ers, exorcists, mass-priests, and mountebanks,
of whom Roger Bacon speaks, &c. _de miraculis naturae et artis. cap. 1._
[2705]they can counterfeit the voices of all birds and brute beasts almost,
all tones and tunes of men, and speak within their throats, as if they
spoke afar off, that they make their auditors believe they hear spirits,
and are thence much astonished and affrighted with it. Besides, those
artificial devices to overhear their confessions, like that whispering
place of Gloucester [2706]with us, or like the duke's place at Mantua in
Italy, where the sound is reverberated by a concave wall; a reason of which
Blancanus in his Echometria gives, and mathematically demonstrates.

So that the hearing is as frequently deluded as the sight, from the same
causes almost, as he that hears bells, will make them sound what he list.
"As the fool thinketh, so the bell clinketh." Theophilus in Galen thought
he heard music, from vapours which made his ears sound, &c. Some are
deceived by echoes, some by roaring of waters, or concaves and
reverberation of air in the ground, hollow places and walls. [2707]At
Cadurcum, in Aquitaine, words and sentences are repeated by a strange echo
to the full, or whatsoever you shall play upon a musical instrument, more
distinctly and louder, than they are spoken at first. Some echoes repeat a
thing spoken seven times, as at Olympus, in Macedonia, as Pliny relates,
_lib. 36. cap. 15._ Some twelve times, as at Charenton, a village near
Paris, in France. At Delphos, in Greece, heretofore was a miraculous echo,
and so in many other places. Cardan, _subtil. l. 18_, hath wonderful
stories of such as have been deluded by these echoes. Blancanus the Jesuit,
in his Echometria, hath variety of examples, and gives his reader full
satisfaction of all such sounds by way of demonstration. [2708]At Barrey,
an isle in the Severn mouth, they seem to hear a smith's forge; so at
Lipari, and those sulphureous isles, and many such like, which Olaus speaks
of in the continent of Scandia, and those northern countries. Cardan _de
rerum var. l. 15, c. 84_, mentioneth a woman, that still supposed she heard
the devil call her, and speaking to her, she was a painter's wife in Milan:
and many such illusions and voices, which proceed most part from a corrupt
imagination.

Whence it comes to pass, that they prophesy, speak several languages, talk
of astronomy, and other unknown sciences to them (of which they have been