Institute, exhibited the precision of its working
to the members, excited their surprise,
obtained their felicitations, and retired,
thinking his business done. And there,
indeed, it ended. He presented his model to
the cabinet of M. Charles, and gave himself
no more trouble in the matter.

For a new thought had presented itself,
and he was pursuing it with vigour to some
practical results. The mechanism of his
phantasmagoria had first occurred to his
mind during the holiday at Liège. He betook
himself to books on natural magic, and
converted his dwelling into a pandemonium by
the multitude of fiends and ghosts that he
employed himself in painting. He was bent
upon reproducing some of the miracles
worked by the priests of old. It was very
easy to excite the wonder of the town, even
without any great dexterity or conjuror's
tools of a refined description. Crowds were
flocking daily to the gardens of the Palais
Royal to gape at the shadow of a chimney,
which, at a certain hour of the day, resembled
the figure of Louis the Sixteenth. Thousands
believed that the shadow of the king upon
whom they had trampled haunted the
Parisians by appearing daily in his garden. A
commissary of police, by the help of a few
masons, at last caused the demolition of the
august shade in the presence of a concourse
of astonished people. It does not take much
to produce a ghost. M. Robertson proposed,
however, to give himself no little trouble for
the purpose, and to introduce his friends to
such a world of spectres as only Virgil, or
Scarron, his parodist, had ever before
pictured. Scarron was the man to show you
spectres:—

Next, O shades, by the ghost of a rock, his doom
I saw being endured by the ghost of a groom,
Who with ghostly mop dipped in the ghost of a tub,
Gave the ghost of a carriage a ghost of a rub.

To such shadowy company M. Robertson
was after a short time inviting Paris. He had
perfected Kirker's magic lantern in such a
way, that he could give to his shadows
motions resembling those of life. One of his
friends in Paris was the Abbé Chappe, who
made known to the French government the
old system of telegraphic lines. This gentleman
urged him to give public séances, and he
did so, attracting at first scientific men, or
amateurs in physics; very soon also the
fashionable mob. He issued a philosophical
prospectus, and made it a great point in his
scheme that his entertainments were to show
how easily superstition could be worked
upon—what dire visions could from very
simple causes spring—how groundless, in
fine, was the common dread of apparitions.

He took pains, however, to make his own
ghosts dreadful. His darkened exhibition
room was made grim with skulls and bones,
and with the representation of a tomb out of
which skeletons and other horrors seemed to
rise. When, after a time, his audiences
became very large, and a new theatre was
necessary, he obtained the use of a deserted
and ruined chapel that had belonged to a
convent of the Capuchins; and there he
made ghosts seem to move over the actual
tombs of many dead. He worked upon the
minds of the visitors before whom he caused
spectres to start into life, with the plaintive
and low notes of a harmonicon. He imitated
dreadful cries, as he made caverns seem to
yawn and render up their dead. He
appealed, in fact, to a coarse taste; established
a reign of terror; produced every supernatural
horror that a man can fear; and said,
Why do you fear? There is nothing here
but a certain amount of mechanical
contrivance, and the application of a few
principles of science. He caused his spectres to
play upon smoke, and upon thin veils spread
imperceptibly in certain parts of the room.

Here let us not omit to record that he
included galvanism among the wonders upon
which he discoursed, as soon as the
discoveries of Volta—which were not instantly
received in France—had got abroad. Volta
himself, when he had come to Paris to
explain his views, honoured M. Robertson
by being present at one of his entertainments;
and when the lecturer expressed some
doubts upon the subject of the relations
between electricity and galvanism, Volta offered
publicly to set his doubts at rest. Volta
gratified M. Robertson with friendship,
admired the beauty of his instruments; and
after his return to Italy, wrote for some like
them. Robertson, the conjuror, was the only
man whom Volta found in Paris not entirely
ignorant of his discoveries. The great
Monsieur Charles, when Robertson called to
introduce to him the Italian philosopher,
stammered, regretted a pressing engagement,
promised to be back soon, and in the meantime
left them absolute masters of his cabinet.
He went out and watched at an adjacent
bookseller's for the departure of his guests.
He had not chosen to confess his ignorance,
and took that method of escaping from an
awkward conversation.

When Volta explained his ideas to the
Institute, he requested Robertson to go with
him and perform the requisite experiments.
Detained by his own evening performance,
Robertson went late; found his way impeded,
and the Institute surrounded by soldiery.
Wondering what that meant, he looked
curiously around him when he entered. The
members, standing and uncovered, were
listening attentively to M. Volta, who stood in
the midst of them. When he cited, as proof
of the identity of electricity and galvanism,
the combustion of hydrogen gas by the
galvanic spark, the Italian courteously said that
M. Robertson had first made that experiment,
and begged him to repeat it. The gas was
procured from the neighbouring cabinet of
M. Charles. The detonation that announced