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Being an excellent penman, he counterfeited | at this period, he got involved in several lawwills, papal dispensations, permits for monks suits, and was committed to prison no less to leave their convents at uncanonical hours, than ten different times. It appears that, and even tickets for the theatres. At last he with all his cunning, he became the prey was compelled to abscond, for having cheat- a number of low sharpers and solicitors, who, ed a silversmith of sixty ounces of gold by from his ignorance of English laws, habits, and pretending to disclose a hidden treasure. He customs, succeeded in fleecing him to no small fled to Messina, and there joined a kindred extent. spirit, a noted juggler, versed in Arabic and the languages of the East. Travelling with this companion in Syria and Egypt, Balsamo picked up that smattering of the Oriental tongues which proved so useful to him in his subsequent deceptions. At length, a ship, in which these two worthies were passengers, was driven by stress of weather into Malta; and Balsamo, learning that Pinto, the then Grand Master, was addicted to alchymical pursuits, introduced himself as the descendant of a Christian princess of Trebizonde; the juggler personating his tutor, the wise Althatas. The deception was completely successful. The Grand Master assigned them apartments in his palace, and they worked daily in his laboratory. In a short time, however, the juggler died; and Balsamo, inconsolable for the death of his tutor, left Malta, furnished with letters of recommendation from Pinto. Arriving at Rome, he was introduced to the pope by the Maltese ambassador; and shortly afterwards he married a woman named Lorenza, whose rare and singular beauty, combined with an extraordinary talent for intrigue and artifice, caused her to be an invaluable partner to such a man. About this period, assuming the title of Count Cagliostro, he commenced his travels, visiting every country in Europe from Spain to Russia. It appears that he actually must have possessed some medical skill. By prescribing for the poor gratis, and giving away large sums in charity, he became exceedingly popular wherever he went; but to the rich, he sold his miraculous pills and balsams at equally miraculous prices. He professed to be able to convert flax into silk, and received large sums of money from his dupes for disclosing the process, which, in all probability, was somewhat similar to that now known as Clausen's patent for making flax-cotton. He also, for a handsome consideration, converted small diamonds into large ones, by substituting paste counterfeits, which he was very skilful in making, for the real stones. He first arrived in London in 1776, and though then possessed of consider able wealth, did not succeed, as on the continent, in gaining admission into the higher circles of society. During his stay in London

One of those cases is curious. A Miss Fry entreated Cagliostro to tell her the number of a ticket which would gain a prize in a lottery, then about to be drawn. He at first refused; but her earnest entreaties prevailing, he took a cabalistical-looking manuscript out of his escritoire, and after making many and apparently very obstruse calculations, told her the fortunate number. She immediately purchased the corresponding ticket; and no doubt more to Cagliostro's amazement than her own, it actually turned up a prize. Numberless applications were then made to the count for fortunate numbers, but he steadily refused to make another calculation; but piles of bank-notes and costly jewels were given to the cunning countess, to induce her to worm the valuable secret from her husband. Miss Fry, not content with her first venture, presented Lorenza with a gold snuff-box, containing diamonds to the value of £294; but not being able to prevail upon Cagliostro to indicate another number, she caused him to be arrested for pursuing illegal arts, and entered an action for restitution of the box and jewels, which were ordered to be restored with costs. It forms a remarkable feature in human credulity, that at the very time this Miss Fry believed Cagliostro so prescient as to be able to tell her the number of an undrawn prize, she was actually engaged in swindling him herself. Being connected with a broken-down roué named Scott, she introduced him to Cagliostro as a Scottish nobleman. The sham nobleman was so delighted with the sham count, that he invited him down to his castle in Scotland, promising to introduce him to the highest personages in that kingdom. This being just what Caglios tro wanted, he eagerly snapped at the proffered bait; and as his noble friend was far from home, and short of cash, he lent him large sums to prepare for the journey. We need scarcely say, the money was never repaid, nor did the journey ever take place. In short, Cagliostro's ostentatious liberality and profusion, which on the continent introduced him to the first society, served only in England to draw around him a crowd of needy sharpers.

Disgusted with London, Cagliostro, after having beeen initiated into the mysteries of

drops of which were to be taken every subsequent day, till the object should be attained. On the thirty-first day, he was to be put to bed, and given the first grain of the materia prima, which would cause a swoon of three hours' duration, accompanied with strong convulsions. On the thirty-third day, the second grain was to be swallowed, upon which delirium would ensue, and the hair and teeth fall out. On the thirty-sixth day, the taking of the third grain would be followed by a deep sleep, and the hair and teeth would grow again. On the thirty-ninth day, the novice was to be put into a bath, ten drops of the balsam of the Great Koptha were to be given him, and on the fortieth morning he would rise in the prime of youthful vigor, in which state he would continue for fifty years. This treatment could be renewed every half-century, until the regenerated attained the age of 5557 years, but no longer!

freemasonry, went to Strasburg, where, by his | liberality to the poor, he soon acquired an immense popularity. Assuming a higher flight, he now announced himself to be the Great Koptha, or head of a mystical system of Egyptian masonry, which he had been taught by the grand master of the order-no less a personage than Alexander the Great, who was still living, in dignified seclusion, in the interior of the Great Pyramid! As Joe Smith is said to have founded Mormonism on an unpublished religious romance, so Cagliostro is supposed to have founded Egyptian masonry on a mystical manuscript, written by one George Copston, a crazy Englishman. Humiliating, yet not without its lesson, is a record of the absurdities believed at the instigation of an ignorant impostor, less than a hundred years ago. In his system of mystification, Cagliostro assumed, through his asserted angelic ancestry, to possess a certain authority over the angels, and declared that his mission was to raise the faithful to spiritual perfection, by a physical and moral regeneration. The method of acquiring this new birth was altogether material in its nature, and curious on account of its absurdity. The faithful could obtain a life independent of the body by means of the materia prima, or red powder, one form of the Grand Elixir; but it required the Great Pentagon to restore them to the state of innocence enjoyed before the Fall of man. The Pentagon was to be constructed by erecting a three-story building, on a mountain named Sinai. On the second floor, termed Ararat, thirteen masters were to pass eighteen hours a day, for forty successive days, in prayer, contemplation, and preparation of the virgin parchment, made from the skin of a new-born male Jewish infant. This being prepared the thirteen masters were placed in communication with the If it were not a matter of history, the inseven first created angels, who, stamping their fluence this artful rogue acquired over the seals upon the parchment, completed the minds of his followers, would be utterly inGreat Pentagon. The happy thirteen were credible. They worshipped him for hours, now masters of all wealth, power, and wis-lying motionless at his feet, and believed dom; and each of them had the privilege, by mere adoption, of raising seven other disciples to his own happy state.

The physical new birth was more difficult to obtain, and the unpleasant process had to be repeated as often as every fifty years. The neophyte was to retire into the country, accompanied by a trusty friend, and there live in complete seclusion, paying strict attention to a certain prescribed regimen, for thirty days. On the seventeenth and thirty-second days, the patient was to be bled, and six drops of a white mixture administered, two

In the lodges of this system of Egyptian masonry, communications were established with angels and prophets. To effect this, a child was selected, and termed the dove. Cagliostro, laying his hand upon the dove, blessed and anointed it with the oil of wisdom. The dove was then taken into the tabernacle, and told to look steadfastly into a basin of water, where it would see an angel. The child would then address the angel, and receive corresponding replies, which were carefully recorded. During his trial before the Inquisition at Rome, Cagliostro confessed all his impositions but this common juggling trick, audaciously insisting that it was a gift from God, although he must have well known that a confession would have been less injurious to him than such a daring assertion.

themselves sanctified by touching the hem of his garment. They wore his portrait in rings and brooches, and set up his bust in their houses with the motto Divo Cagliostro-the divine Cagliostro. About this period, Lorenza began to form female lodges of the mystical Egpytian masonry. She was then in the prime of youthful beauty, but by declaring that she was more than eighty years of age, and introducing everywhere, as her son, an accomplice, a captain in the Dutch service, who was not less than fifty, she obtained immense sums in money and jewels from credu

lous old ladies, who wished to have their
youth and beauty restored. By not remain-
ing long in one place, but constantly travelling
about, with a princely retinue of six carriages,
for the purpose of establishing new lodges,
their deceptions were the less readily discover-
ed and exposed. At length, the first Pentagon
was erected at Basle, and about to be opened
with imposing ceremonies, when Cagliostro
was summoned to Paris by his intimate friendly after tasting the fatal food.
the Prince Cardinal Rohan, to take a part in
the well-known but mysterious affair of the
diamond necklace, which implicated the name
and fame of the unfortunate queen, Marie-An-
toinette. On the discovery of this curious
conspiracy, Cagliostro was sent to the Bastile,
where he was confined for nine months, dur-
ing which time the French parliament was
deluged with petitions for his release, from
men of the highest rank, who described him
as a distinguished physician, prophet, and
friend of the human race.

use of powerful antidotes was so well known
to the people of the East, that at Medina they
fattened pigs with arsenic, for the purpose of
destroying tigers. The pig, supplied with
the antidote, was unaffected by the arsenic,
though its flesh was so imbued with the
poison, that when left in the woods, as a bait
for a hungry tiger, the latter, of course, being
unprovided with the antidote, died immediate-
Mourand
having ridiculed this assertion, Cagliostro in-
serted a challenge in the Public Advertiser,
in September 1786. It was to the effect,
that each of them should stake 5,000 guineas;
that Mourand should breakfast with Caglios
tro on a sucking pig fattened with arsenic,
and whichever should be alive the next day,
would win the stakes. Mourand wisely de-
clined this invitation; and the following epi-
gram, among others on the same subject, was
subsequently published in the Advertiser :—

One of his replies, when examined by the attorney-general of France with reference to the necklace affair, is truly characteristic. Being asked by what right he assumed the name and title of Count Cagliostro, he replied:

"I have gone over all Europe by the name of Cagliostro as to the title of count, from the education I have received, the attention paid to me by the Mufti Suleyman, the Cheriff of Mecca, the Grand Master Pinto, Pope Clement, and most of the sovereigns of Europe, you may judge whether that is not more a disguise to conceal what I really am, than a

title of honor."

When liberated from the Bastile, being ordered to leave Paris, he went to Passy, followed by thousands of his dupes. He was then ordered to leave France, and when he embarked at Boulogne, immense numbers kneeled to receive his parting benediction. Arriving a second time in London, he immediately began to found lodges; and being joined by Lord George Gordon, of No-popery notoriety, he soon acquired a multitude of followers. We meet with some curious notices of him in the newspapers of the period; yet in not one of them, and we have looked through several files, do we see him denounced as a charlatan. It was not so in France. M. Mourand, editor of a Parisian newspaper, was a bitter enemy of Cagliostro, and lost no opportunity of exposing his fraudulent pretensions. Like juggler of our own day, Cagliostro pretended that he was proof against the effects of the most potent poisons. He further stated, that the

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Cagliostro gave a somewhat similar challenge in Russia. It appears, when at St. Petersburg, he had spoken disparagingly of the professional knowledge of the czarina's physician. The physician hearing of this, challenged Cagliostro to mortal combat; but the latter declined, saying that an appeal to arms would only decide their courage and skill in the use of weapons, which was beside the question. The question was skill in medicine; and Cagliostro proposed to decide it in the following manner :-He would make a pill, which the physician would swallow, and the physician should make a pill which he (Cagliostro) would swallow; and whichever of the two combatants should be alive an hour afterwards, was to be considered the victor. The Russian refused; but Cagliostro was immediately ordered to leave the territories of the czarina.

After remaining some time in England, Cagliostro again went to the continent, where he travelled about for a short period, till at last his evil destiny led him to Rome. There, being detected in founding lodges of Egyptian masonry, he was arrested, and committed to the dungeons of the Inquisition. After a long and very curious trial, which has been published, he was condemned to death; but the pope commuted his sentence to imprisonment for life in the fortress of St. Leo, where he died in 1795. Lorenza was also sentenced to imprisonment for life in a convent of penitents.

Cagliostro, though small in stature, was well; made, and had a dark but handsome countenance. When speaking in public, his voice and manners were exactly those of a noisy and ostentatious quack. He harangued his disciples with a drawn sword in his right hand, and principally spoke an incomprehensible jargon. In private life, however, he was lively and agreeable; and his great knowledge of

the world, and conversational powers, rendered him an agreeable companion. Some of his letters, written in Italian, to his wife, when he was a prisoner in the Bastile, are preserved in the British Museum. They relate principally to matters connected with his personal comforts, and are no great proof of his acquirements as a scholar.

From Blackwood's Magazine.

NORTH AND THE NOCTES.

venture into the ring once sacred to the grim
yet graceful athlete, victor in a hundred
fights-the combatants pique themselves on
being (ha, ha!) open to conviction, and fight
in the courteous spirit of Aberdeen as War
Minister, and Dundas at Odessa. The stream
of thought, no longer vigorously impelled
through the channel of partisanship, is dif
fused in wide pools over the flats of liberal-
ism and toleration, where public opinion may
hang, Narcissus-like, over its own reflection,
but where there is none of the rush, the rip-
ple, nor the cataract, that lent picturesque-
ness to the earlier course of the flood.
petuosity has given place to a calm, where
no breeze breaks the mirrored images.
so when Maga, heavenly maid, was young.

Im

Not

MAGA is fat, fair, and close on forty. Her, disposition, now mild and motherly, was dashed in youth with a touch of acerbity, sometimes suddenly varying the sweetness of her aspect with a curl of disdain or a gleam of fierceness. Like Pallas, Britomart, Britannia, and other belligerent young virgins, she went forth glorying in her keen weapons and bright armor; she would strike an adversary's shield as Ivanhoe struck Bois-Guilbert's, with the sharp end of her lance till it rung again; and the foe thus challenged would, if a craven, cower out of sight, but if worthy of her steel, would meet her in mid career, and blows were struck with which not only the lists but the whole world reechoed. Now she applauds with equanimity, and chides with tenderness. A certain Crutch, once the terror of evil-doers, after long leaning idle in the chimney corner, is become a treasured relic to be gazed on with reverence, but never more strong to support or swift to smite. Such forbearance, admirably according with the dignity of the matron Maga, and with the stateliness of her full-low richness and melancholy charm of the blown presence, has not been without ill consequences. All Cockaigne echoes with shrill voices like a marsh filled with frogs on a summer's evening. A cockney may no longer be called a cockney, nor a fool a fool, but each must be apostrophized in a polite periphrasis. The chivalry of periodical writing has lost some dash and brilliancy since the laws of the combat place buttons on the foils; the fiercer spirits miss the excitement of the game of earnest-meek men in spectacles

Thirty years ago the world had far other objects of interest than now. That fine elderly gentleman, your father, sir, and that charming old lady, to whom you are equally indebted for your being, whose silvered hair beneath her cap lends beauty to wrinkles, and invests her faded countenance with the mel

later autumn, remember a state of things which appears to us dim and distant as the golden age, or the time when the Saurians wallowed at Brighton. They remember an era previous to the Peace Society, when Brougham, to whom years have brought the philosophic mind, shone with fierce and fitful brightness in the Blue-and-Yellow, coruscating into the most eccentric and many-colored sparks-when Pam was young as well as gay-when the Whigs were acquiring in

stead of losing confidence in Lord Johnwhen Wordsworth's reputation as a poet was still matter of dispute-when Byron had just shot athwart the globe like a meteor, and vanished, leaving mankind still rubbing their eyes, dazzled with the glare-when the novels of Scott perplexed the world with the mystery of their authorship-and when Macaulay, the present poet, politician, essayist, historian, was alluded to as 66 a young gentleman who ought to make a figure in the world."(Noctes, p. 60.)

Well, in those times, from which we have steamed so far ahead, and to see which we look across an abyss deepened by volcanic political changes-Reform bills, Catholic emancipations, Education bills, Repeal of Corn Laws, French empires, and the like yawning fissures,-by revolutions in literature, heralded (not to mention portentous foreign apparitions) by the mournful shade of Tennyson, the genial sprite of Dickens, the dismal prophecies of Thomas Carlyle, and the impish ubiquity of cheap editions; and vast upheavings in science and art, whence have had birth railways, steamboats, photographs, electric telegraphs-there still existed a race of beings known to many in our land by the name of Tories, now recognized principally in fossilized specimens. If a man's heart were fine and his prejudices strong,―if he bore in the main features of his character distinct traces of relationship to the Bayards and De Coverleys,-if his natural refinement caused him to revolt at popular forms of government and their results-such, for instance, as the sad spectacle of a lettered and polished gentleman, proud as Coriolanus, suing, cap in hand, the mob for their most sweet voices-you had a specimen of the better type of Tory; and if to these elements were added scholastic learning, high intellect, rich humor, fine wit, and gorgeous imagination, you had a first-class man of that type. Place that man in a position where he mingles much and intimately with the most distinguished characters of the day, and where his duty no less than his taste impels him to be conversant with all questions of contemporary politics, literature, and artlet his opinions be conveyed in the form of dialogues between characters based in truth but colored by imagination, where philosophy and metaphysics, and public men and measures and poetry, all lightly and forcibly touched with the free hand of a master who can afford to sport with his brush, are relieved by an ever-shifting mosaic background of fun, pathos, and the most marvellous de

scriptions of natural scenery-and you have the first broad idea of Christopher North and his famous Noctes.

In those days when you, dear lady, our own contemporary, with whom womanhood now approaching its high noon-say about half-past eleven-finds some of its early freshness replaced by the mellow ripeness of a sultrier hour, were sucking your coral or your thumb, while on the ceiling, in the wondering gaze of infancy, were fixed those eyes which have since done such dire execution in the breasts of three generations, includingfirst, the present old gentleman who at fifty, after having bemoaned for half his well-spent existence his lost love, charming Betty Careless, married to a rival about the time the Reform Bill was passed, conceived for you a second and enduring passion which he will carry to his octogenarian tomb; secondly, your nearer contemporary, now beginning to lose, in the practice of a rising barrister, the memory of that terrible evening ten years ago, when you civilly declined his proposals under the laurels, through whose leaves, gilded by moonshine, came the tender beams which showed the despair written in his unfortunate face; and thirdly, the sentimental individual who, in his short halt between Eton and Oxford, has succumbed at once to your experienced wiles, half-worrying, halfflattering you with his protestations that "disparity of age is nothing to a passion like his." Well, when your ladyship was sucking your thumb as aforesaid (that thumb against which your last enterprising lover rubbed his nose in a futile attempt to kiss your hand), your ladyship's father and mother, and other grown-up relations and friends of cultivated and discriminating tastes, looked forward from month to month, with an eagerness of which you, inured to patience by a long course of intermittent and hiatical literature, doled forth by Dickens, Lever, Thackeray, and the periodicals, can have but a faint conception, to the publishing of the new Blackwood, in which some lively instinct forewarned them to expect a Noctes where North, Tickler, and the Shepherd, in Titanic sport and revelry, should gladden, inform, and divert their rapt audience with a pathos melting old Miss Backbite into benevolence, with vivid descriptions restoring to Mr. Omnium of the Stock Exchange a temporary boyhood, and with passages of mirth forcing the rusty corners of old Billy Roller's mouth to relax into a stern smile (the only one that had distorted that feature since the last rise in cottons), but which must be carefully skipt in reading the

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