Middle Kingdom could not have sent him back to earth.
He pressed to pulle fruyt with his hand
As man for faute that was faynt:
She seyd, Thomas, lat al stand
Or els the deuyl wil the ataynt.[1]
Compliance is fatal. The Butler in Glanvill's eighteenth relation is warned "Do nothing this Company invites you to."[2] Those who obeyed the magic voice which murmured in their ear,—"Thou art a handsome youth, a handsome youth. Only look in the glass," put themselves by compliance into the enemy's hand.[3] Similarly, thoughtless invitation of evil powers is fatal.
"But I had not the power to come to thy bower
Had'st thou not conjured me so,"
says the lover's ghost to his mistress in one of Sir W. Scott's poems.[4] And the result of thoughtless imprecation is recognised all the world over. An irate Malay mother once exclaimed to her naughty boy,—"May the 'Toh Kramat Kamarong fly away with him," Next day the boy disappeared, and three days later 'Toh Kamarong appeared to her in a dream and told her that he had taken him off.[5] "Deevil," cried the witch of Mucklestane Moor, incensed at the obstinacy of the geese, which she was trying to drive, "that neither I nor they ever stir from this spot more." She and her flock turned immediately to stones, which remain to this day.[6] Among the Chukchi, "if a herdsman, angered with his flocks for their restlessness,
- ↑ Appendix to Thomas the Rhymer, I, in Sir W. Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Edinburgh 1853), vol. iv., pp. 122 et seq.
- ↑ Glanvill, op. cit., p. 356.
- ↑ Hartland, The Legend of Perseus, vol. iii., p. 102.
- ↑ The Eve of St. John," Scott's Poetical works (Lansdowne Poets), p. 348.
- ↑ Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 70.
- ↑ Sir W. Scott, Black Dwarf c. ii.
