vampiro; modern Latin, vampyrus.[49] The Oxford English Dictionary thus defines vampire: “A preternatural being of a malignant nature (in the original unusual form of the belief an animated Corpse), supposed to seek nourishment and do harm by sucking the blood of sleeping persons; a man or woman abnormally endowed with similar habits.” The first example which has been traced of the use of the word in literature seems to be that which occurs in The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, written about 1734, which was printed in Vol. IV. of the Harleian Miscellany, 1745, where the following passage occurs: “We must not omit Observing here, that our Landlord [at Laubach] seems to pay some regard to what Baron Valvasor has related of the Vampyres, said to infest some Parts of this Country. These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them.” The word and the idea soon became quite familiar, and in his Citizen of the World (1760-2) Oliver Goldsmith writes in every-day phrase: “From a meal he advances to a surfeit, and at last sucks blood like a vampire.”
Johnson, edited by Latham, 1870, has: “Vampire. Pretended demon, said to delight in sucking human blood, and to animate the bodies of dead persons, which, when dug up, are said to be found florid and full of blood.” A quotation is given from Forman’s Observations on the Revolution in 1688, 1741, which shows that so early the word had acquired its metaphorical sense: “These are the vampires of the publick and riflers of the kingdom.” David Mallet in his Zephyr, or the Stratagem, has:
Can Russia, can the Hungarian vampire
With whom call in the hordes and empire,
Can four such powers, who one assail
Deserve our praise should they prevail?
A few travellers and learned authors had written of vampires in the seventeenth century. Thus we have the famous De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus of Leone Allacci,[50] published at Cologne in 1645; there are some detailed accounts in the Relation de ce qui s’est passé a Sant-Erini Isle de l’Archipel[51] by Father François Richard, a Jesuit
