testimony to an utter want of faith in things spiritual, of belief
in God and Christ's teaching, and a pitiful craving for such a
faith, as well as to the absence of all rational common sense, in
the vast numbers of persons deluded by such processes. In this
aspect (the total absence of right reason and real religion
demonstrated by these ludicrous and blasphemous juggleries in our
Christian communities), that which was farcical in the lowest degree
became tragical in the highest. I only witnessed this one mesmeric
exhibition, on the occasion of this visit paid to us by Mr. Townsend
and Alexis, until several years afterwards, in the house of my
excellent friend Mr. Combe, in Edinburgh, when I was one of a party
called upon to witness some experiments of the same kind. I was
staying with Mr. Combe and my cousin Cecilia, when one evening their
friend Mrs. Crow, authoress of more than one book, I believe, and of
a collection of supernatural horrors, of stories of ghosts,
apparitions, etc., etc., called "The Night Side of Nature" (the
lady had an evident sympathy for the absurd and awful), came,
bringing with her a Dr. Lewis, a negro gentleman, who was creating
great excitement in Edinburgh by his advocacy of the theories of
mesmerism, and his own powers of magnetizing. Mrs. Crow had
threatened Mr. and Mrs. Combe with a visit from this _professor_,
and though neither of them had the slightest tendency to belief in
any such powers as those Dr. Lewis laid claim to, they received him
with kindly courtesy, and consented, with the amused indifference of
scepticism, to be spectators of his experiments. Under these
circumstances, great as was my antipathy to the whole thing, I did
not like to raise any objection to it or to leave the room, which
would have been a still more marked expression of my feeling; so I
sat down with the rest of the company round the drawing-room table,
Mr. and Mrs. Combe, Dr. Lewis, Mrs. Crow, our friend Professor
William Gregory, and Dr. Becker--the latter gentleman a man of
science, brother, I think, to Prince Albert's private librarian--who
was to be the subject of Dr. Lewis's experiments, having already
lent himself for the same purpose to that gentleman, and been
pronounced highly sensitive to the magnetic influence.

I sat by Dr. Becker, and opposite to Dr.