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Updated: June 16, 2025
She was better acquainted, perhaps, with his defects than his fascinations, and too familiar with both to appreciate at all their effect upon a stranger. 'What can she see in him? There's nothing remarkable in Stanley, poor fellow, except his faults. There are much handsomer men than he, and many as amusing and he with no estate. She had heard of charms and philtres.
If I did not believe pardon my blasphemy, O uncreated Light! if I did not believe in the truth of that which God has taught us by the voice of the prophets, by the example of His Son, by the acts of the Apostles, by the authority of councils, and by the testimony of the martyrs, if I did not know that the sufferings of the body are necessary for the salvation of the soul if I were, like thee, lost in ignorance of sacred mysteries I would return at once amongst the men of this day, I would strive to acquire riches, that I might live in ease, like those who are happy in this world, and I would say to the votaries of pleasure, 'Come, my daughters, come, my servants, come and pour out for me your wines, your philtres, your perfumes. But you, foolish old man! you deprive yourself of all these advantages; you lose without hope of any gain; you give without hope of any return, and you imitate foolishly the noble deeds of us anchorites, as an impudent monkey thinks, by smearing a wall, to copy the picture of a clever artist.
The golden fleece was defended by bulls, whose hoofs were brass, and whose breath was fire, and by a never-sleeping dragon that planted itself at the foot of the tree upon which the fleece was suspended. Jason was prepared for his undertaking by Medea, the daughter of the king of the country, herself an accomplished magician, and furnished with philtres, drugs and enchantments.
One of these wizards was a black man; a very proper style of person to deal with the black art. Witch means, a woman who practices sorcery under an agreement with the devil, who helps her. Before the Christian era, the Jewish witch was a mere diviner or at most a raiser of the dead, and the Gentile witch was a poisoner, a maker of philtres or love potions, and a vulgar sort of magician.
The lads call him 'Old King Coffee' a memory I suppose of the Ashantee War. Any one will tell you where he lives. He is something of a witch-doctor as well as 'king, and manages to make a little out of charms, philtres and such like, I'm told enough to keep him in rum anyway. He has a name too as a preacher among the Holy Jumpers! but he's getting too old to do much preaching nowadays.
He attends even to their airs, dress, and motions, and imitates them liberally, and not servilely; he copies, but does not mimic. These personal graces are of very great consequence. They anticipate the sentiments, before merit can engage the understanding: they captivate the heart, and give rise, I believe, to the extravagant notions of charms and philtres.
Were not the elixirs of life and the love philtres which the witches sold to the senile and impotent composed of similar or analogous substances? Human semen entered almost always, in the Middle Ages, into the compounding of these mixtures. Now, hasn't Dr. Brown-Sequard, after repeated experiments, recently demonstrated the virtues of semen taken from one man and instilled into another?
The Romans, who borrowed most of their customs from the Greeks, also followed them in that of endeavoring to conciliate love by the power of philtres and charms; a fact of which we have not the least room to doubt, as they are in Virgil and some other of the Latin poets so many instances that prove it.
The Countess boasted that she had selected the name of Freeman because it was peculiarly suited to the frankness and boldness of her character; and, to do her justice, it was not by the ordinary arts of courtiers that she established and long maintained her despotic empire over the feeblest of minds, She had little of that tact which is the characteristic talent of her sex; she was far too violent to flatter or to dissemble: but, by a rare chance, she had fallen in with a nature on which dictation and contradiction acted as philtres.
"Janet Sparhallow, you talk as if you lived in the dark ages! The idea of supposing that horrid old woman could give you love philtres! Why, girl, I've always loved Bruce always. But I thought he'd forgotten me. And tonight when he came I found he hadn't. There's the whole thing in a nutshell. I'm going to marry him and go home with him to Scotland."
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