as Churchill said, speaking of Garrick.

You ask me about those mysterious and frightful intimacies between children and serpents, of which so many instances have been recorded.  I am sure I cannot tell what to make of them.  I have seen several such accounts in recent papers, but here is one published in the seventeenth century, which is as striking as any of the more modern ones: 

“Mr. Herbert Tones of Monmouth, when he was a little Boy, was used to eat his Milk in a Garden in the Morning, and was no sooner there, but a large Snake always came, and eat out of the Dish with him, and did so for a considerable time, till one Morning, he striking the Snake on the Head, it hissed at him.  Upon which he told his Mother that the Baby (for so he call’d it) cry’d Hiss at him.  His Mother had it kill’d, which occasioned him a great Fit of Sickness, and ’twas thought would have dy’d, but did recover.”

There was likewise one “William Writtle, condemned at Maidston Assizes for a double murder, told a Minister that was with him after he was condemned, that his mother told him, that when he was a Child, there crept always to him a Snake, wherever she laid him.  Sometimes she would convey him up Stairs, and leave him never so little, she should be sure to find a Snake in the Cradle with him, but never perceived it did him any harm.”

One of the most striking alleged facts connected with the mysterious relation existing between the serpent and-the human species is the influence which the poison of the Crotulus, taken internally, seemed to produce over the moral faculties, in the experiments instituted by Dr. Hering at Surinam.  There is something frightful in the disposition of certain ophidians, as the whipsnake, which darts at the eyes of cattle without any apparent provocation or other motive.  It is natural enough that the evil principle should have been represented in the form of a serpent, but it is strange to think of introducing it into a human being like cow-pox by vaccination.

You know all about the Psylli, or ancient serpent tamers, I suppose.  Savary gives an account of the modern serpent-tamers in his “Letters on Egypt.”  These modern jugglers are in the habit of making the venomous Naja counterfeit death, lying out straight and stiff, changing it into a rod, as the ancient magicians did with their serpents, (probably the same animal,) in the time of Moses.

I am afraid I cannot throw much light on “Christabel” or “Lamia” by any criticism I can offer.  Geraldine, in the former, seems to be simply a malignant witch-woman with the evil eye, but with no absolute ophidian relationship.  Lamia is a serpent transformed by magic into a woman.  The idea of both is mythological, and not in any sense physiological.  Some women unquestionably suggest the image of serpents; men rarely or never.  I have been struck, like many others, with the ophidian head and eye of the famous Rachel.