Feats of Jugglers formerly attributed to witchcraft—Anglo-Saxon Gleemen—Norman Jugglers or Tregatours—Chaucer’s Description of the Wonders performed by them—Means probably employed by them—Recipe for making the Appearance of a Flood—Jugglers fashionable in the Reign of Charles II.—Evelyn’s Account of a Fire-eater—Katterfelto—Superiority of Asiatic and Eygptian pretenders to magical Skill—Mandeville’s Account of Juggling at the Court of the Great Khan—Extraordinary Feats witnessed by the Emperor Jehanguire—Ibn Batuta’s Account of Hindustanee Jugglers—Account of a Bramin who sat upon the Air—Egyptian Jugglers—Mr. Lane’s Account of the Performance of one of them—Another fails in satisfying Captain Scott.

The mountebanks who now exhibit on the travelling stage or cart, and whose buffoonery pleases only the clown, were formerly thought to practise witchcraft, or deal with some unlawful powers.

The joculators, jugglours, or tregatours, of the Normans, were men of much higher pretensions than the gleemen. Some of the delusions which they practised could not have been performed without considerable scientific knowledge. We have the authority of Chaucer for the fact, that they “cheated the eyes with blear illusion,” in a manner which may excuse ignorant spectators for having attributed the effect to supernatural means. “In a large hall they will,” says he, “produce water with boats rowed up and down upon it. Sometimes they will bring in the similitude of a grim lion, or make flowers spring up in a meadow; sometimes they cause a vine to flourish, bearing white and red grapes; or show a castle built with stone, and when they please they cause the whole to disappear.” He tells us, too, of a “learned clerk, who showed to a friend forests filled with wild deer, where he saw an hundred of them slain, some with hounds and some with arrows; the hunting being finished, a company of falconers appeared upon the banks of a fair river, where the birds pursued the herons and slew them. He then saw knights jousting upon a plain,” and, which was a more attractive sight, “the resemblance of his beloved lady dancing, which occasioned him to dance also.” But when “the maister that this magike wrought thought fit, he clapped his hands together, and all was gone in an instante.” Another feat, which he describes as having himself witnessed, is still more striking:

It is probable that the deceptive effect was produced by the magic lantern, and the concave mirror. With respect to the method “to make the appearance of a flode of water to come into a house,” the following recipe has been gravely handed down to us from our ancestors:—steep a thread in the liquor produced from snake’s eggs bruised, and hang it up over a basin of water in the place where the trick is to be performed. Recipes of this kind were perhaps meant to mislead those who wished to penetrate the mystery.

In the reign of Charles the Second, jugglers appear to have been in much repute with the great. In the “Diary” of Evelyn, under the date of October 8th, 1672, we find the following notice: “I tooke my leave of my Lady Sunderland; she made me stay dinner at Leicester House, and afterwards sent for Richardson, the famous fire-eater. He melted a beer-glass, and eat it quite up; then, taking a live coal on his tongue, he put on it a raw oyster; the coal was blown on with bellows, till it flamed and sparkled in his mouth, and so remained, till the oyster gasped and was quite boiled; then he melted pitch and wax with sulphur, which he drank down as it flamed; I saw it flaming in his mouth a good while. He also took up a thick piece of iron, like an ironing heater, and, when fiery-hot, held it between his teeth, then in his hand, and threw it about like a stone; but this, I believe, he cared not to hold very long.” Lady Sunderland seemed fond of such exhibitions, as Mr. Evelyn recounts on another occasion, that “dining with Lady Sunderland, I saw a fellow swallow a knife, and divers great pebble stones, which could make a plain rattling one against another; the knife was in sheath of horn.”

Katterfelto, described by Cowper, as

was a compound of conjuror and quack-doctor, and seems at one time to have enjoyed a great repute in his way. He practised on the people of London, during the influenza of the year 1782, and added to his nostrums the fascination of hocus-pocus. Among other philosophical apparatus, he employed the services of some extraordinary black cats, with which he astonished the ignorant, and confounded the vulgar. He was not so successful out of London; as he was committed, by the Mayor of Shrewsbury, to the common house of correction, as a vagrant and impostor.

But, though European jugglers have manifested great skill in the various branches of their art, they appear to be far exceeded by those of other parts of the world. Clavigero describes many of the performances of Mexican professors; and adds that “the first Spaniards who were witnesses of these and other exhibitions of the Mexicans were so much astonished at their agility, that they suspected some supernatural power assisted them.”

It is, however, in the Asiatic and African quarters of the globe that the art of deluding the eye by false presentments is to be found in its perfection. Sir John Mandeville gives an account of an exhibition, which took place before the Great Khan; “And be it done by craft, or by nicromancy,” says he, “I wot not.” That, in an unenlightened age, he should doubt whether “nicromancy” had not something to do with such wonders is not astonishing. “They make,” he tells us, “the appearance of the sun and the moon in the air; and then they make the night so dark, that nothing can be seen; and again they restore the daylight, and the sun shining brightly. Then they bring in dances of the fairest damsels of the world, and the richest arrayed. Afterwards they make other damsels to come in, bringing cups of gold, full of the milk of divers animals, and give drink to the lords and ladies; and then they make knights joust in arms full lustily, who run together, and in the encounter break their spears so rudely, that the splinters fly all about the hall. They also bring in a hunting of the hart and of the boar, with hounds running at them open-mouthed; and many other things they do by the craft of their enchantments, that are marvellous to see.”

Mandeville has the reputation, not justly in every instance, of being such “a measureless liar,” that his evidence in this case may, perhaps, excite incredulity; but we must hesitate to disbelieve the old traveller, when we find that similar, or even greater wonders are attested by an unexceptionable witness, no less a personage than Jehanguire, the Emperor of Hindustan. In his Autobiography, that monarch enumerates no less than twenty-eight tricks, which were played by Bengalee jugglers before him and his court, and at which he expresses, as well he might, the utmost astonishment. One of them, that of cutting a man in pieces, and then producing him alive and perfect, resembles a trick which Ibn Batuta saw long before in China. Another was the putting of seeds of curious trees into the earth, which speedily grew to the height of two or three feet, and bore fruit. This was repeated at Madras, not many years ago, on the lawn before the Government-house. A mango stone was put into the ground, which, to all appearance, rapidly sprung up into a fruit-bearing tree. Another of the tricks exhibited before the emperor is equally marvellous: “They produced a chain fifty cubits in length, and in my presence threw one end of it towards the sky, where it remained, as if fastened to something in the air. A dog was then brought forward, and, being placed at the lower end of the chain, immediately ran up, and, reaching the other end, immediately disappeared in the air. In the same manner, a hog, a panther, a lion, and a tiger, were alternately sent up the chain, and all equally disappeared at the upper end of the chain. At last, they took down the chain and put it into a bag, no one ever discerning in what way the different animals were made to vanish into the air, in the mysterious manner above described. This, I may venture to affirm, was beyond measure strange and surprising.”

Ibn Batuta (the celebrated traveller, who has been called the Mahometan Marco Polo of the fourteenth century), to whom a reference has already been made, narrates delusions of the same kind, of which he was an eye-witness. He informs us that, when he was once in the presence of the Emperor of Hindustan, two Yogees came in, whom the monarch desired to show him what he had never yet seen. They said, “‘We will.’ One of them then assumed the form of a cube, and arose from the earth, and, in this cubic shape, he occupied a place in the air over our heads. I was so much astonished and terrified at this, that I fainted and fell to the earth. The emperor then ordered me some medicine which he had with him, and, upon taking this, I recovered and sat up; this cubic figure still remaining in the air just as it had been. His companion then took a sandal, belonging to one of those who had come out with him, and struck it upon the ground as if he had been angry. The sandal then ascended until it became opposite in situation with the cube. It then struck it upon the neck, and the cube gradually descended to the earth, and at last rested in the place it had left. The emperor then told me that the man who took the form of a cube was a disciple to the owner of the sandal. ‘And,’ continued he, ‘had I not entertained fears for the safety of thy intellect, I should have ordered him to show thee greater things than these.’ From this, however, I took a palpitation of the heart, until the emperor ordered me a medicine, which restored me.”

It is not more than seven years since a Bramin died at Madras, who was accustomed to perform apparently the difficult feat of sitting on the air. He did not exhibit for money, but merely as an act of courtesy. Forty minutes is said to have been the longest time that he ever remained in this extraordinary situation; the usual time seems to have been about twelve minutes. An eye-witness thus describes the act and the preparation for it: “The only apparatus seen is a piece of plank, which, with four pegs, he forms into a kind of long stool; upon this, in a little brass saucer or socket, he places, in a perpendicular position, a hollow bamboo, over which he puts a kind of crutch, like that of a walking-crutch, covering that with a piece of common hide; these materials he carries with him in a little bag, which is shown to those who come to see him exhibit. The servants of the house hold a blanket before him, and, when it is withdrawn, he is discovered poised in the air, about four feet from the ground, in a sitting attitude, the outer edge of one hand merely touching the crutch; the fingers of that hand deliberately counting beads; the other hand and arm held up in an erect posture. The blanket was then held up before him, and they heard a gurgling noise, like that occasioned by wind escaping from a bladder or tube, and, when the screen was withdrawn, he was again standing on terra firma. The same man has the power of staying under water for several hours. He declines to explain how he does it, merely saying he has been long accustomed to do so.”

The Bramin died without communicating his secret, and though attempts were made to explain it, none of them were satisfactory. It was asserted by a native that it is treated of in the Shasters, and depends upon the art of fully suppressing the breath, and of cleansing the tubular organs of the body, joined to a peculiar mode of drawing, retaining, and ejecting the breath—an explanation which leaves the mystery as dark as ever.

Egypt, which, more than thirty centuries ago, produced men so confident of their magical skill as to venture to emulate the miracles of Moses, still has pretenders to preternatural powers. The modern magicians seem by no means to be a degenerate race. One of their modes of delusion is “the magic mirror of ink,” and the address with which they manage the trick is really wonderful, and, indeed, inexplicable. It is performed by pouring ink into the hand of a boy not arrived at puberty, an unmarried woman, or a woman who is “as ladies wish to be who love their lords.” The boy is told to look into the ink, and to say what he sees. Mr. Lane, in his recent valuable work on Egypt, has described the operation, and he declares his utter inability to account for the result. “After some preliminary ceremonies had been gone through, the magician,” says he, “addressed himself to me, and asked me if I wished the boy to see any person who was absent or dead. I named Lord Nelson, of whom the boy had evidently never heard; for it was with much difficulty he pronounced the name, after several trials. The magician desired the boy to say to the Sooltan, ‘My master salutes thee, and desires thee to bring Lord Nelson: bring him before my eyes, that I may see him, speedily.’ The boy then said so; and almost immediately added, ‘A messenger is gone, and has returned, and has brought a man, dressed in a black[15] suit of European clothes; the man has lost his left arm.’ He then paused for a moment or two, and, looking more intently and more closely into the ink, he said, ‘No, he has not lost his left arm, but it is placed to his breast.’ This correction made his description more striking than it had been without it; since Lord Nelson generally had his empty sleeve attached to his coat: but it was the right arm that he had lost. Without saying that I suspected the boy had made a mistake, I asked the magician whether the objects appeared in the ink as if actually before the eyes, or as if in a glass, which makes the right appear left. He answered, that they appeared as in a mirror. This rendered the boy’s description faultless.” Mr. Lane adds, “A short time since, after performing in the usual manner, by means of a boy, he prepared the magic mirror in the hand of a young English lady, who, on looking into it for a little while, said that she saw a broom sweeping the ground without any body holding it, and was so much frightened that she would look no longer.” To make this appearance understood, it must be mentioned, that the first thing seen in the mirror is the sweeping of the ground by a broom. In the case of Lord Nelson, however, the broom was in the hands of a man. The boy is said not to have been a confederate of the magician.

The same experiment was tried, at another time, in the presence of Captain Scott; but, in this instance, the conjuror seems to have been less a proficient in his trade than the one who was employed by Mr. Lane, and the result was unsatisfactory to the captain.

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