The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campell

I am not unacquainted, that, ever since this book was first promised by way of advertisement to the world, it was greedily coveted by a great many persons of airy tempers, for the same reason that it has been condemned by those of a more formal class, who thought it was calculated partly to introduce a great many new and diverting curiosities in the way of superstition, and partly to divulge the secret intrigues and amours of one part of the sex, to give the other part room to make favourite scandal the subject of their discourse; and so to make one half of the fair species very merry, over the blushes and the mortifications of the other half. But when they come to read the following sheets, they will find their expectations disappointed, but I hope I may say too, very agreeably disappointed. They will find a much more elegant entertainment than they expected. Instead of making them a bill of fare out of patchwork romances of polluting scandal, the good old gentleman who wrote the Adventures of my Life, has made it his business to treat them with a great variety of entertaining passages, which always terminate in morals that tend to the edification of all readers, of whatsoever sex, age, or profession. Instead of seducing young, innocent, unwary minds into the vicious delight which is too often taken in reading the gay and bewitching chimeras of the cabalists, and in perusing the enticing fables of new-invented tricks of superstition, my ancient friend, the writer, strikes at the very root of these superstitions, and shows them how they may be satisfied in their several curiosities, by having recourse to me, who by the talent of the second-sight, which he so beautifully represents, how nature is so kind frequently to implant in the minds of men born in the same climate with myself, can tell you those things naturally, which when you try to learn yourselves, you either run the hazard of being imposed upon in your pockets by cheats, gipsies, and common fortune-tellers, or else of being imposed upon in a still worse way, in your most lasting welfare, by having recourse to conjurors or enchanters that deal in black arts, and involve all their consulters in one general partnership of their execrable guilt; or, lastly, of imposing worst of all upon your own selves, by getting into an itch of practising and trying the little tricks of female superstition, which are often more officiously handed down by the tradition of credulous nurses and old women, from one generation to another, than the first principles of Christian doctrine, which it is their duty to instil early into little children. But I hope when this book comes to be pretty generally read among you ladies, as by your generous and numerous subscriptions I have good reason to expect, that it will afford a perfect remedy and a thorough cure to that distemper, which first took its rise from too great a growth of curiosity, and too large a stock of credulity nursed prejudicially up with you in your more tender and infant years.

Whatever young maid hereafter has an innocent but longing desire to know who shall be her husband, and what time she shall be married, will, I hope, when she has read the following sheets of a man that can set her right in the knowledge of those points, purely by possessing the gift of the second sight, sooner have recourse innocently to such a man than use unlawful means to acquire it, such as running to conjurors to have his figure shown in their enchanted glasses, or using any of those traditional superstitions, by which they may dream of their husbands, or cause visionary shapes of them to appear on such and such festival nights of the year; all which practices are not ordinarily wicked and impious, but downright diabolical. I hope that the next 29th of June, which is St. John Baptist's day, I shall not see the several pasture fields adjacent to this metropolis, especially that behind Montague House, thronged, as they were the last year, with well dressed young ladies crawling busily up and down upon their knees, as if they were a parcel of weeders, when all the business is to hunt superstitiously after a coal under the root of a plantain, to put under their heads that night, that they may dream who should be their husbands. In order to shame them out of this silly but guilty practice, I do intend to have some spies out on that day, that shall discover who they are, and what they have been about; and I here give notice to the public, that this ill-acted comedy, if it be acted at all this year, must begin according to the rule of their superstition, on that day precisely at the hour of twelve. And so much for the pretty weeders. But as you, ladies, have had several magical traditions delivered to you, which, if you put in exercise and practice, will be greatly prejudicial to your honour and your virtue, let me interpose my counsels, which will conduct you innocuously to the same end, which some ladies have laboured to arrive at by these impieties. Give me leave first to tell you, that though what you aim at may be arrived to by these means, yet these means make that a miserable fortune which would have been a good one; because, in order to know human things beforehand, you use preternatural mediums, which destroy the goodness of the courses, which nature herself was taking for you, and annexes to them diabolical influences, which commonly carry along with them fatalities in this world as well as the next. You will, therefore, give me your pardon likewise, ladies, if I relate some other of these practices, which bare relation of itself, after what I have said before, seems to me sufficient to explode them.

Another of the nurse's prescriptions is this: upon a St. Agnes's night, the 21st day of January, take a row of pins and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Pater Noster, or Our Father, sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of her you shall marry. Ben Johnson, in one of his masks, makes some mention of this:

Now what can be more infinitely profane than to use the prayer our Lord instituted in such a way?

There is another prescription, which is as follows: You must lie in another county, and knit the left garter about the right-legged stocking, let the other garter and stocking alone, and as you rehearse these following verses, at every comma, knit a knot: —

Accordingly in your dream you will see him: if a musician, with a lute or other instrument; if a scholar, with a book, &c. Now I appeal to you, ladies, what a ridiculous prescription is this? But yet as slight a thing as it is, it may be of great importance if it be brought about, because then it must be construed to be done by preternatural means, and then those words are nothing less than an application to the devil.

Mr. Aubrey, of the Royal Society, says, a gentlewoman, that he knew, confessed in his hearing that she used this method, and dreamt of her husband whom she had never seen. About two or three years after, as she was one Sunday at church, up pops a young Oxonian in the pulpit; she cries out presently to her sister, this is the very face of the man I saw in my dream. Sir William Somes's lady did the like.

Another way is to charm the moon thus, as the old nurses give out, at the first appearance of the moon, after New-year's-day, some say any other new moon is as good, go out in the evening, and stand over the spars of a gate or stile, looking on the moon (here remark that in Yorkshire they kneel on a ground-fast stone) and say,

You must presently after go to bed. The aforesaid Mr. Aubrey knew two gentlewomen that did thus when they were young maids, and they had dreams of those that married them.

But a great many of the wittiest part of your sex laugh at these common superstitions; but then they are apt to run into worse: they give themselves up to the reading of the cabalistical systems of sylphs, and gnomes, and mandrakes, which are very wicked and delusive imaginations.

I would not have you imagine, ladies, that I impute these things as infirmities and frailties peculiar to your sex. No; men, and great men too, and scholars, and even statesmen, and princes themselves, have been tainted with superstitions, and where they infect the minds of such great personages, they make the deeper impression, according to the stronger and more manly ideas they have of them. Their greater degree of strength in the intellect only subjects them to greater weaknesses; such was even the great Paracelsus, the wonder and miracle of learning in the age wherein he lived, and such were all his followers, scholars, statesmen, divines, and princes, that are talismanists.

These talismans that Paracelsus pretends to owe to the excogitation and invention of honest art, seem to me to be of a very diabolical nature, and to owe their rise to being dedicated by the author to the heathen gods. Thus the cabalists pretending to a vast penetration into arts and sciences, though all their thoughts are chimeras and extravagancies, unless they be helped by preternatural means, say they have found out the several methods appropriated to the several planets. They have appropriated gold to the sun on the Sunday, silver to the moon on the Monday, iron to Mars on the Tuesday, quicksilver to Mercury on the Wednesday, tin to Jupiter on the Thursday, copper or brass to Venus on the Friday, and lead to Saturn on the Saturday. The methods they take in forming these talismans are too long to dwell upon here. But the properties which they pretend belong to them are, that the first talisman or seal of the sun will make a man beloved by all princes and potentates, and cause him to abound with all the riches his heart can wish. The second preserves travellers from danger, and is favourable to merchants, tradesmen, and workmen. The third carries destruction to any place where it is put: and it is said that a certain great minister of state ordered one of these to be carried into England in the times of the revolution of government caused by Oliver Cromwell. The fourth they pretend cures fevers and other diseases; and if it be put under the bolster, it makes the proprietor have true dreams, in which he sees all he desires to know. The fifth, according to them, renders a man lucky and fortunate in all his businesses and undertakings. It dissipates melancholy, drives away all importunate cares, and banishes panic fears from the mind. The sixth, by being put into the liquor which any one drinks, reconciles mortal enemies, makes them intimate friends: it gains the love of all women, and renders the proprietor very dexterous in the art of music. The seventh makes women be easily brought to bed without pain; and if a horseman carries it in his left boot, himself and his horse become invulnerable.

This, Paracelsus and his learned followers say, is owing to the influence of the stars; but I cannot help arguing these acts of diabolical impiety. But as these arts are rarely known among the middling part of mankind, I shall neither open their mysteries, nor inveigh against them any farther.

The persons who are most to be avoided are your ordinary fortune-telling women and men about this town, whose houses ought to be avoided as a plague or a pestilence, either because they are cheats and impostors, or because they deal with black arts, none of them that I know having any pretensions to the gift of a second-sight. Among many, a few of the most notorious that I can call to mind now, are as follow. The first and chiefest of these mischievous fortune-tellers is a woman that does not live far from the Old Bailey. And truly the justice hall in that place is the properest place for her to appear at, where, if she was tried for pretending to give charms written upon paper with odd scrawls, which she calls figures, she would be probably convicted, and very justly condemned, and doomed to have her last journey from the Old Bailey to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The other is a fellow that lives in Moorfields, in which place those who go to consult him ought to live all their lifetimes, at the famous palaces of the senseless men: he is the successor of the famous Dr. Trotter, whose widow he married; and from being a tailor and patching men's garments, he now cuts flourishes with his shears upon parchment, considers the heavens as a garment, and from the spangles thereupon he calculates nativities, and sets up for a very profound astrologer. The third is an ignorant fellow that caws out strange predictions in Crow-alley, of whose croaking noise I shall here take no notice, he having been sufficiently mauled in the most ingenious Spectators. These and such counterfeits as these, I would desire all gentlemen and ladies to avoid. The only two really learned men that I ever knew in the art of astrology, were my good friends Dr. Williams and Mr. Gadbury; and I thought it necessary to pay this esteem to their names, let the world judge of them what it will. I will here say no more, nor hinder you any longer, gentlemen and ladies, from the diversion which my good old friend, who is now departed this life, has prepared for you in his book, which a young gentleman of my acquaintance revised, and only subscribe myself,

THE INTRODUCTION

Of all the writings delivered in an historical manner to the world, none certainly were ever held in greater esteem than those which give us the lives of distinguished private men at full length; and, as I may say, to the life. Such curious fragments of biography are the rarities which great men seek after with eager industry, and when found, prize them as the chief jewels and ornaments that enrich their libraries, and deservedly; for they are the beauties of the greatest men's lives handed down by way of example or instruction to posterity, and commonly handed down likewise by the greatest men. Since, therefore, persons distinguished for merit in one kind or other are the constant subjects of such discourses, and the most elegant writers of each age have been usually the only authors who choose upon such subjects to employ their pens, and since persons of the highest rank and dignity, and genii of the most refined and delicate relish, are frequently curious enough to be the readers of them, and to esteem them the most valuable pieces in a whole collection of learned works; it is a wonder to me that when any man's life has something in it peculiarly great and remarkable in its kind, it should not move some more skilful writer than myself to give the public a taste of it, because it must be at least vastly entertaining, if it be not, which is next to impossible, immensely instructive and profitable withal.

If ever the life of any man under the sun was remarkable, this Mr. Duncan Campbell's, which I am going to treat upon, is so to a very eminent degree.

It affords such variety of incidents, and is accompanied with such diversity of circumstances, that it includes within it what must yield entire satisfaction to the most learned, and admiration to persons of a moderate understanding. The prince and the peasant will have their several ends of worthy delight in reading it; and Mr. Campbell's life is of that extent, that it concerns and collects, as I may say, within itself, every station of life in the universe. Besides, there is a demand in almost every page that relates any new act of his, for the finest and closest disquisitions that learning can make upon human nature, to account how those acts could be done by him. For he daily practised, and still practises, those things naturally, which puts art to the rack to find out how nature can so operate in him; and his fleshly body, by these operations, is a living practical system, or body of new philosophy, which exceeds even all those that have hitherto been compounded by the labour and art of many ages.

If one that had speculated deep into abstruse matters, and made it his study not only to know how to assign natural reasons for some strange new acts that looked like miracles by being peculiar to the individual genius of some particular admired man, but carrying his inquiry to a much greater height, had speculated likewise what might possibly be achieved by human genius in the full perfection of nature, and had laid it down as a thesis by strong arguments, that such things might be compassed by a human genius, if in its true degree of perfection, as are the hourly operations of the person's life I am writing, he would have been counted a wild romantic enthusiast, instead of a natural philosopher. Some of the wisest would be infidels to so new and so refined a scheme of thinking, and demand experiment, or cry it was all against reason, and would not allow the least tittle to be true without it. Yet the man that had found out so great a mystery as to tell us what might be done by human genius, as it is here actually done, would have been a great man within himself; but wanting further experimental proof, could lay no claim to the belief of others, or consequently to their esteem. But how great, then, is the man who makes it constantly his practice actually to do what would not otherwise have been thought to be of such a nature as might ever be acquired by mortal capacity, though in its full complement of all possible perfection? He is not only great within himself, he is great to the world: his experiments force our belief, and the amazing singularity of those experiments provokes both our wonder and esteem.

If any learned man should have advanced this proposition, that mere human art could give to the deaf man what should be equal to his hearing, and to the dumb man an equivalent for his want of speech, so that he could converse as freely almost as other hearing or talking persons; that he might, though born deaf, be by art taught how to read, write, and understand any language, as well as students that have their hearing, would not the world, and many even of the learned part of it, say that nothing could be more extravagantly wild, more mad and frantic? The learned Dr. Wallis, geometry professor of Oxford, did first of all lay down this proposition, and was counted by many to have overshot the point of learning, and to have been the author of a whimsical thesis. And I should not have wondered if, after a man's having asserted this might be done, before it was actually done, some blind devout people in those days, had accused him of heresy, and of attributing to men a power of working miracles. The notion of the antipodes was by the most learned men of the age in which St. Augustin lived, and by the great St. Austin himself, treated in no milder a manner: yet if the ability of teaching the deaf and the dumb a language proved a truth in experience afterwards, ought not those to turn their contempt into admiration, ought not those very people to vote him into the Royal Society for laying down the proposition, who, before it proved true, in fact, would have been very forward to have sent him to Bedlam? The first instance of this accomplishment in a dumb person was proved before King Charles II. by this same Dr. Wallis, who was a fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the most ingenious of that society.

But, notwithstanding this, should I come afterwards and say, that there is now living a deaf and dumb man, and born so, who could by dint of his own genius teach all others deaf and dumb to read, write, and converse with the talking and hearing part of mankind, some would, I warrant, very religiously conclude, that I was about to introduce some strange new miracle-monger and impostor into the world, with a design of setting up some new sect of anti-christianism, as formidable as that of Brachmans. Should I proceed still further, and say, that this same person, so deaf and dumb, might be able also to show a presaging power, or kind of prophetical genius, (if I may be allowed to use the expression,) by telling any strange persons he never saw before in his life, their names in writing, and by telling them the past actions of their lives, and predicting to them determined truths of future contingencies, notwithstanding what divines say, that "in futuris contingeatibus non datur determinata veritas," would not they conclude that I was going to usher in a new Mahomet? Since, therefore, there does exist such a man in London, who actually is deaf and dumb, and was born so, who does write and read, and converse as well as anybody, who teaches others deaf and dumb to write, and read and converse with anybody, who likewise can, by a presaging gift, set down in writing the name of any stranger at first sight, tell him his past actions, and predict his future occurrences in fortune, and since he has practised this talent as a profession with great success for a long series of years upon innumerable persons in every state and vocation in life, from the peeress to the waiting-woman, and from the lady mayoress to the milliner and sempstress, will it not be wonderfully entertaining to give the world a perfect history of this so singular a man's life? And while we are relating the pleasant adventures with such prodigious variety, can anything be more agreeably instructive in a new way than to intersperse the reasons, and account for the manner how nature, having a mind to be remarkable, performs by him acts so mysterious.

I have premised this introduction, compounded of the merry and the serious, with the hopes of engaging many curious people of all sorts to be my readers, even from the airy nice peruser of novels and romances, neatly bound and finely gilt, to the grave philosopher, that is daily thumbing over the musty and tattered pieces of more solid antiquity. I have all the wonders to tell that such a merry kind of a prophet has told, to entertain the fancies of the first gay tribe, by which means I may entice them into some solid knowledge and judgment of human nature; and I have several solid disquisitions of learning to make, accounting for the manner of these mysterious operations, never touched upon before in due form and order by the hands of the ancient or modern sages, that I may bribe the judgment of this last grave class, so far as to endure the intermixing entertainment with their severer studies.

CHAPTER I.

MR. CAMPBELL'S DESCENT, FAMILY, BIRTH, ETC

Of the goodness and antiquity of the name and family of this gentleman, nobody can ever make any question. He is a Campbell, lineally descended from the house of Argyll, and bears a distant relation to the present duke of that name in Scotland, and who is now constituted a duke of England, by the style and title of Duke of Greenwich.

It happens frequently that the birth of extraordinary persons is so long disputed by different people, each claiming him for their own, that the real place where he first took breath grows at last dubious. And thus it fares with the person who is the subject of the following sheets; as, therefore, it is my proposal to have a strict regard to historical faith, so I am obliged to tell the reader that I can with no certainty give an account of him till after he was three years old; from which age I knew him, even to this day; I will answer for the truths which I impart to the public during that time, and as for his birth and the circumstances of it, and how the first three years of his life passed, I can only deliver them the same account I have received from others, and leave them to their own judgments whether it ought to be deemed real or fabulous.

The father of our Mr. Duncan Campbell, as these relate the story, was from his infancy of a very curious, inquisitive nature, and of an enterprising genius, and if he heard of anything surprising to be seen, the difficulty in practice was enough to recommend to him the attempting to get a sight of it at any rate or any hazard. It is certain, that during some civil broils and troubles in Scotland, the grandfather of our Mr. Campbell was driven with his wife and family, by the fate of war, into the isle of Shetland, where he lived many years; and during his residence there, Mr. Archibald Campbell, the father of our Duncan Campbell, was born.