each position immovably until she was put into the next. Next came the demon Sabulon, who rolled her through the chapel with horrible convulsions. Five or six times he carried her left foot up higher than her shoulder; all the while her eyes were fixed, wide open, without winking; after that he threw out her limbs till she touched the ground, with her legs extended straight on either side, and while in that posture, the exorcist compelled her to join her hands, and with the trunk of the body in an erect posture, to adore the holy sacrament." (Calmeil, vol. ii. p. 29, citing Histoire des Diables, p. 231.) We seem to read the proceedings of an electro-biologist, rather than of a pastor of the church but the parallel is not yet at an end. "The same nun," says Calmeil, "towards the close of her exorcism, executed a command which the Duke imparted secretly to her exorcist." Then follows this remarkable admission of the learned and cautious physiologist:-"On hundreds of occasions one might believe, in effect, that the Energumenes read the thoughts of the ecclesiastics who were charged with the combating of their demons. It is certain that these young women were endowed, during their excesses of hysteria or nervous exaltation, with a penetration of mind altogether unique." The children of the fanatics of the Cevennes, while in their supposed prophetic ecstasies, spoke the purest dialect of French, and expressed themselves with singular propriety. The same facility of speaking in a fluent and exalted style while in the divinatory ecstasy, was remarked of old in the case of the Pythian priestess. "Though it cannot be divined," says Plutarch, in his "Inquiry," "why the Pythian priestess ceases to deliver her oracles in verse;" "but that her parentage was virtuous and honest, and that she always lived a sober and chaste life, yet her education was among poor, laboring people, so that she was advanced to the oracular sect rude and unpolished, void of all the advantages of art or experience. For, as it is the opinion of Xenophon, that a virgin, ready to be espoused, ought to be carried to the bridegroom's house before she has either seen or heard the least communication, so the Pythian priestess ought to converse with Apollo illiterate and ignorant almost of everything, still approaching his presence with a truly virgin soul." We might here, without any stretch of imagination, suppose we are reading a commentary on the birth and character of Joan of Arc, or of any of the prophetesses of the Swiss Anabaptists. But to return to the possessions recorded by Calmeil. The biological relations alleged by the mesmerists appear in still stronger development in the case of the nuns of Auxonne in 1662. The Bishop of Chalons reports, speaking of the possessed, "that all the aforesaid young women, being in number eighteen, as well seculars as regulars, and without a single exception, appeared to him to have obtained the gift of tongues, inasmuch as they accurately replied to the matters in Latin, which were addressed to them by their exorcists, and which were not borrowed from the ritual, still less arranged by any preconcert; they frequently explained themselves in Latin-sometimes in entire periods, sometimes in broken sentences ;" "that all or almost all of them were proved to have introvision (cognizance de l'interieur) and knowledge of whatever thought might be secretly addressed to them, as appeared particularly in the case of the internal commands which were often addressed to them by the exorcists, and which, in general, they obeyed implicitly, although without any external signification of the command, either verbal or by way of sign; as the said Lord Bishop experienced in many instances, among others, in that of Denise Parisot, whom the exorcist having commanded, in the depths of his own mind, to come to him for the purpose of being exorcised, she came incontinently, though dwelling in a remote part of the town; telling the Lord Bishop that she had received his commands and was come accordingly; and this she did on several occasions: likewise in the person of Sister Jamin, a novice, who, on recovering from her fit, told him the internal commandment which he had given to her demon during the exorcism; also in the case of the Sister Borthon, to whom having issued a mental commandment in one of her paroxysms to come and prostrate herself before the Holy Sacrament, with her face to the ground and her arms stretched forward, she executed his command at the very instant that he willed it, with a promptitude and precipitation altogether wonderful."-(Calmeil, vol. ii. page 187.) Sister Denise Parisot, one of those who exhibited these singularities, also displayed a further and very remarkable manifestation of what would now be called biological influence. "Being commanded by his Lordship to make the pulse of her right arm entirely cease beating while that of the left contin ued, and then to transfer the pulsation so as Instead of exorcist we may, without mnch apprehension of offending either the reason or the belief of any candid person, read "mesmerist." The passes seem similar, the phenomena identical. Again, in the case of the girls of the parish of Landes, near Bayeux, in 1732, the orders given by the exorcists in Latin appeared to be well understood by the patients. "In general," says Calmeil, quoting the contemporaneous account of their possession, "during the ecstatic access, the sense of touch was not excited even by the application of fire; nevertheless the exorcists affirm that their patients yielded immediate attention to the thoughts which they (the exorcists) refrained from expressing, and that they described with exactness the interior of distant houses which they had never before seen."—(vol. ii. p. 413.) This long and varied survey of different forms of physical and mental malady brings us to a point where we may, with some confidence, take our stand on inductive conclusions. point, as a wafer, or the umbilicus, or on a polished ball or mirror, is one of the most general and efficacious means of artificially inducing the condition of clairvoyance. That it may also, on those prepared for its reception by strong mental excitement, be induced by tumultuous music, as by the sound of drums and cymbals, by odors, and perhaps by unguents; and that the same condition also frequently supervenes on long-continued and intense emotion, as well as on those hysterical and convulsive movements of the body which sometimes attend on excessive religious excitation. That, induced by the latter means, clairvoyance has a tendency to become contagious, and has often afflicted whole communities with the most dangerous and deplorable epidemic hallucinations, as in the fancied witch-sabbaths of the demonomaniacs, and prowling excursions of lycanthropes and vampyres; but that, although in these demotic frenzies, the prevailing ideas and images presented to the minds of the sufferers are merely illusory, they possess the capacity of being put in such a relation with ideas and images derived from actual existences in the minds of others, as to perceive and appropriate them. Beyond this it would be difficult to advance our speculation with any degree of certainty; but if speculation may be at all indulged in such a question, it might, perhaps, be allowed to a sanguine speculator to surmise that, possibly, the mind in that state may be put en rapport with not only the ideas and emotions of another particular mind, but with the whole of the external world, and with all its minds. Another step would carry us to that participation in the whole scheme of nature, pretended to by divinators and seers; but it That, in addition to the ordinary manifes-must be owned that, in the present state of tations of insensibility to pain, rigidity, and what is called clairvoyance, the patients affected with the more intense conditions of the malady have at all times exhibited a marvellous command of languages; a seeming participation in the thoughts, sensations, and impulses of others; a power of resisting, for some short time at least, the action of fire; and, perhaps, a capacity of evolving some hitherto unknown energy counteractive of the force of gravitation. It seems evident, then, that all the phenomena of animal magnetism have been from an early period known to mankind under the various forms of divinatory ecstasy, demonopathy, or witchmania, theomania or fanatical religious excitation, spontaneous catalepsy, and somnambulism. That the condition of mind and body in question can be induced by means addressed to each and all of the senses, as well as involuntarily by way of sympathy or contagion. That the fixing of the eyes on a particular the evidences, there is no solid ground on which to rest the foot of conjecture in taking either the one step or the other. In the meantime, many practitioners are playing with an agency, the dangerous character of which they little suspect. In ancient exorcisms, it sometimes happened that the exorcist himself became the involuntary recipient of the contagious frenzy of the patient. If such an event happened now, it would not be more wonderful than when it befell the Père Surin, at Loudon, in 1635, as he has himself described his disaster in his letter to the Jesuit Attichi:-"For three months and ahalf I have never been without a devil in full exercise within me. While I was engaged in the performance of my ministry, the devil passed out of the body of the possessed, and coming into mine, assaulted me and cast me down, shook me, and traversed me to and fro, for several hours. I cannot tell you what passed within me during that time, and how that spirit united itself with mine, leaving no liberty either of sensation or of thought, but acting in me like another self, or as if I possessed two souls; these two souls making, as it were, a battle-ground of my body. When I sought, at the instigation of the one, to make the sign of the cross on my mouth, the other suddenly would turn round my hand and seize the fingers with my teeth, making me bite myself with rage. When I sought to speak, the word would be taken out of my mouth; at mass I would be stopped short; at table I could not carry the food to my mouth; at confession I forgot my sins; in fine, I felt the devil go and come within me as if he used me for his daily dwelling-house." (Calmeil, vol. ii. p. 61.) Or if, instead of passing into a single operator, as in the case of Surin, the diseased contagion should suddenly expand itself among a crowd of bystanders, there would be nothing to wonder at, although enough to deplore, in such a catastrophe. It would be no more than has already happened in all the epidemics of lycanthropy and witch-mania, of the dancers of St. Vitus, of the Jumpers, Quakers, and Revivalists, of the Mewers, Barkers, and Convulsionnaires. The absence of religious pretensions among the operators seems as yet to be the chief guarantee against such results. If, instead of being made rigid and lucid by the manipulations of a professor, the patients should find themselves cast into that state by contact with the tomb of a preacher, or with the reliques of a saint, society would soon be revisited with all the evils of pseudo-miracles and supposed demoniacal possessions. The comparatively innocent frenzy of the followers of Father Mathew was the nearest approach to a social disturbance of that kind that our country has been visited by since the barking epidemic of the fourteenth century. In the county of Leicester, a person travelling along the road," says Camden, (Brit. vol. ii. p. 636,) "found a pair of gloves, fit for his hands, as he thought; but when he put them on, he lost his speech immediately, and could do nothing but bark like a dog; nay, from that moment, the men and women, old and young, throughout the whole country, barked like dogs, and the children like whelps. This plague continued, with some eighteen days, with others a month, and with some for two years; and, like a contagious distemper, at last infected the neighboring counties, and set them a barking too." If mesmerism did no more than demonstrate, as it has done, that all the supposed evidences of modern inspiration, as well as of modern demoniacal possession and ghostcraft, are but the manifestations of a physical disorder, capable of being induced by ordinary agencies, it would have done a great service to the cause of social and religious. stability. In addition to this, it has furnished surgery with a new narcotic, perhaps with a new antispasmodic. It is not impossible that here, at length, a means may have been found for combating the horrors of hydrophobia. Its higher pretensions of clairvoyance and prevision, if not proved, are at least not yet satisfactorily disproved. Its admitted usefuldess may, perhaps, counterbalance its perils; but in every exercise of it, whether curative or speculative, it is never to be forgotten, that the phenomena are those of disease, and that the production of disease, save for the counteraction of other maladies more hurtful, is in itself an evil. The two Universities of Edinburgh-the Old and the New-opened the present year under favorable auspices. Upwards of 700 students assembled to hear the introductory lecture of Principal Lee, of the Old University. Two of the Professors are unable to continue their prelections on account of ill health-Prof. Low, of the agricultural, and Prof. Wilson, of the moral philosophy class. Professor Wilson, we regret to hear, has had an attack of paralysis. His illness is not very serious, but repose is recommended. Dr. Lee, in speaking of the age of entering the University, remarked, that many of the most eminent men he had known went to college very early. Lord Brougham went to college at the age of twelve, Sir David Brewster and Dr. Chalmers at eleven, and Lord Campbell at eleven. Archbishop Usher, Bishop Cowper, of Galloway, and Jeremy Taylor, also entered college unusually early. Among the lecturers announced for the New College are some distinguished names, and the institution seems to be conducted in a higher tone than is usual in similar places of popular instruction and amusement. Hugh Miller, the geologist, and Isaac Taylor, author of the "Natural History of Enthusi asm," are to deliver courses of lectures. From the Athenæum. ELOQUENCE OF KOSSUTH.* M. KOSSUTH has told the public that on approaching the shores of England-the land of his dreams and of his hopes-he could scarcely overcome a certain sentiment of awe. As is ever the case with great material objects-ships in motion or Alpine ridges-so, vivid conceptions frequently owe much of their poetic charm to the mellowing effect of distance; and as the green slopes of the south coast of our land rose on the Exile's view, he trembled lest the glory with which his mind had so long crowned the Figure of England should dissolve before a stern and prosaic reality. Some such feeling, we believe, existed in many minds on shore, with respect to the illustrious Exile himself. While in the zenith of his power, the leader of a mighty and for a time successful national movement in Hungary, stories reached us of the oratorical genius of Kossuth-of his power over the masses-of his faculty for inspiring personal attachmentswhich to our colder temperaments raised a suspicion that they must be over-colored. Common fame represented him as a sort of magician, who by a word could persuade men to exchange their silver coin for bits of paper containing no better security than his own promise to pay when he should be able who by his conjuration could raise up army after army of Magyars and launch them against the Imperial house of Hapsburg. In England we had few means of conceiving the idea of such a man. own great revolution oratory played but an inferior part. The swords of Cromwell, Blake, and Fairfax, the passions and convictions of the people, were the executive and motive powers. France had its Mirabeau In our tions and its Robespierre; but the most stirring words of those popular tribunes did notlike the dragon teeth of Greek fable and the rumored spells of Kossuth-spring up armed men. Doubts occurred to many if this imputed gift were not one of those exaggeracommon to the East. The whole character of the man, as it was drawn for us by such Magyars, Poles, and English as had seen or learned about him in his own country, was touched with what seemed to persons looking on soberly from a distance the contrasted lights and shades of an artistic fancy. Personal beauty, modesty of deportment, refined and gentle manners, romantic generosity, a presence to command respect and inspire devotion, varied knowledge of the world, the highest order of physical and moral courage, and a mind equal to emergencies, ready to act at any moment, and of almost infinite resources,such were the materials of that sketch of Kossuth which was commonly given by those who shared his general views and spoke of him on personal knowledge. To meet the expectations so raised would be a severe trial to any man; trebly so when their object was a foreigner, an exile, without wealth, aristocratic connections, power, or the prestige of victory. Many, therefore, who had been stirred by the Hungarian struggle, and whose hearts had warmed towards the Hungarian hero, believed that the moment he set foot on English ground the spell of his great name would be broken. This man has now been among us for a month. He has been seen by millions and heard by thousands. He has addressed influential meetings in Southampton, Winchester, London, Manchester, and Birmingham. He has stood the test of criticism in many * Kossuth in England. Authentic Life of His shapes:-and from the moment of his landExcellency Louis Kossuth, Governor of Hungary.ing at Southampton to his embarkation at With a full Report of his Speeches delivered in England; to which is added, his Address to the People of the United States of America. Bradbury & Evans. Kossuth his Speeches in England, with a brief Sketch of his Life. Gilpin. Cowes for the United States, his stay has been one prolonged representation. Has his presence in England vulgarized the romantic image already familiar to the public through the vivid portraiture of his friends? His re ception by the people-the enthusiasm cre-, prison companion! To this circumstance, ated by his speeches, an enthusiasm spreading and deepening to the end of his sojourn is the answer; and of these speeches we hope to have yet a more perfect record than either of those which now lie before us. Into the discussion of any of those questions which form the subject-matter of these speeches the readers of the Athenæum well know that it is beyond our mission to enter; but, without being prepared to endorse the assertion of Mr. Walter Savage Landor, that "since the days of Demosthenes no equal or similar eloquence has ever been heard on earth," we feel that this great Hungarian monologue has been sufficiently remarkable to bring the actor legitimately before us in the literary point of view. however, we owe it that we are now able to understand, in a vague and reflex way perhaps, but still with no little vividness and life, what must have been the charm and power of the great Magyar's eloquence when it was appealing in a national cause, in its native idiom, and under circumstances of great excitement, to minds kindled at the same source and hearts beating with the same blood as his own. This interesting story, too, gives peculiar. appropriateness to a proposition that has emanated from Mr. Douglas Jerrold, looking on the Magyar chief in his character of a literary man, that a subscription from Englishmen of all parties shall produce a testimonial taking the form of a fine copy of Shakspeare, inclosed in a shrine of whatever cost the surplus amount of subscriptions may justify. The thought is in no degree political, but founds a literary memorial on a highly interesting literary fact. Of the minor merits of this remarkable man, his command of the English language is perhaps that which creates the largest amount of wonder. With the exception of an occasional want of idiom, the use of a few words in an obsolete sense, and a habit of We have heard M. Kossuth, and we have sometimes carrying (German fashion) the in- carefully read the reports of his speeches. finitive verb to the end of a sentence, there His style is new and personal. Compared is little to distinguish M. Kossuth's English with the men, whose speeches have been refrom that of our great masters of eloquence. ceived as the best specimens of oratory in Select, yet copious and picturesque it is al- recent times-such as Brougham, Lacordaire, ways. The combinations-we speak of his Blum, Thiers, Gavazzi, and O'Connellwords as distinct from the thoughts that lie Kossuth is calm and grave. He has no in them—are often very happy. We can sophisms, no verbal dexterities. All is with even go so far as to say that he has enriched him clear, sequent, logical. He never mouths and utilized our language:-the first by using his passion-never wrings his hands or stamps unusual words with extreme felicity, the his feet-never gesticulates his violence, or latter by proving to the world how well the resorts to the common tricks of the orator to pregnant and flexible tongue of Shakspeare impress his audience with an idea of his adapts itself to the expression of a genius earnestness. As a rhetorical weapon he and a race so remote from the Saxon as the uses scorn very rarely, and we have not read Magyar. Most of our readers know the a sneering sentence from his lips. He neither story told by Kossuth himself of his first in- mocks his enemy like Gavazzi, nor insults him troduction to our language and literature. like O'Connell. His appeal is made directly The story runs that when, fourteen years to the intellect of his hearer. He seems ago, he was thrown into an Austrian dun- more anxious to convince than to excite. geon for daring to publish the debates in the Warmth of fancy and of feeling he undoubtHungarian Parliament, he was kept for some edly possesses, and his passion sometimes time in solitary confinement without books or breaks into sudden explosion. But in these papers, but that afterwards, in consequence qualities he has had many equals-Chatham, of the representations of the Diet, his gaol- Mirabeau, Patrick Henry, and others of all ers allowed him to have a few books, on con- nations. What seems more particularly dition of his not asking for works on politics. He chose a copy of Shakspeare and an English dictionary. Out of the great dramatist he learned our speech, our modes of thinking, our national sentiments. Certain it is, that his extraordinary mastery over our tongue has proved power to the Exile and to It was a sad blunder of the Austrian police to give him Shakspeare for a his cause. Kossuthian-that is, personal-in his eloquence is, its moral undertone. Master of his subject, he speaks to other nations with the energy, but also with much of the gravity of history. He flatters no prejudice-appeals to no passion-yet, his discourse adapts itself with singular art to its immediate audiene. Perhaps next to his excellent Englishthe thing which is most curious about "M |