humours with the hand of an executed person, &c. Rites of this sort and
other practices of sorcery have always been regarded with trembling
abhorrence by all nations, even the most ignorant, as by the Africans,
the Hudson's Bay people and others. The alchemists were, no doubt, often
considered as dealers in art magic, and many of them were not unwilling
that such a belief should be prevalent; and the more earnest among them
evidently looked at their association of substances, fumigations, and
other chemical operations as merely ceremonial, and seem, therefore, to
have had a deeper meaning, that of evoking a latent power. It would be
profitable to make a collection of all the cases of cures by magical
charms and incantations; much useful information might, probably, be
derived from it; for it is to be observed that such rites are the form
in which medical knowledge would be preserved amongst a barbarous and
ignorant people.

[Footnote 1: From Mr. Green's note. Ed.]



Note. [1] June, 1827.

The apocryphal book of Tobit consists of a very simple, but beautiful
and interesting, family-memoir, into which some later Jewish poet or
fabulist of Alexandria wove the ridiculous and frigid machinery,
borrowed from the popular superstitions of the Greeks (though, probably,
of Egyptian origin), and accommodated, clumsily enough, to the purer
monotheism of the Mosaic law. The Rape of the Lock is another instance
of a simple tale thus enlarged at a later period, though in this case by
the same author, and with a very different result. Now unless Mr.
Hillhouse is Romanist enough to receive this nursery-tale garnish of a