Lord Orrery and Mr. Greatrakes may have seen the butler float in the air—­ after dinner.  The exploits of the Indian fakirs almost, or quite, overcome the scepticism of Mr. Max Muller, in his Gifford Lectures on Psychological Religion.  Living and honourable white men aver that they have seen the feat, examined the performers, and found no explanation; no wires, no trace of imposture. (The writer is acquainted with a well vouched for case, the witness an English officer.) Mr. Kellar, an American professional conjurer, and exposer of spiritualistic pretensions, bears witness, in the North American Review, to a Zulu case of ‘levitation,’ which actually surpasses the tale of the gentleman’s butler in strangeness.  Cieza de Leon, in his Travels, translated by Mr. Markham for the Hakluyt Society, brings a similar anecdote from early Peru, in 1549. {100b} Miss Nancy Wesley’s case is vouched for (she and the bed she sat on both rose from the floor) by a letter from one of her family to her brother Samuel, printed in Southey’s Life of Wesley.  Finally, Lord Lindsay and Lord Adare published a statement that they saw Home float out of one window and in at another, in Ashley Place, S.W., on December 16, 1868.  Captain Wynne, who was also there, ’wrote to the Medium, to say I was present as a witness’. {101} We need not heap up more examples, drawn from classic Greece, as in the instances of Abaris and Iamblichus.  We merely stand speechless in the presence of the wildest of all fables, when it meets us, as identical myths and customs do—­not among savages alone, but everywhere, practically speaking, and in connection with barbarous sorcery, with English witchcraft, with the saintliest of mediaeval devotees, with African warriors, with Hindoo fakirs, with a little English girl in a quiet old country parsonage, and with an enigmatic American gentleman.  Many living witnesses, of good authority, sign statements about Home’s levitation.  In one case, a large table, on which stood a man of twelve stone weight rose from the floor, and an eye-witness, a doctor, felt under the castors with his hands.

Of all persons subject to ‘levitation,’ Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603-1663) was the most notable.  The evidence is partly derived from testimonies collected with a view to his canonisation, within two years after his death.  There is a full account of his life and adventures in Acta Sanctorum. {102} St. Joseph died, as we saw, in 1663, but the earliest biography of him, in Italian, was not published till fifteen years later, in 1678.  Unluckily the compiler of his legend in the Acta Sanctorum was unable to procure this work, by Nutius, which might contain a comparatively slight accretion of myths.  The next life is of 1722, and the author made use of the facts collected for Joseph’s beatification.  There is another life by Pastrovicchi, in 1753.  He was canonised in that year, when all the facts were remote by about a century.