ation or visionary powers in women, inspired by nature only.
The traditions of witch and gypsy are partly its offshoots. You despise
both, perhaps. But can you, though in utmost pride of your supreme
modern wisdom, suppose that the character--say, even of so poor and
far-fallen a sibyl as Meg Merrilies--is only the coinage of Scott's
brain; or that, even being no more, it is valueless? Admit the figure of
the Cumaean Sibyl, in like manner, to be the coinage only of Virgil's
brain. As such, it, and the words it speaks, are yet facts in which we
may find use, if we are reverent to them.

To me, personally, (I must take your indulgence for a moment to speak
wholly of myself,) they have been of the truest service--quite material
and indisputable.

I am writing on St. John's Day, in the monastery of Assisi; and I had no
idea whatever, when I sat down to my work this morning, of saying any
word of what I am now going to tell you. I meant only to expand and
explain a little what I said in my lecture about the Florentine
engraving. But it seems to me now that I had better tell you what the
Cumaean Sibyl has actually done for me.

212. In 1871, partly in consequence of chagrin at the Revolution in
Paris, and partly in great personal sorrow, I was struck by acute
inflammatory illness at Matlock, and reduced to a state of extreme
weakness; lying at one time unconscious for some hours, those about me
having no hope of my life. I have no doubt that the immediate cause of
the illness was simply, eating when I was not hungry; so that modern
science would acknowledge nothing in the whole business but an extreme
and very dangerous form of indigestion; and entirely deny any
interference of the Cumaean Sibyl in the matter.

I once heard a sermon by Dr. Guthrie, in Edinburgh, upon the wickedness
of fasting. It was very eloquent and ingenious, and finely explained the
superiority of the Scotch Free Church to the benighted Catholic Church,
in that the Free Church saw no merit in fasting. And there was no
mention, from beginning to end of the sermon, of even the existence of
such texts as Daniel i. 12, or Matthew vi. 16.

Without the smallest merit, I admit, in fasting, I was nevertheless
reduced at Matlock to a state very near starvation; and could not rise
from my pillow, without being lifted, for some days. And in the first
clearly pronounced stage of recovery, when the perfect powers of spirit
had returned, while the body was still a