a_ 1720)

Stock-jobbing Card, or the Humours of Change Alley. 1720. (From the
_Bubblers' Medley_)

Caricature--People climbing the Tree of Fortune. (From the
_Bubblers' Medley_)

The Gateway to Merchant Tailors' Hall. (Gateway from old print)

Mr. Secretary Craggs

Caricature--Beggars on Horseback. (From the _Bubblers' Medley_)

Caricature--Britannia stript by a South-Sea Director

Caricature--The Brabant Screen. (Copied from a rare print of the time,
in the collection of E. Hawkins, Esq., F.S.A.)

Bonfires on Tower Hill

The Earl of Sunderland

Caricature--Emblematic Print of the South-Sea Scheme. (From a print by
Hogarth)

Caricature--Bubblers' Arms: Despair. (From _Bubblers' Mirror, or
England's Glory_)

Conrad Gesner

The Alchymist. (From print after Teniers)

Albertus Magnus

Arnold de Villeneuve

Raymond Lulli

House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges. (From _Sommerard's Album_)

Cornelius Agrippa

Paracelsus

Dr. Dee

Dr. Dee's Show-stone and Magic Crystal. (Originals in the possession
of Lord Londesborough and British Museum)

Innspruck. (From Nodier's _Paris_)

House of Cagliostro (Rue de Clery, No. 278), Paris

Mother Shipton's House

Henry Andrews, the original "Francis Moore, physician"

Nostradamus. (From the frontispiece to a collection of his Prophecies,
published at Amsterdam A.D. 1666)

Serlo clipping Henry I.'s hair

Peter the Great

Bayeux Tapestry

PREFACE.

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals,
they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of
excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find
that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and
go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously
impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is
caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one
nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a
fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed
upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses
until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and
tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in the annals of
Europe its population lost their wits about the sepulchre of Jesus,
and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land; another age went
mad for fear of the devil, and offered up hundreds