order to get up such an exhibition, we need scarcely travel backward into antiquity. The briefest experience, and the narrowest circle, will

furnish us, on better evidence than that of history, with ample specimens of human credulity; and the panel-Man-may in our own day, and even in our own country, be convicted of this felony against reason, before a unanimous jury and an approving judge. But such evidence did not suit Mr Godwin's purpose. His object was to associate extreme credulity, and deplorable ignorance, and reckless villany, with all that is admirable in talent and elevated in piety; to assimilate necromancy and magic with the miracles of the Old and New Testament; and to link the disgusting details of sorcery and witchcraft with the history and propagation of the Christian faith. That these are the objects which our author has in view, will appear from various parts of his work; but the following extract from the preface, which is very explicit, will furnish sufficient evidence of our assertions.

'If we would know man in all his subtleties, we must deviate into the world of miracles and sorcery. To know the things that are not, and cannot be, but have been imagined and believed, is the most curious chapter in the annals of man. To observe the actual results of these imaginary phenomena, and the crimes and cruelties they have caused us to commit, is one of the most instructive studies in which we can possibly be engaged. It is here that man is most astonishing, and that we contemplate with most admiration the discursive and unbounded nature of his faculties.

But, if a recollection of the examples of the credulity of the human mind may in one view supply nourishment to our pride, it still more obviously tends to teach us sobriety and humiliation. Man, in his genuine and direct sphere, is the disciple of reason; it is by this faculty that he draws inferences, exerts his prudence, and displays the ingenuity of machinery, and the subtlety of system both in natural and moral philosophy. Yet what so irrational as man? Not contented with making use of the powers we possess, for the purpose of conducing to our accommodation and well-being, we with a daring spirit enquire into the invisible causes of what we see, and people all nature with gods "of every shape and size" and angels, with principalities and powers, with beneficent beings, who "take charge concerning us, lest at any time we dash our foot against a stone;" and with devils, who are perpetually on the watch to perplex us and do us injury. And, having familiarized our minds with the conceptions of these beings, we immediately aspire to hold communion with them. We represent to ourselves God, as "walking in the garden with us in the cool of the day," and teach ourselves "not to forget to entertain strangers, lest by so doing we should repel angels unawares.'

No sooner are we, even in a slight degree, acquainted with the laws of nature, than we frame to ourselves the idea, by the aid of some invisible ally, of suspending their operation, of calling out meteors in the sky, of commanding storms and tempests, of arresting the motion of the