scover'd a very fair Vault:
At the upper end of it was a Statue of a Man in Armour sitting by a
Table, and leaning on his Left Arm. He held a Truncheon in his right
Hand, and had a Lamp burning before him. The Man had no sooner set one
Foot within the Vault, than the Statue erecting it self from its leaning
Posture, stood bolt upright; and upon the Fellow's advancing another
Step, lifted up the Truncheon in his Right Hand. The Man still ventur'd
a third Step, when the Statue with a furious Blow broke the Lamp into a
thousand Pieces, and left his Guest in a sudden Darkness.

Upon the Report of this Adventure, the Country People soon came with
Lights to the Sepulchre, and discovered that the Statue, which was made
of Brass, was nothing more than a Piece of Clock-work; that the Floor of
the Vault was all loose, and underlaid with several Springs, which, upon
any Man's entering, naturally produced that which had happend.

Rosicrucius, says his Disciples, made use of this Method, to shew the
World that he had re-invented the ever-burning Lamps of the Ancients,
tho' he was resolvd no one should reap any Advantage from the Discovery.

X.

[Footnote 1: Nil proprium ducas quod mutarier potest.]

[Footnote 2: Aulus Gellius. Noct. Att., Bk xx., ch. 5.]

[Footnote 3: Baltazar Grecian's Discreto has been mentioned before in
the Spectator, being well-known in England through a French translation.
See note on p. 303, ante [Footnote 1 of No. 293]. Gracian, in Spain,
became especially popular as a foremost representative of his time in
transferring the humour for conceits--cultismo, as it was called--from
verse to prose. He began in 1630 with a prose tract, the Hero, laboured
in short ingenious sentences, which went through six editions. He wrote
also an Art of Poetry after the new style. His chief work was the
Criticon, an allegory of the Spring, Autumn, and Winter of life. The
Discreto was one of his minor works. All that he wrote was published,
not by himself, but by a friend, and in the name of his brother Lorenzo,
who was not an ecclesiastic.]

[Footnote 4: Rosicrucius had been made fashionable by the Abbe de
Villars who was assassinated in 1675. His Comte de Gabalis was a popular
little book in the Spectators time. I suppose I need not inform my
readers that there never was a Rosicrucius or a Rosicrucian sect. The
Rosicrucian pamphlets which appeared in Germany at the beginning of the
17th century, dating from the