34 SIR PETTRONELL FLASH. 



The candles were as yet not lighted. Mr. P., like a true " fire 

 worshipper," was burning his shins to his perfect satisfaction, the 

 table was close to his chair, his chair close to the fire; but there 

 was not that abandonment in his reclining figure which marks 

 the idle man, in his easy chair ; there was a compression and 

 twitching of the lips, an epileptic sort of stare, a rigidity of the 

 whole frame, which betrayed a moral abstraction, to which Mr. 

 P. was not accustomed. Who this mysterious Sir Pettronell was 

 the little man had been quite unsuccessful in discovering, and 

 his perturbed spirit even now vibrated under the misery of un- 

 satisfied curiosity. Who can he be, most inexplicable man, the 

 name familiar to no one. Who can he be, murmured the vexed 

 bibliopole. Here Mr. P. lighted the candles, and opened the 

 manuscript papers left by Sir Pettronell ; to judge by the several 

 titles, the papers offered the most agreeable repast, such as *** 

 *** -K-** ***• but as things must have a beginning (from the 

 creation of the world to the unities of Aristotle), Mr. P., with all 

 worldly wisdom, desired to be acquainted with the host before 

 he partook of the entertainment. We therefore begin — in the 

 beginning was chaos — " rudis indigestaque males." How know 

 you all this, do you ask ? How do I know ! If you please, 

 suppose that I had the cloak of Mephistophiles, or " as quaint 

 Ariel, like to a nymph of the sea, subject to no sight, invisible 

 to every eye-ball" — or perched with Asmodeus on the glowing 

 ball of St. Paul's, or even astride the little critic's chair, peering 

 over his shoulder, for " we have the receipt of fern seed."* 



Z. 



* It may not generally be known that to several plants, the old herbalists 

 attached a magical power ; thus the vervain, Verbenoe officinalis, was given to 

 conciliate friendship, and hence Shakspeare alludes to the power of the fern- seed 

 in bestowing invisibility. John Parkinson, in his Theatrum Botannicum, 1640, 

 thus curiously describes the magical virtues of the Felix mas vulgare : — " The 

 seed, which this and the female fern do beare, are to be gathered only on Mid- 

 summer eve, at night, with I know not what conjuring words, is superstitiously 

 held by divers, not only mountebanks and quack-salvers, but by other learned men, 

 to be of some great secret hidden virtue" — (see Tribe 10 Felices, page 1039) ; but 

 if the age of charms is gone by, and even his present Majesty King William "of 

 blessed memory," forgets to cure his people's " evils" by " touching them," and 

 though we no longer weave the tapering vervain into a pyladean cestus for an 

 amiciciary tie, still are our minds linked to superstitions which seem the physico- 

 spiritual chain between time and eternity. 



" Hominibus vitae finis mors non 

 Autem superstitiones."— Plin. 



