the future King of France for the benefit of the lovely Marie dé Médicis. This illusion was accomplished by the aid of mirrors adroitly secreted amid hanging draperies.

II.

The history of magic would be incomplete without a sketch of Cagliostro, the arch-necromancer of the eighteenth century, who filled all Europe with his fame. Novels and plays have been founded on his strange career, as witness Goethe’s “Grand Cophta” and Alexander Dumas’ “Memoirs of a Physician.” Thomas Carlyle has remorselessly dissected the character of Cagliostro in an immortal essay, “Count Cagliostro,” which makes fascinating reading. Cagliostro like Nostradamus, and others of that ilk, as the Scotch say, was a pretender to magic and sorcery. He manufactured elixirs of life, raised the shades of the illustrious dead, pretty much after the fashion of our modern spirit mediums; told fortunes, predicted lucky numbers in the lottery, transmuted metals, and founded occult lodges of Egyptian Masonry for the regeneration of mankind. Joseph Balsamo—for such was the Count’s real name—was born of poor parents at Palermo, Sicily, in the year 1743. He received the rudiments of an education, and a smattering of chemistry, at a neighboring monastery, and then started out to fleece mankind. He began by forging theater tickets, after that a will; then he robbed a goldsmith named Marano of a sum of money. Balsamo pretended that a secret treasure lay buried in a certain rocky chasm just outside the city of Palermo, and that he, for a consideration, was able to unearth the gold by means of certain magical incantations. Poor Marano like a susceptible gudgeon swallowed the bait, hook and all, paid the contingent fee, and accompanied by the amateur sorcerer (it was Balsamo’s first attempt in the necromantic line) paid a visit on a certain dark night to the lonely spot where the treasure lay hid from mortal gaze. Joseph drew a magic circle of phosphorus on the earth, pronounced some spells in a peculiar gibberish known only to himself, which he denominated Arabic, and bade the goldsmith dig away for dear life. Marano went vigorously to work with pick and spade. Suddenly terrific yells were heard, whereupon a legion of devils (Joseph’s boon companions with cork-blackened visages) rushed from behind the rocks, pounced upon the goldsmith, and nearly beat him to death with their pitchforks. The enchanter, in order to escape the vengeance of the furious Marano, was compelled to flee his native city. In company with a Greek, Althotas, he visited various places—Greece, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Rhodes, Malta, Naples, Venice and Rome. According to his own account, he studied alchemy at Malta in the laboratory of Pinto, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and St. John. At Rome he married a beautiful girl, Lorenza Feliciani, daughter of a girdle maker, who proved of great assistance to him in his impostures. They travelled over Europe in a coach-and-four with a retinue of servants garbed in gorgeous liveries. Balsamo changed his name to the high-sounding title of the Comte de Cagliostro, and scattered money right and left. “At Strasbourg,” says one of his biographers, “he reaped an abundant harvest by professing the art of making old people young; in which pretension he was seconded by his wife, Lorenza Feliciani, who, though only twenty years of age, declared that she was sixty and that she had a son a veteran in the Dutch service.” Cagliostro also pretended to be of a great age, and solemnly declared that he had hobnobbed with Alexander and Julius Cæsar; that he was present at the burning of Rome under Nero and was an eye-witness of the crucifixion of Christ. Cardinal de Rohan, of France, who became a firm believer in the pretensions of the charlatan, entertained him in Paris, introducing him to that gay world of the Old Régime which went out forever with the French Revolution. This was in 1785. All Paris went wild over the enchanter, and thronged to his magical soirées at his residence in the Rue St. Claude. Cagliostro coined money in the French capital with his spurious Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry, which promised to its votaries the length of life of the Noachites, and superhuman power over nature and her laws. Imbert Saint-Amand, the interesting author of “Marie Antoinette and the End of the Old Régime,” says (Scribner Edition): “The mania for the supernatural, the rage for the marvelous, prevailed in the last years of the eighteenth century, which had wantonly derided every sacred thing. Never were the Rosicrucians, the adepts, sorcerers, and prophets so numerous and so respected. Serious and educated men, magistrates, courtiers, declared themselves eye-witnesses of alleged miracles.... When Cagliostro came to France, he found the ground prepared for his magical operations. A society eager for distractions and emotions, indulged to every form of extravagance, necessarily welcomed such a man and hailed him as its guide. Whence did he come? What was his country, his age, his origin? Where did he get those extraordinary diamonds which adorned his dress, the gold which he squandered so freely? It was all a mystery.... So far as was known, Cagliostro had no resources, no letter of credit, and yet he lived in luxury. He treated and cured the poor without pay, and not satisfied with restoring them to health, he made them large presents of money. His generosity to the poor, his scorn for the great, aroused universal enthusiasm. The Germans, who lived on legends, imagined that he was the Wandering Jew.... Speaking a strange gibberish, which was neither French nor Italian, with which he mingled a jargon which he did not translate, but called Arabic, he used to recite with solemn emphasis the most absurd fables. When he repeated his conversation with the angel of light and the angel of darkness, when he spoke of the great secret of Memphis, of the Hierophant, of the giants, the enormous animals, of a city in the interior of Africa ten times as large as Paris, where his correspondents lived, he found a number of people ready to listen and believe him.”

The interior of Africa was an excellent place in which to locate all these marvels. Since no traveler in that age of skepticism and credulity had ever penetrated into the mysterious land of Ham, it was impossible to deny the Munchausen-like stories of the magician. All this bears a close analogy to the late Madame Blavatsky and her Tibetan Mahatmas. Cagliostro, like all successful and observant wizards, was keenly alive to the effects of mise en scène in his necromantic exhibitions; he was a strong believer in the spectacular. To awe his dupes with weird and impressive ceremonies, powerfully to stimulate their imaginations—ah, that was the great desideratum! His séance-room was hung with somber draperies, and illuminated with wax lights in massive silver candlesticks which were arranged about the apartment in mystic triangles and pentagons.

Says Saint-Amand: “As a sorcerer he had a cabalistic apparatus. On a table with a black cloth, on which were embroidered in red the mysterious signs of the highest degree of the Rosicrucians, there stood the emblems: little Egyptian figures, old vials filled with lustral waters, and a crucifix, very like, though not the same as the Christian’s cross; and there too Cagliostro placed a glass globe full of clarified water. Before the globe he used to place a kneeling seer; that is to say, a young woman who, by supernatural powers, should behold the scenes which were believed to take place in water within the magic globe.

“Count Beugnot, who gives all the details in his Memoirs, adds that for the proper performance of the miracle the seer had to be of angelic purity, to have been born under a certain constellation, to have delicate nerves, great sensitiveness, and, in addition, blue eyes. When she knelt down, the geniuses were bidden to enter the globe. The