He is born at Palermo, on the 8th of June, 1743; the son of Peter Balsamo and Felicia Braconniere; both of the middle class of life. His father dies while he is yet in his cradle; and the good men, his mother's brothers, bestow a world of pains upon his education, secular and spiritual. But his perverse nature revolts alike from letters and religion, and he commences his career by running away, not once but repeatedly, from the Seminary of Saint Roch.

He is entrusted, at the age of thirteen years, in the hopes of amendment, to the charge of the Father-general of a Religious Order, in the town of Cartagirone. Here again his evil propensities quickly burst forth, in flagranter colours than before. When it is his turn to read aloud some holy book, as is the daily custom of the Monks, he interpolates, into the sacred text, any lewd nonsense that may come across his brain, to the infinite scandal of his hearers; and on one occasion in particular, when the blessed Martyrology was placed into his hands, for the names of meek and murdered virgins he shamelessly substituted those of the most notorious courtesans in Palermo ! "All that he learns at Cartagirone," exclaims his indignant biographer, "are certain godless secrets of chymistry, which he picks up, with amazing readiness, from one Vardi, an astrological apothecary, at whose house in the town he lodged."

In a year's time he returns to Palermo, as tired and hateful of the good Monks as they are shocked and scandalized at him. By way of occupation he takes to Design; but continues, in the intervals of study, as great a profligate as ever. He associates with the wildest and most dissolute youth, of either sex, in the town; and displays the greatest audacity and ingenuity in helping such of his acquaintances as have fallen into the hands of justice, sometimes to break their prisons, sometimes to baffle their prosecutors. He forges tickets of admission to the play-houses, which puzzle the very directors to distinguish them from the true ones, till they are driven to make a regulation that no one shall enter the doors without paying-and then he cheats them with bad money. He robs his uncle, with whom he lives, of gold and jewels, and threatens to poison him when he complains. He turns Pandarus to one of his female cousins, makes her duped lover to believe that his mistress passionately covets the possession now of this trinket now of that, obtains them from him to be conveyed to her, and keeps them himself. Having found means to enter the cabinet of a distant relation of his mother's, a notary of great practice in the place, he mischievously alters a Will which he finds there, by erasing the name of a religious community, which was intended to be benefited thereby, and inserting, in the place of it, that of a crabbed avaricious old lord, the Marquis Maurigi, who was no sort of kin to the testator, and could never be brought to admit the mistake.

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And to make an end of his misdeeds, a worthy Monk, that was no great scholar, having entreated him to write a letter, in his name, to the Superior of his Convent, asking leave to absent himself for two days from Palermo, he not only obliged him in that respect but undertakes to deliver the letter and to bring back the reply. In a short time he returns with a paper, signed by the Superior, giving the Monk the permission which he sought; and demands a piece of money for his trouble and welcome intelligence, which the good man joyfully bestows. But, behold! the paper is a forgery; and on the Monk's return to his Convent he is sentenced to very rigorous penances, for a breach of discipline of his order in staying away without leave; nor is it of any avail to him to say that he obtained the paper in question from Balsamo, for the latter impudently affirms that he knows nothing whatever about the business.

Even thus early in life he is addicted to unlawful and damnable arts. He pretends to exorcise his sister of a devil, she being only troubled with a bad colic, by beating her with a rope steeped in holy oil. And one day, being in the country, with some of his usual associates, and a sudden curiosity springing up to know how a certain lady was at that moment employed, he takes a piece of paper, draws a square upon it with his pencil, passes his hands rapidly over it, and there appears the figure of a lady engaged at the game of tressette, or, as it is more commonly called, vingt-un. They send one of the number to the town, and find her engaged at that very game!

In the sixteenth year of his age, grandiloquently continues the apostolic scribe, he abruptly quits, like a second Cataline, the city of his birth. The reason of his flight, or rather his departure, for he goes boldly off, in open day, is as follows:-There is living in the street of Toledo one Marana, a jeweller, a man of true Sicilian character: weak, passionate, covetous, and credulous. This man he persuades that a mighty treasure is lying in a grotto, in the suburbs, which can only be taken possession of by means of certain magical ceremonies, to be performed at dead of night. He obtains from him, beforehand, for the cost and trouble of these rites and incantations, no less than sixty ounces of gold. But the loss of his money is not the worst of the business to the unlucky jeweller. On going, by night, to the grotto, where Balsamo has promised to meet him, he is surrounded by several figures, in hideous masks, who dance about him for a while, to his great terror, uttering fearful noises, and end by cruelly beating and otherwise torturing him. For many days he is confined to his bed, sore alike in body and spirit, and believing himself to have been assailed by the demons that guarded the treasure. At length he grew better and wiser; and then, notwithstanding the hypocritical regrets of Balsamo, that they should have been thus unfortunately

prevented from the performance of the requisite ceremonies, he opens his eyes to the trick which has been played upon him, and not only denounces the knave to the tribunals but threatens to take vengeance with a poignard. Balsamo laughs at him and treats him contemptuously, but, knowing the dangerous character of his countrymen, thinks it prudent to quit Palermo, and a short time afterwards Sicily itself.

Now begins, and continues through upwards of thirty years, such a series of wanderings, adventures, and experiences of either fortune, as never fell to the lot of mortal man. Fiction herself, we really believe, with Ahasuerus for a subject, could hardly have crowded into eighteen centuries so many such various and extraordinary events as are gravely recorded of this strange being. He is Monk, Pilgrim, Physician, Soldier, Count Cagliostro, Marquis Anna, Marquis Pellegrini, Marquis Balsamo, Ararat of the holy lineage, and wants but his own consent to be raised to the Ducal throne of Courland. Sometimes, when dupes are scarce, competing rogues abundant, and the ordinarily owl-like eyes of the law are open with a keener speculation than was usual to them three-quarters of a century ago, he is saved from the streets and bare starvation by the wages of his wife's prostitution. Sometimes he is the owner of a palace, and travels with a pompous train of attendants, blazing in sumptuous liveries at twenty Louis apiece. He is the inmate of gaols; he is hooted from cities; he experiences such bitter mortifications and sufferings that a twinge takes hold of his reverend biographer, and he refrains, out of very shame and pity, from the mention of them. He is followed by enthusiastic crowds; his likeness is on every man's ring, or snuff-box; paintings of him are in all houses; his bust is carved in marble; his features are perpetuated in medals; his statue is set up in public places, and on the pedestal, of more than one of them, is inscribed "to the divine Cagliostro." He is the rudest and most uncouth of mortals, uttering a vile unintelligible mixture of Sicilian and Hebrew. He harangues large and polite assemblies, in all the languages of the earth, speaking with the tongue of an angel. He is a man of low stature, swarthy skin, and base licentious aspect. His deportment and figure are those of an immortal; and his eyes shine with a celestial intelligence, striking awe and veneration into the minds of all beholders. He is a miserable charlatan, subsisting on the sale of washes and powders and invigorating balsams. He is profoundly versed in all secrets of chymistry, real or imaginary-the elixir of life, occult magnetic influences and sympathies, the most sacred mysterics of Mecca, the buried knowledge of the pyramids; and walks through hospitals, like a god, scattering money, healing sickness, making the lame to walk, insomuch, that in one hospital alone were hung up a hundred votive crutches, in grateful commemoration of his miraculous

powers. His associates are thieves, swindlers, forgers, pimps, catamites, and wretches that are afterwards hung, grand-masters, princes, ministers, cardinals. He is forty-five years old, he lived before the deluge, he was present at the marriage of Cana of Galilee, he is the son of a Princess of Trebizond, he is born at Palermo, he is born at Malta, he is born at Madeira, he is the worshipped of the Mufti, he spends three years at Mecca, the guest of the holy Scherif. He sees visions; he founds sects, where he is adored as the grand-cophte, and initiates his followers in the arcana of physical and moral regeneration-the former by the means of the acacia or juice of youth and immortality, the latter by the figure pentagon, which restores mankind to their original purity and the state before the fall. And, finally, having-according to the Inquisitor-exhausted every crime in every country, he is imprisoned in the Castle of Saint Angelo, on no worse accusation than that of free-masonry, and is believed -for the epoch of his death is as great a mystery and as variously reported as his life to have perished in its dungeons, in the year 1795, in the fifty-second year of his age, "being the cycle of one hermetic year," in the jargon of his followers, "as fifty-two weeks make a common year."

This is the life of Cagliostro, as it is sent forth to the world upon the authority and from the press of the Holy Apostolic Chamber. Other persons, a little more enlightened and of a somewhat sharper knowledge of mankind, while they smile as contemptuously as the French translator at the monstrous prejudices and credulity of his Italian biographer, yet record many circumstances about him that are inexplicably puzzling.

Madame the Countess de la Motte, the barbarously-punished heroine of the diamond collar, even admitting her guilt-which has always appeared to us to be very doubtful-than whom, of which there is no doubt at all, very few people were harder to be deceived in matters of money, speaks with a feeling almost of awe of the unheard-of riches-"la fortune inouie "of Cagliostro. He, himself, in his Memoir-published on the occasion of that famous process from which not a single person, queen, cardinal, or countess, emerged honourably, except himself-speaks of the

*

* Vie de Jeanne de St. Remy de Valois, ci-devant Comtesse de la Motte, ecrite par elle-même, Paris, 1793-a frontless book as ever was written; but she seems to have felt her whipping, such an one as Jefferies would have warmed her with, with more moral bitterness than one might have anticipated. Her joy at learning that her friend, Cagliostro, has fallen, notwithstanding all his cunning, into the claws of the Holy Inquisition is not unamusing:-"qui pourroit bien ne sortir du Chateau St. Angelo où le Saint Pere l'a fait enfermer que pour aller consommer sur une Place publique les grandes Destinées qu'il s'est dit appeler à remplir."—Vol. ii., page 394. After all, it is very doubtful whether his "great destinies" were really completed in that fortress.

enormous sums deposited, to his credit, in every celebrated bank in Europe; and the assertion was never contradicted. La Borde, a man of science and learning, in the household of Louis the Fifteenth, and the author of a work on Switzerland, testifies to the wonderful cures performed by Cagliostro, at the public hospital, at Strasbourg-to his immense donations to the public charities, in that and other towns of Francewhere fifteen thousand people, says he, owed to him their existence; and to the marvels of his appearance.

"Ce prodige de notre Siècle," writes to a friend the well-known Marquis de Segur-"plus savant que Pic de Mirandule, plus errant et pretentieux qu' Agrippe de Nettesheim, plus mysterieux que l'homme du Masque de fer, qui a tout vu, tout su et apparemment qui tout peut: "—he is the wonder of the age we live in, more universally-learned than Picus of Mirandula, a greater traveller and a loftier pretender than Cornelius Agrippa, more puzzling than the Man in the Iron Mask, has seen everything, knows everything, and to him apparently all things are possible.

In brief, the man was a mystery; and only required to have lived in a different age and country to have founded a religion that might have spread as wide, lasted as long, found as ardent believers, and been just as moral and as true as the religion of Mahomet.

TEXT BOOK OF ARITHMETIC, containing progressive Exercises in the Elementary Rules, with calculations adapted to modern mercantile transactions, including Exercises on the Decimal Coinage. By Mathew Wilson, Head Master of the Glasgow Normal Seminary. London: Richard Griffin.

This is another "Tutor's Assistant," and as such it has its merits: like all compendiums it is useful for reference and to refresh and exercise the memory on a science perhaps long neglected, and rules almost forgotten.

The inadequacy of language to convey all that the mind is capable of conceiving might be proved, we believe, from any work on arithmetic, with which we have ever yet made acquaintance; provided only that the compiler of it could be shewn to have been master of the language in which he wrote. It is remarkable that we have no Pupil's Assistant" in this science, as if it were impossible to teach it by written rules alone, and that the most that could be done was to lighten the labour of those who, by oracular teaching, had already arrived at some proficiency in it.

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Mr. Wilson has written on Etymology and Grammar, and has been gratified by the laudations of the contemporary press, for his lucidity and the intelligibility of his lessons; but we are not sure that he has succeeded, better than his predecessors, in simplifying the rules of arithmetic. Take the following, for instance :—