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He became the victim of a sort of intellectual superfetation. He was perpetually planning labours of a magnitude which, from the first, rendered them hopelessly impracticable. His brain was morbidly active, while his hand grew tremulous and uncertain, and his sight dimmed. His manner became irritable, and more than ever timid and suspicious.
But, that we may rid ourselves once and for ever of this outrageous calumny upon Shakspeare's memory, we shall pursue the story to its final stage. Even Malone has been thoughtless enough to accredit this closing chapter, which contains, in fact, such a superfetation of folly as the annals of human dullness do not exceed. Let us recapitulate the points of the story.
Bertram stabs himself, and dies by her side, and that the play may conclude as it began, to wit, in a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because he had snatched a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in terror when it is pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and thief-captain this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination, this monster, whose best deed is, the having saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him, by turning Jack Ketch to himself; first recommends the charitable Monks and holy Prior to pray for his soul, and then has the folly and impudence to exclaim
Addison describes the case of a woman who was delivered of a healthy male child, and everything was well until the evening of the fourth day, when intense labor-pains set in, and well-formed twins about the size of a pigeon's egg were born. In this strange case, possibly an example of superfetation, the patient made a good recovery and the first child lived.
At birth the boy looked premature, about seven months old, which being the case, the girl must have been either a superfetation or a seven months' child also. Van Bibber of Baltimore says he met a young lady who was born five months after her sister, and who was still living.
Pare seemed to be well conversant with the possibility as well as the actuality of superfetation; and Harvey reports that a certain maid, gotten with child by her master, in order to hide her knavery came to London in September, where she lay in by stealth, and being recovered, returned home.
The birth of twins is an evil portent to the Mpongwes, as it is in many parts of Central Africa, and even in the New World; it also involves the idea of moral turpitude, as if the woman were one of the lower animals, capable of superfetation.
She must have become pregnant twenty-one days after the delivery of her first child. Superfetation has been known for many centuries; the Romans had laws prescribing the laws of succession in such cases, and many medical writers have mentioned it. Hippocrates and Aristotle wrote of it, the former at some length.
In December of the same year she was unexpectedly delivered of another child, a product of superfetation, which proclaimed the crime that she had so cunningly concealed before. Marcellus Donatus, Goret, Schacher, and Mauriceau mention superfetation.
And if any blame them for this their rataconniculation, and reiterated lechery upon their pregnancy and big-belliedness, seeing beasts, in the like exigent of their fulness, will never suffer the male-masculant to encroach them, their answer will be, that those are beasts, but they are women, very well skilled in the pretty vales and small fees of the pleasant trade and mysteries of superfetation: as Populia heretofore answered, according to the relation of Macrobius, lib. 2.
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