proper corporeal gravity if placed in a scale. Unless, then, we
suppose Delrio to have been the dupe of some singular and unaccountable
delusion on this point, the typanitic affections of the _convulsionnaires_
will not account for the anti-gravitating phenomena ascribed to medieval
witchcraft. There are some reasons, however, for the belief that these
appearances may not have been wholly imaginary; for if any reliance can be
placed on the concurrent traditions of all religions, Pagan as well as
Christian, supported by wide-spread popular belief, the high mental
exaltation induced by religious abstraction, and also by other vehement
affections of the mind, is actually attended with a diminished specific
gravity. Of alleged ecclesiastical miracles of this kind it is better to
say nothing. The Roman Catholic and the Hindoo devotees equally claim for
their adepts in religious contemplation an exemption from (among other
earthly liabilities) the hindrance of weight. In the rapture of prayer,
the ascetic and the saint alike rise in the air, and spurn the law of
gravitation with the other incidents of matter. Suspected evidences of
this kind are, however, of no weight in philosophical inquiry. It will be
safer to leave the Etstaticas and the Fakirs to their respective
believers, and to take a story of the people, into which religious
considerations do not so directly enter. The native Irish, then, have a
remarkable tradition, as old, at least, as the seventh or eighth century,
that phrenetic madmen lose the corporeal quality of weight. A picturesque
and romantic example of this belief is found in the story of the fate of
Suibhne, son of Colman, King of Dalnaraidhe, as related in the bardic
accounts of the battle of Moyra. Suibhne, a valiant warrior, has offered
an insult to Saint Ere, Bishop of Slane; the affront is avenged by a
curse, the usual retaliation of aggrieved ecclesiastics in those days. The
curse falls on Sweeny in the most grievous form of visitation that could
afflict a warrior:--a fit of cowardice seizes him in the very onset of the
battle, and drives him frantic with terror. "Giddiness came over him at
the sight of the horrors, grimness, and rapidity of the Gaels; at the
fierce looks, brilliance, and ardor of the foreigners; at the rebounding
furious shouts of the embattled tribes on both sides, rushing against and
coming into collision with one another. Huge, flickering, horrible, aerial
phantoms, rose up (aroun