The more often he is deceived,
the more steadfastly he believes.... Do you remember the time, Signor
Carlo, when a friend of ours, in order to win a favour of his beloved,
filled his room with skulls and bones like a churchyard?' The most
loathsome tasks were prescribed--to draw three teeth from a corpse or a
nail from its finger, and the like; and while the hocus-pocus of the
incantation was going on, the unhappy participants sometimes died of
terror.
Benvenuto Cellini did not die during the well-known incantation (1532)
in the Colosseum at Rome, although both he and his companions witnessed
no ordinary horrors; the Sicilian priest, who probably expected to find
him a useful coadjutor in the future, paid him the compliment as they
went home of saying that he had never met a man of so sturdy a courage.
Every reader will make his own reflections on the proceedings
themselves. The narcotic fumes and the fact that the imaginations of
the spectators were predisposed for all possible terrors, are the chief
points to be noticed, and explain why the lad who formed one of the
party, and on whom they made most impression, saw much more than the
others. but it may be inferred that Benvenuto himself was the one whom
it was wished to impress, since the dangerous beginning of the incantation can have had no other aim than to arouse curiosity.
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