My Library

“R�������� continued: ‘Mesmerism’s day has gone by. Already it is found to be impossible to produce the same effects with it as were produced a few years ago, while the bastard thing that now goes by its name, is of such a nature and character that it speedily either disgusts all sensible people, or very soon lands its friends into a deep quagmire of such alkaline properties, that all the little common sense they had at starting gets thoroughly mixed therewith, and forms a compound which they carry back, instead of what they brought; and when they get home again, they peddle it out as “Divine Philosophy,” when in fact it is an excellent article of soap—regular savon extraordinaire, warranted to extract brains, decency, money, and everything else worth having, from all who meddle with it—it washes so very clean. If your railway does not accomplish this, yet in ninetynine cases out of every hundred of journeys that terminate differently, it lands its passengers in the populous Town of Fantasy, in the which all things look real, but are as hollow and as substanceless as mere Forms can be, and that is next to nothing. In fact, most of the popular