The form which these most often took in daily life is shown by Ariosto
in his comedy of the necromancers. His hero is one of the many Jewish
exiles from Spain, although he also gives himself out for a Greek, an
Egyptian, and an African, and is constantly changing his name and
costume. He pretends that his incantations can darken the day and
lighten the darkness, that he can move the earth, make himself
invisible, and change men into beasts; but these vaunts are only an
advertisement. His true object is to make his account out of unhappy
and troubled marriages, and the traces which he leaves behind him in
his course are like the slime of a snail, or often like the ruin
wrought by a hailstorm. To attain his ends he can persuade people that
the box in which a lover is hidden is full of ghosts, or that he can
make a corpse talk. It is at all events a good sign that poets and
novelists could reckon on popular applause in holding up this class of
men to ridicule. Bandello not only treats this sorcery of a Lombard
monk as a miserable, and in its consequences terrible, piece of
knavery, but he also describes with unaffected indignation the
disasters which never cease to pursue the credulous fool. 'A man hopes
with "Solomon's Key' and other magical books to find the treasures
hidden in the bosom of the earth, to force his lady to do his will, to
find out the secret of princes, and to transport himself in the
twinkling of an eye from Milan to Rome.
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