60 Human Levitation. (January, 
performed mass, which at length he was forbidden to do 
publicly. His aérial flights, and more frequent trances, to 
which he had been subject from the age of eight, continued, 
the former to his last year, and the latter to his last day, in 
1663, at Osima. Four biographers soon published memoirs 
of him, one at least during the life and with the approbation 
of Prince John’s widow,* a Bavarian princess whom he 
married in 1668, after becoming Duke of Hanover. 
With the unfortunate Bonaventure of Potenza, buried 
alive by his devotees in 1711, seems to have ended the series 
of saints (and such they undoubtedly were) in whom this 
phenomenon of levity was inseparable from their devotions ; 
and about the same time we disposed of our last witch— 
Protestantism, though finding no saints to canonise, having, 
through its first two centuries, thousands of witches to burn. 
And this must never be left out of account as bearing on the 
present rarity of these phenomena. ‘They are rarer than in 
any century before the last, because hereditary psychics are 
rarer; necessarily after so persistent an attempt at their ex- 
termination. The mother of the Eddy family is said to be 
great-granddaughter of one of those condemned in girlhood 
at Salem, in Massachusetts, but who broke prison. We may 
conceive the artificial clearing of our race from psychics to 
be as possible as was the clearing the vertebrate kingdom of 
the dodo; and if—as might have happened by a few Biblical 
words being slightly better translated—our ancestors, two 
centuries back, had killed fewer of them by 30,000, would 
there not naturally be now several times 30,000 more of 
them in the world than at present ? 
It should be noted, respecting the Prince of Brunswick, 
that whatever power or intelligence superintended those 
miracles, that power showed great ignorance of the future. 
At the time, indeed, no conversion could seem more impor- 
tant to the interests of Catholicism than that of this young 
German sovereign, but eventually it appeared that any other 
ruler would have had more permanent influence. In fact, 
all public effect of his pious dispositions absolutely ended 
with his life in twenty-nine years. Though he lived till 
* « The biographers were Nutius, Agellus, Pastrovicchi,and Bernino. Late 
editions of the two latter are in the British Museum, and have frontispieces in 
each of which Joseph hovers in the air, in one before the top of a tall calvary ; 
in the other borne forward fifty paces at sight of the church of Loretto. Pas- 
trovicchi says, in page 87 of this edition:—‘‘Attesta la Serenissima di 
Brunswik ancor viva mentre questo Libro scriviamo, qualmente in quella 
Corte a tempo del Duca Gio: Frederico suo Marito, Non ci faceva oltro, che 
parlare del servo di Dio, Padve Fra Guiseppe da Copertino, al quale egli con- 
seyvava una lenerissima divozione, ¢ ne aveva l'Effigie,” &c. 
