THE ALCHEMIST.
17
Erecting figures in your rows of houses,
And taking in of shadows with a glass,[1]
Told in red letters;[2] and a face cut for thee,
Worse than Gamaliel Ratsey's.[3]
- ↑ And taking in of shadows with a glass,] This mode of divination was very common in Jonson's time, and indeed long before and after it. What he calls the glass, was a globular crystal or berryl, into which the angels Uriel, Gabriel, &c. entered, and gave responses, as Lilly says, "in a voice, like the Irish, much in the throat." This, if it proves nothing else, will serve to shew that the Irish was the primitive language! Of all the various modes of imposture, this was at once, the most artful and the most impudent. It was usually conducted by confederacy, for the possessor of the glass seldom pretended to see the angels, or hear their answers. His part was to mumble over some incomprehensible prayers: after which a speculatrix, a virgin of a pure life, (for the angels were very delicate on this point,) was called in to inspect the crystal. "I was very familiar," Lilly says, "with one Sarah Skelhorn, who had been speculatrix to Arthur Gauntlet. This Sarah had a perfect sight, and indeed the best eyes for that purpose I ever yet did see. Sir Robert Holborn," he continues,"brought me one Gladwell, of Suffolk, who had formerly had conference with Uriel and Raphael, but lost them both by carelessness. He would have given me two hundred pounds to have assisted him for their recovery, but I am no such man!"—Gladwell's berryl "was of the largeness of a good big orange, set in silver, with a cross on the top, and another on the handle, and round about engraved the names of these angels, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel," &c. Lilly's Life, p. 150.
- ↑ Told in red letters,] i.e. says Upton, letters written in blood, —but he mistakes the whole sense of the passage. Instead of turning to Aristophanes, as he does upon the present occasion, he should have looked at some of our old song books, where he would have seen that those red letters were, as Whalley truly observes, the material parts of them tricked out in this manner to catch the eye of passengers. Rubric titles to ballads, stories, &c. were then to be seen upon every post. It is the knavery of Subtle, which Face threatens to put into red letters, with his figure (as the manner was), printed at the top of the ballad, to put the subject of it out of all doubt.
- ↑ and a face cut for thee
Worse than Gamatel Ratsey's.] Gamaliel Ratsey was a
planets, with respect to the several constellations. House, in astrology, is the twelfth part of the zodiac.
