368 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



tion. 'Tis fit to be inquired whether certain rules may be 

 made of it as n. grad. Loud, variat. alibi, 36, etc., and 

 that which is more prodigious, the variation varies in the 

 same place, now taken accurately, 'tis so much after a few 

 years quite altered from what it was : till we have better 

 intelligence, let our Dr. Gilbert and Nicholas Cabaeus the 

 Jesuit, that have both written great volumes on this sub- 

 ject, satisfy these inquisitors." 1 



Burton, however, has much to say about the Coperni- 

 cans, and he knows Gilbert best as a defender of their 

 theory, which he classes among the causes of melancholy. 

 It is in "sober sadness," he says, that he finds Digges and 

 Gilbert and Kepler defending the notion that the earth is 

 a moon, a conception which makes one u giddy vertiginous 

 and lunatic within this sublunary maze." 



But Ben Jonson, in perhaps closer touch with London 

 life than the Leicestershire clergyman, discovers that the 

 making of terrellas into playthings for Tuscan Grand 

 Dukes, like other fads Italian, was being widely copied 

 among English aristocracy, and that magnetism and its 

 wonders were therefore beginning to interest the people 

 generally. Therefore he wrote his comedy, "The Mag- 

 netic Lady," wherein the heroine, "Lady Lodestone," 



"Draws and draws unto you guests of all sorts, 

 The courtiers, and the soldiers, and the scholars, 

 The travelers, physicians and divines, 

 As Doctor Ridley wrote, and Dpctor Barlowe." 



and which ends with the happy union of the magnet and 

 armature. 



"More work then for the parson. I shall cap 

 The Lodestone with an Ironside, I see " 2 



1 Burton : Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, \ 2, Mem. 3. The fii 

 edition of this work appeared in 1621, and five editions of it appeared ii 

 Burton's lifetime, which ended in 1639. The reference to Cabseus in tl 

 last sentence of the quotation shows that this clause at least was writtt 

 after the appearance of the Philosophia Magnetica in 1629. 



2 The date of this play is 1632. 



