Nostradamus was born at St. Remy, a town of Provence, in 1503, and was a great friend of Julius Scaliger. He must thus have been likewise a cotemporary of the famous alchymist Cornelius Agrippa, whom, as we have seen (Vide Introd. Remarks), Del-Rio makes a companion of Dr. Faust. Like a worthy son of the sixteenth century, Nostradamus was convinced that he could make no progress in the art of healing bodily diseases unless he began ab ovo with the study of the stars; and this it was that led him away from his own profession of medicine into the sublime regions of astronomy and astrology, to which allusion is made in the text. He was particularly famous for his prophetic almanacs, which were held in universal estimation. The title of his principal work is “The true Prophecies and Prognostications of Michael Nostradamus, physician to Henry II., Francis II., Charles IX., Kings of France, and one of the best astronomers that ever were, a work full of curiosity and learning.” The English translation is from the hand of Theophilus de Garenciennes, a naturalised Frenchman, and Oxonian Doctor of Physic. The common edition is London, 1672.

The macrocosm is a Greek word signifying the big world, the universe, as contrasted with the little world, the microcosm or man, made in the likeness of God, and therefore in the likeness of his great manifestation, the universe. The terms were in familiar use with the theosophists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; as may be seen from the title-page of a great physico-metaphysical book by our countryman, Robert Fludd, printed at Oppenheim 1617-19, “Utriusque Cosmi, majoris scilicet et minoris, Metaphysica, Physica atque technica Historia, in duo volumina, secundum, Cosmi differentiam divisa; auctore Roberto Fludd, alias de Fluctibus, Armigero, et in Medicina Doctore Oxoniensi,” etc. The book is rare; but the curious may find a beautiful copy in the Library of the Writers to the Signet, Edinburgh.

Solomon was a magician among the Jews, for the same reason that Roger Bacon has acquired that reputation amongst us—on account of his great wisdom. The Jewish exorcists, of whom mention is made in several passages of the New Testament (Matthew xii. 27), used to invoke the evil spirit by the name of Solomon (Joseph. Antiq. 8, 2, 5, apud Bretschneider Dogmatik, vol. i. p. 764), and the cabalistic talmudists were, of course, not negligent in taking advantage of this popular belief for giving authority to their occult science of numbers. Accordingly, we find Solomon, in the Middle Ages, looked upon as the patriarch and patron-saint of the Magic Art; and many curious books, under his name, were in common circulation among its Professors. It is to the title of these books that the text alludes, “Clavicula Solomonis,” or Key of Solomon, supposed to be of supreme power in compelling spirits to obey the will of man. They are now become exceedingly rare, but some notice of them will be found in Reichard’s work von Geistern, and in Horst’s Zauber-Bibliothek.

Here we have the four elemental spirits, of which Mr. Pope has discoursed so learnedly to Mrs. Anabella Fermor in his preface to “The Rape of the Lock.” With Silphs and Salamanders I may suppose the English reader sufficiently acquainted, as they have been almost naturalised on British ground; Undenes and Kobolds still remain more closely attached to their German soil. The former, sometimes called Wasser-Nixen, are a sort of Teutonic Nymphs or Sirens, familiar now to a large class of English readers, from Heine’s ballad of the Lurley, and Fouque’s beautiful extravaganza of Undine; the latter, seemingly from a Greek original, ??a???, well known to the readers of Aristophanes, are called gnomes by Pope, and appear as brownies in many a Scotch ballad. For special details of their character and proceedings the German work of Henning’s von Geistern may be consulted, p. 800, and Horst’s Zauber-Bibliothek, vol. iv. p. 250.

“Jam experimento comprobatum est nullum malum dÆmonem, nullum inferiorum virtutum, in his quÆ vexant aut obsident homines, posse huic nomini resistere quando nomen Jesu debitÂ, pronunciatione illis proponitur venerandum; nec solum nomen, sed etiam illius signaculum Crucem pavent.”—Agrippa de Occult. Philos., lib. iii. c. 12.

“Inter alios plurimos characteres, duo tantum sunt veri et prÆcipui, quorum primus constat ex duobus trigonis super se invicem ita depictis ut Hexagonum constituant. Alterum dicunt esse priori potentiorem et efficaciorem et esse pentagonon.”—Paracelsus de Characteribus apud Horst, Z. B. vol. iii. p. 74. The figure thus accurately described by the oracular Bombastus occurs almost as frequently as the sign of the cross, in almost all the old books on magic, and is drawn thus:

The Platonists (let Proclus serve for an example) seem to have derived from the Pythagoreans a strange mixture of religious mysticism with a great enthusiasm for the mathematical sciences; and this same pentagonal figure very probably derives not a little of its supreme efficacy from the fact of its having been transmitted to us from the most ancient times. Poetry is not the only thing that receives a sacredness from age.

“Rippach is a village near Leipzig; and to ask for Hans von Rippach, a fictitious personage, was an old joke amongst the students. The ready reply of Mephistopheles, indicating no surprise, shows Siebel and Altmayer that he is up to it. Hans is the German Jack.”—Hayward.

These nimble little animals, which play such a distinguished part in this Witch Scene, are denominated in the original “Meer-katzen,” literally “Sea-cats;” of which Adelung (in voce) gives the following account:—“A name given to a certain kind of monkeys with a cat’s tail, of which there are many species,—Cebus, LinnÆi. They are so called from coming across the sea from warm countries.” I originally intended to retain the German phrase “Sea-cat;” but afterwards had no hesitation to adopt the happy translation given by the writer in Blackwood’s Magazine, vol. vii. There is something mystical in the idea of an animal half cat and half ape, which agrees wonderfully with the witch-like antic character of this whole scene. Besides, the term “Cat-ape” is far more expressive of the nature of the animal than that in the original.

A German custom prevalent among the common people, when they suspect the virginity of a bride. The ceremony is performed on the day before the marriage.—Vide Adelung in voce HÄckerling.

“Sir Urian is a name which was formerly used to designate an unknown person, or one whose name, even if it were known, it was not thought proper to mention. In this sense it was sometimes applied to the devil. In the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the unprincipled Prince of Partartois is called Urian.”—Bayard Taylor.

“According to the orthodox theory, the witches anointed their whole body with a salve or ointment prepared in the name of the fiend, murmured a few magic sentences into their beard, and then flew up, body and soul, head and hair, actually and corporeally into the air.”—Horst’s DÆmonomagie, vol. ii. p. 203.

A name of Satan, derived probably from the Latin Volo, through the Italian Volante, expressive of that agile quality of the old deceiver, whereby he is always “going to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down in it.”—Job i. 7. See Reichard’s Geister Reich, vol. i. p. 397. But I rather suspect this appellation is connected with the office of the evil one, as chief of the flies, and other volatile tormentors. In the French edition of the popular story the devil is called “Le Diable volatique,” c. vi.;—or, better still, the devil is so called as being “the prince of the power of the air,” and therefore a flying spirit. “Mon Valet, dis moi quel esprit es-tu?—Mon Maistre Faust, je suis un esprit Volant, qui ay mon cours dans l’air sous le ciel”—in the same French history of Doctor Faust.

Lilith, from Lil, darkness, is the name of night-monster (translated screech-owl in Isaiah xxxiv. 14), who, under the deceitful form of a beautiful woman, was believed by the Jews to be most injurious to parturient women, and very often to occasion the death of young persons before they were circumcised. Buxtorf, in his Lexicon Talmudicum, gives a tolerably good account of these Hebrew LamiÆ; but the most complete and satisfactory information on this, as on all other subjects connected with ancient and modern superstition, is to be found in Horst, Zauber-Bibliothek, part vi. pp. 42 and 86.

It is universally agreed that Nicolai, a noted Berlin publisher, who flourished about the middle and towards the end of the last century, is the person meant here. From his biography by GÖcking, he appears to have been a man of remarkable mental activity and considerable literary significance in his day; but, like the Brandenburg sands on which he was located, his ideas seemed to have been somewhat flat and prosaic, and totally inadequate to grasp the significance of the great master spirits of thought, who were now asserting their rightful place on the platform of German literature. Notwithstanding the prosaic character of his mind, he became subject to a disease of seeing apparitions in clear daylight (see Dr. Hibbert’s book on apparitions), an abnormal action of the optic nerves, which was cured by the application of leeches to the part of the body on which the unfeathered biped finds it comfortable to sit. Hence the name, from the Greek p???t??.

Most of the puppet personages who pop up in this curious little piece, and explain their own significance in a stanza, may be presumed to be sufficiently familiar to all readers capable of appreciating the mind of a poetical thinker such as Goethe. I confine myself to the few following notes:—

Embryo-Spirit.—German “Geist der sich erst bildet.” A quiz upon young versifiers,—poetlings with whom rhyme and reason are opposite poles.

Orthodox.—We are indebted to the Fathers of the Church for the pious imagination that the heathen gods were devils. Milton follows the same unfounded idea. The gods of Greece were bad enough; but we need not make them worse than they were. They had their good side too. Vide Schiller’s beautiful poem, “The Gods of Greece,” which, by the by, Frantz Horn calls “Ein unendlicher Irrthum,”—an infinite error. But a man may admire an Apollo or a Minerva without meaning to be a heathen.

Purists.—There are “purists” among the German grammarians; but the allusion here must be to something else—prigs and precisians, I fancy.

Xenien.—Epigrammatic poems published by Goethe and Schiller, which were very severe on the half-poets of the day.

Hennings.—I know nothing of this character. Hayward says he was one of the victims of the Xenien, and editor of two periodicals, “The Genius of the Age,” and the “Musaget.”

The stiff man is Nicolai; he of the “old mill,” supra, p. 251. Nicolai was a great zealot against Catholics and Jesuits; but, as Frantz Horn hints, his zeal was not always according to knowledge.—Geschichte der Deutschen Poesie, vol. iii.

The Crane, I believe, is Lavater.

“This song is founded upon a popular German story, to be found in the Kinder-und Haus-MÄrchen of the distinguished brothers Grimm, under the title of Van den Machandel-Boom, and in the English selection from that work (entitled German Popular Stories), under the title of The Juniper Tree.—The wife of a rich man, whilst standing under a juniper tree, wishes for a little child as white as snow and as red as blood; and, on another occasion, expresses a wish to be buried under the juniper when dead. Soon after, a little boy as white as snow and as red as blood is born: the mother dies of joy at beholding it, and is buried according to her wish. The husband marries again, and has a daughter. The second wife, becoming jealous of the boy, murders him, and serves him up at table for the unconscious father to eat. The father finishes the whole dish, and throws the bones under the table. The little girl, who is made the innocent assistant in her mother’s villany, picks them up, ties them in a silk handkerchief, and buries them under the juniper tree. The tree begins to move its branches mysteriously, and then a kind of cloud rises from it, a fire appears in the cloud, and out of the fire comes a beautiful bird, which flies about singing the following song:—

[THE END.]