Two curious stories having relation to the ghostly character of the mirror will best serve to illustrate my text. The first is found in Shelley’s journal; one of the inexhaustible store supplied to the poet by “Monk” Lewis, and is about a German lady who, dancing with her lover at a ball, saw in a glass the reflection of her dead husband gazing at her with stern, reproachful eyes. She is said to have died of terror. The second tale is infinitely more picturesque. In the church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence is the beautiful tomb of Beata Villana, the daughter of a noble house, and married in extreme youth to one of the family of Benintendi. Tradition says that she was very fair, and that, being arrayed one night for a festival, she stood looking long in the mirror, allured by her own loveliness. Suddenly her eyes were opened, and she saw, close by her side, a demon dressed with costly raiment like her own, and decked with shining jewels like those she wore upon her arms and bosom. Appalled by this vision of evil, Beata Villana fled from the vanities of the world, and sought refuge in a convent, where she died a holy death in 1360, being then but twenty-eight years of age. Her marble effigy rests on its carven bed in the old Florentine church, and smiling angels draw back the curtains to show her sweet, dead beauty, safe at last from the perilous paths of temptation. In such a legend as this there lingers for us still the elements of mystery and of horror which centuries of prosaic progress are powerless to alienate from that dumb witness of our silent, secret hours, the mirror.
There is a delightful story, which we owe to Charles Lever’s splendid mendacity, of an old English lady who sent to Garibaldi, during that warrior’s confinement at Varignano, a portly pincushion well stocked with British pins. Her enthusiastic countrywomen had already supplied their idol with woolen underwear, and fur-lined slippers, and intoxicating beverages, and other articles equally useful to an abstemious prisoner of war in a hot climate; but pins had been overlooked until this thoughtful votary of freedom offered her tribute at its shine.
Absurd though the tale appears, it has its counterparts in more sober annals, and few men of any prominence have not bewailed at times their painful popularity. Sir Walter Scott, who was the recipient of many gifts, had his fair share of vexatious experiences, and laughs at them somewhat ruefully now and then in the pages of his journal. Eight large and very badly painted landscapes, “in great gilded frames,” were given him by one “most amiable and accomplished old lady.” She had ordered them from an impoverished amateur whom she desired to befriend, and then palmed them off on Sir Walter, who was too gentle and generous to protest. A more “whimsical subject of affliction” was the presentation of two emus by a Mr. Harmer, a settler in Botany Bay, to whom Scott had given some useful letters of introduction. “I wish his gratitude had either taken a different turn, or remained as quiescent as that of others whom I have obliged more materially,” writes Sir Walter in his journal. “I at first accepted the creatures, conceiving them, in my ignorance, to be some sort of blue and green parrots, which, though I do not admire their noise, might scream and yell at their pleasure, if hung up in the hall among the armor. But your emu, it seems, stands six feet high on his stocking soles, and is little better than a kind of cassowary or ostrich. Hang them! They might eat up my collection of old arms, for what I know.”