losed. Perhaps this custom was by way
of retaliation, by which means the charge of payment of oats and a hen was
recovered by the money paid for replevying their cattle, &c. so impounded.

[Footnote 3: No payment entered in the accounts between 1527 and 1539. The
average tenpence annually.]

* * * * *

PSALMANAZAR.

(Vol. vii., p. 206.)

Your correspondent inquires as to the real name of this most penitent of
impostors. I fear that {436} there is now no likelihood of its being
discovered. His most intimate friends appear to have been kept in the dark
on this subject. With respect to his country, the most probable conclusion
seems to be, that he was born in the south of Europe, in a city of
Languedoc. A very near approximation seems to be made to the exact locality
by a careful collation of the circumstances mentioned in his autobiography,
in the excellent summary of his life in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, vols.
xxxiv. and xxxv., which is much better worth consulting than the articles
in Aikin or Chalmers; which are poor and superficial, and neither of which
gives any list of his works, or notices the _Essay on Miracles, by a
Layman_ (London, 1753, 8vo.), which is one of them, though published
anonymously. There is a very amusing account of conversations with him at
Oxford, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, vol. xxxv. p. 78., in which, before
a large company of ladies and gentlemen who were curious as to the customs
of Formosa, he gravely defended the practice which he said existed in that
country, of cutting off the heads of their wives and eating them, in case
of misconduct. "I think it is no sin," continued he, "to eat human flesh,
but I must own it is a little unmannerly." He admitted that he once ate
part of a black; but they being always kept to hard work, their flesh was
tough and unsavoury. His grandfather, he said, lived to 117, and was as
vigorous as a young man, in consequence of sucking the blood of a viper
warm every morning; but they had been forced to kill him, he being attacked
with a violent fit of the colic, and desiring them to stab him, which, in
obedience to another "custom of the country," they had done. _Splendide
mendax!_ was certainly, in his younger days, this much venerated friend of
our great moralist. I should, however, feel inclined to forgive much of his
extraordinary romancing for the admirable manner in which he settled that
chattering twaddler, Bishop Burn