Merimee's pleasant story of "Colomba,"
'_sois excommuniee, sois maudite, friponne!' Car Bandalaccio, superstitieux
comme tous les bandits, craignait de fasciner les enfans en les addressant
les benedictions et les eloges. On sait que les puissances mysterieuses qui
president a l'annocchiatura ont la mauvaise habitude d'executer le
contraire de nos souhaits._" Perhaps our familiar habit of calling our
children "scamp" and "rascal," when we are caressing them, may be founded
on a worn-out superstition of the same kind.
But it is not only praise administered by others which may inflict evil
upon us,--we must also be specially careful not to have too "gude a conceit
of ourselves," lest we thereby draw down upon us the fate of a certain
Eutelidas, who, having regarded his image in the water with peculiar
self-satisfaction and laudation, immediately lost his health, and from that
time forward was afflicted with sore diseases. During a supper at the house
of Metrius Florus, where, among others, Plutarch, Soclarus, and Caius, the
son-in-law of Florus, were guests, a curious and interesting conversation
took place on the subject of the _Fascinum_, which is reported by Plutarch
in one of his Symposia. The existence of the power of fascination was
admitted by all, and a philosophical explanation of its phenomena was
attempted. In reply to some suggestions of Plutarch, Soclarus says there is
no doubt that their ancestors fully believed in this power, and then cites
the case of Eutelidas as being well known to his auditors, and celebrated
by some poet in these lines:--
"Eutelidas was once a beauteous youth,
But, luckless, in the wave his face beholding,
Himself he fascinates, and pines away.
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