“These herbs did Moeris give to me
      And poisons pluckt at Pontus;
    For there they grow and multiplie
      And do not so amongst us: 
    With these she made herselfe become
      A wolfe, and hid hir in the wood;
    She fetcht up souls out of their toome,
      Removing corne from where it stood.”

In the fourth AEneid, the lovesick Tyrian queen is thus made to describe the magic which was then believed to be practised:—­

    “Rejoice,” she said:  “instructed from above,
    My lover I shall gain, or lose my love;
    Nigh rising Atlas, next the falling sun
    Long tracts of Ethiopian climates run: 
    There a Massylian priestess I have found,
    Honored for age, for magic arts renowned: 
    The Hesperian temple was her trusted care;
    ’Twas she supplied the wakeful dragon’s fare;
    She, poppy-seeds in honey taught to steep,
    Reclaimed his rage, and soothed him into sleep;
    She watched the golden fruit.  Her charms unbind
    The chains of love, or fix them on the mind;
    She stops the torrent, leaves the channel dry,
    Repels the stars, and backward bears the sky. 
    The yawning earth rebellows to her call,
    Pale ghosts ascend, and mountain ashes fall.”

Tibullus, in the second elegy of his first book, gives the following account of the powers ascribed to a magician:—­

    “She plucks each star out of his throne,
      And turneth back the raging waves;
    With charms she makes the earth to cone,
      And raiseth souls out of their graves;
    She burns men’s bones as with a fire,
      And pulleth down the lights of Heaven,
    And makes it snow at her desire
      E’en in the midst of summer season.”

These views continued to hold undisturbed dominion over the people during a long succession of centuries.  As the twilight of the dark ages began to settle upon Christendom, superstition, that night-blooming plant, extended itself rapidly, and in all directions, over the surface of the world.  While every thing else drooped and withered, it struck deeper its roots, spread wider its branches, and brought forth more abundantly its fruit.  The unnumbered fables of Greek and Roman mythology, the arts of augury and divination, the visions of oriental romance, the fanciful and attenuated theories of the later philosophy, the abstract and spiritual doctrines of Platonism, and all the grosser and wilder conceptions of the northern conquerors of the Roman Empire, became mingled together in the faith of the inhabitants of the European kingdoms.  From this multifarious combination, the infinitely diversified popular superstitions of the modern nations have sprung.