Читать книгу The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campell - Даниэль Дефо, Данієль Дефо, Defoe Daniel - Страница 1

I am not unacquainted, that, ever since this book was first promised by way of advertisement to the world, it was greedily coveted by a great many persons of airy tempers, for the same reason that it has been condemned by those of a more formal class, who thought it was calculated partly to introduce a great many new and diverting curiosities in the way of superstition, and partly to divulge the secret intrigues and amours of one part of the sex, to give the other part room to make favourite scandal the subject of their discourse; and so to make one half of the fair species very merry, over the blushes and the mortifications of the other half. But when they come to read the following sheets, they will find their expectations disappointed, but I hope I may say too, very agreeably disappointed. They will find a much more elegant entertainment than they expected. Instead of making them a bill of fare out of patchwork romances of polluting scandal, the good old gentleman who wrote the Adventures of my Life, has made it his business to treat them with a great variety of entertaining passages, which always terminate in morals that tend to the edification of all readers, of whatsoever sex, age, or profession. Instead of seducing young, innocent, unwary minds into the vicious delight which is too often taken in reading the gay and bewitching chimeras of the cabalists, and in perusing the enticing fables of new-invented tricks of superstition, my ancient friend, the writer, strikes at the very root of these superstitions, and shows them how they may be satisfied in their several curiosities, by having recourse to me, who by the talent of the second-sight, which he so beautifully represents, how nature is so kind frequently to implant in the minds of men born in the same climate with myself, can tell you those things naturally, which when you try to learn yourselves, you either run the hazard of being imposed upon in your pockets by cheats, gipsies, and common fortune-tellers, or else of being imposed upon in a still worse way, in your most lasting welfare, by having recourse to conjurors or enchanters that deal in black arts, and involve all their consulters in one general partnership of their execrable guilt; or, lastly, of imposing worst of all upon your own selves, by getting into an itch of practising and trying the little tricks of female superstition, which are often more officiously handed down by the tradition of credulous nurses and old women, from one generation to another, than the first principles of Christian doctrine, which it is their duty to instil early into little children. But I hope when this book comes to be pretty generally read among you ladies, as by your generous and numerous subscriptions I have good reason to expect, that it will afford a perfect remedy and a thorough cure to that distemper, which first took its rise from too great a growth of curiosity, and too large a stock of credulity nursed prejudicially up with you in your more tender and infant years.

Whatever young maid hereafter has an innocent but longing desire to know who shall be her husband, and what time she shall be married, will, I hope, when she has read the following sheets of a man that can set her right in the knowledge of those points, purely by possessing the gift of the second sight, sooner have recourse innocently to such a man than use unlawful means to acquire it, such as running to conjurors to have his figure shown in their enchanted glasses, or using any of those traditional superstitions, by which they may dream of their husbands, or cause visionary shapes of them to appear on such and such festival nights of the year; all which practices are not ordinarily wicked and impious, but downright diabolical. I hope that the next 29th of June, which is St. John Baptist's day, I shall not see the several pasture fields adjacent to this metropolis, especially that behind Montague House, thronged, as they were the last year, with well dressed young ladies crawling busily up and down upon their knees, as if they were a parcel of weeders, when all the business is to hunt superstitiously after a coal under the root of a plantain, to put under their heads that night, that they may dream who should be their husbands. In order to shame them out of this silly but guilty practice, I do intend to have some spies out on that day, that shall discover who they are, and what they have been about; and I here give notice to the public, that this ill-acted comedy, if it be acted at all this year, must begin according to the rule of their superstition, on that day precisely at the hour of twelve. And so much for the pretty weeders. But as you, ladies, have had several magical traditions delivered to you, which, if you put in exercise and practice, will be greatly prejudicial to your honour and your virtue, let me interpose my counsels, which will conduct you innocuously to the same end, which some ladies have laboured to arrive at by these impieties. Give me leave first to tell you, that though what you aim at may be arrived to by these means, yet these means make that a miserable fortune which would have been a good one; because, in order to know human things beforehand, you use preternatural mediums, which destroy the goodness of the courses, which nature herself was taking for you, and annexes to them diabolical influences, which commonly carry along with them fatalities in this world as well as the next. You will, therefore, give me your pardon likewise, ladies, if I relate some other of these practices, which bare relation of itself, after what I have said before, seems to me sufficient to explode them.

Another of the nurse's prescriptions is this: upon a St. Agnes's night, the 21st day of January, take a row of pins and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Pater Noster, or Our Father, sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of her you shall marry. Ben Johnson, in one of his masks, makes some mention of this:

Now what can be more infinitely profane than to use the prayer our Lord instituted in such a way?

There is another prescription, which is as follows: You must lie in another county, and knit the left garter about the right-legged stocking, let the other garter and stocking alone, and as you rehearse these following verses, at every comma, knit a knot: —

Accordingly in your dream you will see him: if a musician, with a lute or other instrument; if a scholar, with a book, &c. Now I appeal to you, ladies, what a ridiculous prescription is this? But yet as slight a thing as it is, it may be of great importance if it be brought about, because then it must be construed to be done by preternatural means, and then those words are nothing less than an application to the devil.

Mr. Aubrey, of the Royal Society, says, a gentlewoman, that he knew, confessed in his hearing that she used this method, and dreamt of her husband whom she had never seen. About two or three years after, as she was one Sunday at church, up pops a young Oxonian in the pulpit; she cries out presently to her sister, this is the very face of the man I saw in my dream. Sir William Somes's lady did the like.

Another way is to charm the moon thus, as the old nurses give out, at the first appearance of the moon, after New-year's-day, some say any other new moon is as good, go out in the evening, and stand over the spars of a gate or stile, looking on the moon (here remark that in Yorkshire they kneel on a ground-fast stone) and say,

You must presently after go to bed. The aforesaid Mr. Aubrey knew two gentlewomen that did thus when they were young maids, and they had dreams of those that married them.

But a great many of the wittiest part of your sex laugh at these common superstitions; but then they are apt to run into worse: they give themselves up to the reading of the cabalistical systems of sylphs, and gnomes, and mandrakes, which are very wicked and delusive imaginations.

I would not have you imagine, ladies, that I impute these things as infirmities and frailties peculiar to your sex. No; men, and great men too, and scholars, and even statesmen, and princes themselves, have been tainted with superstitions, and where they infect the minds of such great personages, they make the deeper impression, according to the stronger and more manly ideas they have of them. Their greater degree of strength in the intellect only subjects them to greater weaknesses; such was even the great Paracelsus, the wonder and miracle of learning in the age wherein he lived, and such were all his followers, scholars, statesmen, divines, and princes, that are talismanists.

These talismans that Paracelsus pretends to owe to the excogitation and invention of honest art, seem to me to be of a very diabolical nature, and to owe their rise to being dedicated by the author to the heathen gods. Thus the cabalists pretending to a vast penetration into arts and sciences, though all their thoughts are chimeras and extravagancies, unless they be helped by preternatural means, say they have found out the several methods appropriated to the several planets. They have appropriated gold to the sun on the Sunday, silver to the moon on the Monday, iron to Mars on the Tuesday, quicksilver to Mercury on the Wednesday, tin to Jupiter on the Thursday, copper or brass to Venus on the Friday, and lead to Saturn on the Saturday. The methods they take in forming these talismans are too long to dwell upon here. But the properties which they pretend belong to them are, that the first talisman or seal of the sun will make a man beloved by all princes and potentates, and cause him to abound with all the riches his heart can wish. The second preserves travellers from danger, and is favourable to merchants, tradesmen, and workmen. The third carries destruction to any place where it is put: and it is said that a certain great minister of state ordered one of these to be carried into England in the times of the revolution of government caused by Oliver Cromwell. The fourth they pretend cures fevers and other diseases; and if it be put under the bolster, it makes the proprietor have true dreams, in which he sees all he desires to know. The fifth, according to them, renders a man lucky and fortunate in all his businesses and undertakings. It dissipates melancholy, drives away all importunate cares, and banishes panic fears from the mind. The sixth, by being put into the liquor which any one drinks, reconciles mortal enemies, makes them intimate friends: it gains the love of all women, and renders the proprietor very dexterous in the art of music. The seventh makes women be easily brought to bed without pain; and if a horseman carries it in his left boot, himself and his horse become invulnerable.

This, Paracelsus and his learned followers say, is owing to the influence of the stars; but I cannot help arguing these acts of diabolical impiety. But as these arts are rarely known among the middling part of mankind, I shall neither open their mysteries, nor inveigh against them any farther.

The persons who are most to be avoided are your ordinary fortune-telling women and men about this town, whose houses ought to be avoided as a plague or a pestilence, either because they are cheats and impostors, or because they deal with black arts, none of them that I know having any pretensions to the gift of a second-sight. Among many, a few of the most notorious that I can call to mind now, are as follow. The first and chiefest of these mischievous fortune-tellers is a woman that does not live far from the Old Bailey. And truly the justice hall in that place is the properest place for her to appear at, where, if she was tried for pretending to give charms written upon paper with odd scrawls, which she calls figures, she would be probably convicted, and very justly condemned, and doomed to have her last journey from the Old Bailey to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The other is a fellow that lives in Moorfields, in which place those who go to consult him ought to live all their lifetimes, at the famous palaces of the senseless men: he is the successor of the famous Dr. Trotter, whose widow he married; and from being a tailor and patching men's garments, he now cuts flourishes with his shears upon parchment, considers the heavens as a garment, and from the spangles thereupon he calculates nativities, and sets up for a very profound astrologer. The third is an ignorant fellow that caws out strange predictions in Crow-alley, of whose croaking noise I shall here take no notice, he having been sufficiently mauled in the most ingenious Spectators. These and such counterfeits as these, I would desire all gentlemen and ladies to avoid. The only two really learned men that I ever knew in the art of astrology, were my good friends Dr. Williams and Mr. Gadbury; and I thought it necessary to pay this esteem to their names, let the world judge of them what it will. I will here say no more, nor hinder you any longer, gentlemen and ladies, from the diversion which my good old friend, who is now departed this life, has prepared for you in his book, which a young gentleman of my acquaintance revised, and only subscribe myself,

Yours, &c.,

Duncan Campbell.