From Chambers's Journal. THE TRUE HISTORY OF COUNT

CAGLIOSTRO.

About this period, assuming the title of Count Cagliostro, he commenced his travels, visiting every country in Europe from Spain to Russia. It appears that he actually must have possessed some medical skill.

short time, however, the juggler died; and Balsamo, inconsolable for the death of his tutor, left Malta, furnished with letters of recommendation from Pinto. Arriving at Rome, No one ever worked the rich mine of hu- he was introduced to the Pope by the Maltese man credulity so long and so profitably as ambassador; and shortly afterwards he mar Joseph Balsamo, better known by his assumed ried a woman named Lorenza, whose rare and title of Count Cagliostro. From the records singular beauty, combined with an extraordiof the French police and the Roman Inquisi-nary talent for intrigue and artifice, caused tion, we can glean the history of the greater her to be an invaluable partner to such a man. part of his life; but many of the enigmas of his mysterious career will probably never be explained. He himself pretended that his first recollections were of the East-the land of mystery. He was brought up, he said, in princely splendor at Medina, attended by a suite of eunuchs and slaves, and instructed in all the occult sciences, by a sage termed the wise Althatas. In his twelfth year he went to Mecca, where he lived for three years with his uncle the sheriff. Thence he started on his travels. In Egypt he studied the lore of the priests, and received with delight the knowledge of the ancients, preserved in the Pyramids. In 1766, he made his appearance in Malta, where the Grand Master received him with distinguished honors.

By prescribing for the poor gratis, and giving away large sums in charity, he became exceedingly popular wherever he went; but to the rich, he sold his miraculous pills and balsams at equally miraculous prices. He professed to be able to convert flax into silk, and received large sums of money from his dupes. for disclosing the process, which, in all probability, was somewhat similar to that now known as Clausen's patent for making flaxcotton. He also, for a handsome consideration, converted small diamonds into large ones, by Now, the truth is, Balsamo was born in Pa- substituting paste counterfeits, which he was lermo in 1743, and, at the age of thirteen, was very skilful in making, for the real stones. He sent to the convent of the Brothers of Mercy first arrived in London in 1776, and though at Cartagirone, where he was committed to then possessed of considerable wealth, did not the tuition of the apothecary, under whom he succeed, as on the continent, in gaining adacquired his first insight into the chemical and mission into the higher circles of society. medical secrets he afterwards used so success- During his stay in London at this period, he got fully. Expelled from the convent for irregu- involved in several lawsuits, and was comlar conduct, he commenced life on his own ac-mitted to prison no less than ten different count in Palermo. Forgery seems to have times. It appears that, with all his cunning, been his first method of fraud. Being an ex- he became the prey of a number of low sharpcellent penman, he counterfeited wills, papal ers and solicitors, who, from his ignorance of dispensations, permits for monks to leave their English laws, habits, and customs, succeeded convents at uncanonical hours, and even tick- in fleecing him to no small extent. ets for the theatres. At last, he was com- One of these cases is curious. A Miss Fry pelled to abscond for having cheated a silver- entreated Cagliostro to tell her the number of smith of sixty ounces of gold by pretending a ticket which would gain a prize in a lottery, to disclose a hidden treasure. He fled to then about to be drawn. He at first refused; Messina, and there joined a kindred spirit, a but her earnest entreaties prevailing, he took noted juggler, versed in Arabic and the lan- a cabalistical-looking manuscript out of his esguages of the East. critoire, and after making many and apparentTravelling with this companion in Syria and ly very abstruse calculations, told her the forEgypt, Balsamo picked up that smattering of tunate number. She immediately purchased the Oriental tongues which proved so useful the corresponding ticket; and no doubt more to him in his subsequent deceptions. At to Cagliostro's amazement than her own, it length, a ship, in which these two worthies actually turned up a prize. Numberless apwere passengers, was driven by stress of plications were then made to the count for forweather into Malta; and Balsamo, learning tunate numbers, but he steadily refused to that Pinto, the then Grand Master, was ad- make another calculation; but piles of bankdicted to alchymical pursuits, introduced him- notes and costly jewels were given to the cunself as the descendant of a Christian princess ning countess to induce her to worm the valuof Trebizonde; the juggler personating his able secret from her husband. Miss Fry, not tutor, the wise Althatas. The deception was content with her first venture, presented Locompletely successful. The Grand Master as-renza with a gold snuff-box, containing diasigned them apartments in his palace, and monds to the value of 2941.; but not being they worked daily in his laboratory. In a able to prevail upon Cagliostro to indicate

another number, she caused him to be arrested erecting a three-story building, on a mountain for pursuing illegal arts, and entered an action named Sinai. On the second floor, termed for restitution of the box and jewels, which Ararat, thirteen masters were to pass eighteen were ordered to be restored with costs. hours a day, for forty successive days, in prayer, It forms a remarkable feature in human contemplation, and preparation of the virgin credulity, that at the very time this Miss Fry parchment, made from the skin of a new-born believed Cagliostro so prescient as to be able male Jewish infant. This being prepared, to tell her the number of an undrawn prize, the thirteen masters were placed in communishe was actually engaged in swindling him cation with the seven first-created angels, who, herself. Being connected with a broken down stamping their seals upon the parchment, comroue named Scott; she introduced him to pleted the Great Pentagon. The happy thirCagliostro as a Scottish nobleman. The sham teen were now masters of all wealth, power, nobleman was so delighted with the sham and wisdom; and each of them had the privicount, that he invited him down to his castle lege, by mere adoption, of raising seven other in Scotland, promising to introduce him to the disciples to his own happy state. highest personages in that kingdom. This The physical new birth was more difficult being just what Cagliostro wanted, he eagerly to obtain, and the unpleasant process had to snapped at the proffered bait; and as his no- be repeated as often as every fifty years. The ble friend was far from home, and short of neophyte was to retire into the country, accash, he lent him large sums to prepare for companied by a trusty friend, and there live the journey. We need scarcely say, the in complete seclusion, paying strict attention money was never repaid, nor did the journey to a certain prescribed regimen, for thirty ever take place. In short, Cagliostro's osten- days. On the seventeenth and thirty-second tatious liberality and profusion, which on the days, the patient was to be bled, and six drops continent introduced him to the first society, of a white mixture administered, two drops of served only, in England, to draw around him a crowd of needy sharpers.

which were to be taken every subsequent day, till the object should be attained. On the Disgusted with London, Cagliostro, after thirty-first day, he was to be put to bed, and having been initiated into the mysteries of given the first grain of the materia prima, freemasonry went to Strasburg, where, by his which would cause a swoon of three hours' liberality to the poor, he soon acquired an im- duration, accompanied with strong convulsions. mense popularity. Assuming a higher flight, On the thirty-third day, the second grain was he now announced himself to be the Great to be swallowed, upon which delirium would Koptha, or head of a mystical system of Egyp- ensue, and the hair and teeth fall out. On tian masonry, which he had been taught by the thirty-sixth day, the taking of the third the grand master of the order-no less a per- grain would be followed by a deep sleep, and sonage than Alexander the Great, who was the hair and teeth would grow again. On the still living, in dignified seclusion, in the interior of the Great Pyramid! As Joe Smith is said to have founded Mormonism on an unpublished religious romance, so Cagliostro is supposed to have founded Egyptian masonry on a mystical manuscript, written by one George Copston, a crazy Englishman.

thirty-ninth day, the novice was to be put into a bath, ten drops of the balsam of the Great Kaptha were to be given him, and on the fortieth morning he would rise in the prime of youthful vigor, in which state he would continue for fifty years. This treatment could be renewed every half-century, until the regenerated attained the age of 5557 years, but no longer.

Humiliating, yet not without its lesson, is a record of the absurdities believed at the instigation of an ignorant impostor, less than a In the lodges of this system of Egyptian hundred years ago. In his system of mystifi- masonry, communications were established cation, Cagliostro assumed, through his assert- with angels and prophets. To effect this a ed angelic ancestry, to possess a certain au- child was selected, and termed the dove. Cathority over the angels, and declared that his gliostro, laying his hand upon the dove, blessed mission was to raise the faithful to spiritual and anointed it with the oil of wisdom. The perfection, by a physical and moral regenera- dove was then taken into the tabernacle, and tion. The method of acquiring this new birth told to look steadfastly into a basin of water, was altogether material in its nature, and cu- where it would see an angel, and receive corrious on account of its absurdity. The faith-responding replies, which were carefully reful could obtain a life independent of the body corded. During his trial before the Inquisiby means of the materia prima, or red powder, one form of the Grand Elixir; but it required the Great Pentagon to restore them to the state of innocence enjoyed before the Fall of man.

The Pentagon was to be constructed by

tion at Rome, Cagliostro confessed all his impositions but this common juggling trick, audaciously insisting that it was a gift from God, although he must have well known that a confession would have been less injurious to him than such a daring assertion.

If it were not a matter of history, the influ- notoriety, he soon acquired a multitude of folence this artful rogue acquired over the minds lowers. We meet with some curious notices of his followers would be utterly incredible. of him in the newspapers of the period; yet They worshipped him for hours, lying motion- in not one of them, and we have looked through less at his feet, and believed themselves sanc- several files, do we see him denounced as a tified by touching the hem of his garment. charlatan. It was not so in France. They wore his portrait in rings and brooches, M. Mourand, editor of a Parisian newspaand set up his bust in their houses with the per, was a bitter enemy of Cagliostro, and fost motto Divo Cagliostro-the divine Cagliostro. no opportunity of exposing his fraudulent preAbout this period, Lorenza began to form fe- tensions. Like a juggler of our own day, male lodges of the mystical Egyptian masonry. Cagliostro pretended that he was proof against She was then in the prime of youthful beauty, the effects of the most potent poisons. He but by declaring that she was more than eighty further stated, that the use of powerful antiyears of age, and introducing everywhere, as dotes was so well known to the people of the her son, an accomplice, a captain in the Dutch East, that at Medina they fattened pigs with service, who was not less than fifty, she ob- arsenic, for the purpose of destroying tigers. tained immense sums in money and jewels The pig, supplied with the antidote, was unfrom credulous old ladies, who wished to have affected by the arsenic, though its flesh was so their beauty and youth restored. By not re- imbued with the poison, that when left in the maining long in one place, but constantly woods, as a bait for a hungry tiger, the latter, travelling about, with a princely retinue of six of course, being unprovided with the antidote, carriages, for the purpose of establishing new died immediately, after tasting the fatal food. lodges, their deceptions were the less readily Mourand having ridiculed this assertion, Cagdiscovered and exposed. liostro inserted a challenge in the Public Ad

At length, the first Pentagon was erect-vertiser, in September, 1786. It was to to ed at Basle, and about to be opened with im- the effect that each of them should stake five posing ceremonies, when Cagliostro was sum- thousand guineas; that Mourand should breakmoned to Paris by his intimate friend the fast with Cagliostro on a sucking-pig fattened Prince Cardinal Rohan, to take a part in the with arsenic, and whichever should be alive well-known, but mysterious affair of the dia- the next day, would win the stakes. Moumond necklace, which implicated the name rand wisely declined this invitation; and the and fame of the unfortunate queen, Marie- following epigram, among others on the same Antoinette. On the discovery of this curious subject, was subsequently published in the Adconspiracy, Cagliostro was sent to the Bastile, vertiser:where he was confined for nine months, during

taken;

I'll not eat your pig, but I'll save my own bacon.

which time the French parliament was deluged If you expect me to breakfast, you're greatly miswith petitions for his release, from men of the highest rank, who described him as a distinguished physician, prophet, and friend of the human race.

One of his replies, when examined by the attorney-general of France with reference to the necklace affair, is truly characteristic. Being asked by what right he assumed the name and title of Count Cagliostro, he replied :

Cagliostro gave a somewhat similar challenge. in Russia. It appears, when at St. Petersburg, he had spoken disparagingly of the professional knowledge of the czarina's physician. The physician hearing of this, challenged Cagliostro to mortal combat; but the latter declined, saying that an appeal to arms would only decide their courage and skill

"I have gone over all Europe by the name of Cagliostro; as to the title of count, from the education I have received, the attention in the use of weapons, which was beside the paid to me by the Mufti Suleyman, the Cheriff of Mecca, the Grand Master Pinto, Pope Clement, and most of the sovereigns of Europe, you may judge whether that is not more a disguise to conceal what I really am, than a title of honor."

question. The question was skill in medicine; and Cagliostro proposed to decide it in the following manner:-He would make a pill which the physician would swallow, and the physician should make a pill, which he (Cagliostro) would swallow; and whichever of the two combatants should be alive an hour afterwards, was to be considered the victor. The Russian refused: but Cagliostro was immediately ordered to leave the territories of the czarina.

When liberated from the Bastile, being ordered to leave Paris, he went to Passy, followed by thousands of his dupes. He was then ordered to leave France, and when he embarked at Boulogne, immense numbers kneeled to receive his parting benediction. After remaining some time in England, Arriving a second time in London, he imme- Cagliostro again went to the continent, where diately began to found lodges; and being he travelled about for a short period, till at joined by Lord George Gordon, of no-popery last his evil destiny led him to Rome. There,

DXCV. LIVING AGE. VOL. XI. 10

being detected in founding lodges of Egyp- and ostentatious quack. He harangued his tian masonry, he was arrested and committed disciples with a drawn sword in his right hand, to the dungeons of the Inquisition. After a and principally spoke an incomprehensible long and very curious trial, which has been jargon. În private life, however, he was published, he was condemned to death; but lively and agreeable; and his great knowledge the pope commuted his sentence to imprison- of the world, and conversational powers renment for life in the fortress of St. Leo, where dered him an agreeable companion. Some of he died in 1795. Lorenza was also sentenc- his letters, written in Italian, to his wife when ed to imprisonment for life in a convent of he was a prisoner in the Bastile, are preserved penitents. in the British Museum. They relate principally to matters connected with his personal comforts, and are no great proof of his acquirements as a scholar.

Cagliostro, though small in stature, was well made, and had a dark but handsome countenance. When speaking in public his voice and manners were exactly those of a noisy

From the Presbyterian. THE PRESENT STATE OF EUROPE PREDICTED THIRTY YEARS AGO. MESSRS. EDITORS-I herewith send you an extract from "The Advancement of Society," by James Douglass, Esq., a work republished in New York in 1830, from the 2d Edinburgh edition. It has a special interest at the present time.

both ultimately destined to be instruments of pocelerating the march of European society; but litical changes which will give a new face to the institutions of the ancient continent.

pation of Boulogne and Brest. The wide separation between Russia and England leaves no adjacent field of combat on which they might measure their forces and decide the contest; and England, it is now evident, can best preserve the independence and prosperity of Europe by preserving peace, and her surest weapon is the communication of her own knowledge and liberty; before which, barbarism, however potent, must "Throughout Europe there is no less a revolution in the relative position of the nations to-bow, and stirred up by which vassals, however wards each other, than in the interior condition depressed, will rise up and shake off the yoke. of each. The French and the Russians have While Britain counterbalances the ascendency of changed situations in the political scale; Peters- Russia in the west, she will divide with her the burg has become the centre of aggression, and supremacy of the east, and have for her share the Paris that of resistance and defence. The inva- fairest, if not the most extensive portion of Asia. sions which Europe has now to dread are from They are the two great antagonist powers in the the north, and the hope of its ultimate freedom old world, opposite in their nature as in their inrests upon the energy and the prosperity of its fluence the one physically, the other morally southern States. The position of Russia is emi-great-the one at present retarding, the other acnently favorable for successful and limitless encroachment, and possesses within itself ample space for ever-increasing numbers. It has no enemy behind it to distract its attention or divide its efforts; it has only opposed to it a weak and broken frontier, without any one commanding defence, and with vulnerable points innumerable from the Baltic to the sea of Japan. The Swedes, the Poles, the Turks, the Persians, the Turcomans, and the Chinese, are unable to cope with the Russian armies, and must yield at the first shock of the invader. Austria and Prussia hold their Polish provinces, in some measure, at the mercy of Russia, and France is the only nation which, single-handed, could afford an adequate resistance. As France has changed from the attitude of aggression to that of defence, England, the supporter of the independence of the continental nations, becomes the natural ally of France instead of being its natural enemy; and henceforth it is manifestly the interest of this country that the French should be great, powerful, and free. It is certainly for the advantage of England, that the seat of aggrandizement and danger should be removed from the banks of the Seine to the shores of the Baltic; and an Attila, whose troops are encamped in Poland and along the frontiers of China, is less to be dreaded than an enemy of inferior power, who has the occu

PARALLEL PASSAGES.

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarken'd ways
Made for our searching; yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

*

*

*

An endless fountain of immortal drink
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
[Keat's Endymion (opening lines).

And let our love,
Our large true love bend o'er our little babe.
As the calm grand old heavens bend over carth,
Revealing God's own starry thoughts and things,
So shall the image of our hearts' ideal,
The angel nestling in her bud of life,
Smile upward in the mirror of her face,
A daily beauty in our darken'd ways,
And a perpetual feast of holy things.

[Gerald Massul's Wedded Life.