HKB
these acts of diabolical impiety. But as these arts are rarely known among the middling part of mankind, I shall neither open their mysteries, nor inveigh against them any farther.
The persons who are most to be avoided are your ordinary fortune-telling women and men about this town, whose houses ought to be avoided as a plague or a pestilence, either because they are cheats and impostors, or because they deal with black arts, none of them that I know having any pretensions to the gift of a second-sight. Among many, a few of the most notorious that I can call to mind now, are as follow. The first and chiefest of these mischievous fortune-tellers is a woman that does not live far from the Old Bailey. And truly the justice hall in that place is the properest place for her to appear at, where, if she was tried for pretending to give charms written upon paper with odd scrawls, which she calls figures, she would be probably convicted, and very justly condemned, and doomed to have her last journey from the Old Bailey to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The other is a fellow that lives in Moorfields, in which place those who go to consult him ought to live all their lifetimes, at the famous palaces of the senseless men: he is the successor of the famous Dr. Trotter, whose widow he married; and from being a tailor and patching men's garments, he now cuts flourishes with his shears upon parchment, considers the heavens as a garment, and from the spangles thereupon he calculates nativities, and sets up for a very profound astrologer. The third is an ignorant fellow that caws out strange predictions in Crow-alley, of whose croaking noise I shall here take no notice, he having been sufficiently mauled in the most ingenious Spectators. These and such counterfeits as these, I would desire all gentlemen and ladies to avoid. The only two really learned men that I ever knew in the art of astrology, were my good friends Dr. Williams and Mr. Gadbury; and I thought it necessary to pay this esteem to their names, let the world judge of them what it will. I will here say no more, nor hinder you any longer, gentlemen and ladies, from the diversion which my good old friend, who is now departed this life, has prepared for you in his book, which a young gentleman of my acquaintance revised, and only subscribe myself,
Yours, &c.,
DUNCAN CAMPBELL.
THE HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF MR. DUNCAN CAMPBELL.
THE INTRODUCTION.