vanished as you approached; he could conjure up in his quiet cell the
likeness of a castle manned with soldiers, or a forest tenanted by
deer. [See Chaucer, House of Time, Book III.; also the account given
by Baptista Porta, of his own Magical Delusions, of which an extract
may be seen in the "Curiosities of Literature" Art., Dreams at the
Dawn of Philosophy.] Besides these illusions, probably produced by
more powerful magic lanterns than are now used, the friar had stumbled
upon the wondrous effects of animal magnetism, which was then
unconsciously practised by the alchemists and cultivators of white or
sacred magic. He was an adept in the craft of fortune-telling; and
his intimate acquaintance with all noted characters in the metropolis,
their previous history and present circumstances, enabled his natural
shrewdness to hit the mark, at least now and then, in his oracular
predictions. He had taken, for safety and for bread, the friar's
robes, and had long enjoyed the confidence of the Duchess of Bedford,
the traditional descendant of the serpent-witch, Melusina. Moreover,
and in this the friar especially valued himself, Bungey had, in the
course of his hardy, vagrant early life, studied, as shepherds and
mariners do now, the signs of the weather; and as weather-glasses were
then unknown, nothing could be more convenient to the royal planners
of a summer chase or a hawking company than the neighbourhood of a
skilful predictor of storm and sunshine. In fact, there was no part
in the lore of magic which the popular seers found so useful and
studied so much as that which enabled them to prognosticate the
humours of the sky, at a period when the lives of all men were
principally spent in the open air.

The fame of Friar Bungey had travelled much farther than the repute of
Adam Warner: it was known in the distant provinces: and many a
northern peasant grew pale as he related to his gaping listeners the