put upon it, the sun shining, will represent on the opposite wall all such objects as are illuminated by his rays? with concave and cylinder glasses, we may reflect any shape of men, devils, antics, (as magicians most part do, to gull a silly spectator in a dark room), we will ourselves, and that hanging in the air, when ’tis nothing but such an horrible image as [2704]Agrippa demonstrates, placed in another room.  Roger Bacon of old is said to have represented his own image walking in the air by this art, though no such thing appear in his perspectives.  But most part it is in the brain that deceives them, although I may not deny, but that oftentimes the devil deludes them, takes his opportunity to suggest, and represent vain objects to melancholy men, and such as are ill affected.  To these you may add the knavish impostures of jugglers, exorcists, mass-priests, and mountebanks, of whom Roger Bacon speaks, &c. de miraculis naturae et artis. cap. 1. [2705]they can counterfeit the voices of all birds and brute beasts almost, all tones and tunes of men, and speak within their throats, as if they spoke afar off, that they make their auditors believe they hear spirits, and are thence much astonished and affrighted with it.  Besides, those artificial devices to overhear their confessions, like that whispering place of Gloucester [2706]with us, or like the duke’s place at Mantua in Italy, where the sound is reverberated by a concave wall; a reason of which Blancanus in his Echometria gives, and mathematically demonstrates.

So that the hearing is as frequently deluded as the sight, from the same causes almost, as he that hears bells, will make them sound what he list.  “As the fool thinketh, so the bell clinketh.”  Theophilus in Galen thought he heard music, from vapours which made his ears sound, &c.  Some are deceived by echoes, some by roaring of waters, or concaves and reverberation of air in the ground, hollow places and walls. [2707]At Cadurcum, in Aquitaine, words and sentences are repeated by a strange echo to the full, or whatsoever you shall play upon a musical instrument, more distinctly and louder, than they are spoken at first.  Some echoes repeat a thing spoken seven times, as at Olympus, in Macedonia, as Pliny relates, lib. 36. cap. 15. Some twelve times, as at Charenton, a village near Paris, in France.  At Delphos, in Greece, heretofore was a miraculous echo, and so in many other places.  Cardan, subtil. l. 18, hath wonderful stories of such as have been deluded by these echoes.  Blancanus the Jesuit, in his Echometria, hath variety of examples, and gives his reader full satisfaction of all such sounds by way of demonstration. [2708]At Barrey, an isle in the Severn mouth, they seem to hear a smith’s forge; so at Lipari, and those sulphureous isles, and many such like, which Olaus speaks of in the continent of Scandia, and those northern countries.  Cardan de rerum var. l. 15, c. 84, mentioneth a woman, that still supposed she heard the devil call her, and speaking to her, she was a painter’s wife in Milan:  and many such illusions and voices, which proceed most part from a corrupt imagination.