They counterfeit suns and moons, and sit
on ships' masts. They cause whirlwinds on a sudden and tempestuous
storms, which though our meteorologists generally refer to natural
causes, yet I am of Bodine's mind, they are more often caused by
those aerial devils in their several quarters. Cardan gives much
information concerning them. His father had one of them, an aerial
devil, bound to him for eight and twenty years; as Aggrippa's dog had
a devil tied to his collar. Some think that Paracelsus had one
confined in his sword pommel. Others wear them in rings. At Hammel
in Saxony, the devil in the likeness of a pied piper carried away 130
children that were never after seen."
All this sky-full of cobwebs is now forever swept clean away.
Another race is born. Humboldt and Herschel, Davy and Arago, Malthus
and Bentham have arrived. If Robert Burton should be quoted to
represent the army of scholars, who have furnished a contribution to
his moody pages, Horace Walpole, whose letters circulate in the
libraries, might be taken with some fitness to represent the spirit
of much recent literature.
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