The Square of Sevens | Page 3

of his own mind or his conscience, Mr. Antrobus did not order any new edition. The prefatory "Afterthought" mentioned may be found, only if stuck in some of the copies of the volume--doubtless by quick and clumsy after-pastings.
Why Antrobus did not give the volume real currency is not known. That he was urged to do so is certain. It is likely, however, that about this same time some pecuniary losses withheld him from such expensive bobbies as printing books. He returned to Bath, and died there in 1740. We have no particulars of the event, nor are there more than allusions to it in the journal of the date or in the letters of contemporaries. Lady Lavinia Pitt, however, mentions the disease as the smallpox, then so much dreaded.
He left no family--except his young ward, the mysterious daughter of "Mr. George"--of the Tretelly Inn. To her Antrobus had given his name, and she inherited half his estate. Shortly after her kind guardian's death she married an Exeter gentleman of high family. Her father, "Mr. George," died in the course of Mr. Antrobus's stay at Tretelly.
To some beaux and belles of the reigns of George II. and George III. this book, originating in the conversation of another George-- George the Unknown--could well seem an interesting matter. All the more might it be so in view of its scarceness, from the first. There are no more copies of it, despite the fact that fashionable dilettanti in things occult have borne it in mind. Could anything be more characteristic of Horace Walpole than to find him in a letter, from serene Strawberry Hill, confessing--to no purpose--that he is "desirous of getting hold of that damned queer old woman's fortune-telling book, by Bob Antrobus." In the Diary of the sprightly Louisa Josepha Adelaide, Countess of Bute (afterward so unfortunate a wife and an even more unfortunate mother), she describes a droll scene at a Scotch castle one evening, in which the unexpected statements of "The Square of Sevens" as to the lives and characters of the company "put to the blush several persons of distinction" who rashly tempted its wisdom--especially including the aged Earl of Lothian. For what Lady Morgan thought of it, and the characteristic story of the peculiar terms on which she offered "to sell her copy to Archbishop Dacre," the reader is referred to the Bentijack Correspondence.
It is on its face a model method of fortune-telling with cards; easily the first for completeness and directness. Our author, in a letter to his cousin, Henry Antrobus, quotes the eminent Brough as styling it not only the most authoritative little book on its topic, certainly the most interesting one; hit the only volume on the subject "which is not a confusing and puerile farrago of nonsense-- troublesome to look into and unsatisfactory to acquire." Certainly our ancient enthusiasts record can be learned and used systematically, exactly as is the case with such excellent and approved systems of chiromancy as Mr. Heron-Allen's and others. It may be thought fortunate for modern students of card-divination that the work has survived, so complete and clear. Its discreetness, too, is delightfully adroit, when it suggests that its tenses, past, present, and future, are not as definite as one might desire.
There is no copy of the hook in the British Museum, nor in the Paris Biblioth��que Nationale, nor in any public collection of America, England, or France that I can name. One worn but perfect MS copy is to be found in a private library in the United States. Another might yet be sought in far Australia, if still owned by descendants of Mr. Antrobus's young ward. Only by a special personal interest in the matter, and with a sense of risk to an heirloom, I am permitted to make the manuscript for this edition.
Undoubtedly, as "R.A.," Mr. Antrobus dressed the mystic "Significances" of the cards in the book's "Tavola" in English less blunt and uncultivated than they came to his ears from the lips of the dying "George--." But that he took no other liberties of the least consequence is pretty certain. He respected the "Supernaturall" here, as in his grave brochure on the Cock Lane Ghost, which spectre, alas! mightily took him in. And, by the way, the reader will please observe in his pages here following that though the method of "building" and so of forming the "Square," and of "reducing" it, seems at first glance bothersome and complicated, it is only a childishly easy performance in the way of making a square of seven rows of seven cards, and then of making the rows only three cards deep, at most! Crazy superstition and the aim at mummery have added the details of process that seem tedious. And, really, they are not ineffective in a