The Square of Sevens | Page 3

a dozen or so of copies,"
before there had been any "distribution of the Book" among the author's
"Friends, Male or, Female, or to the Publick." By some sudden change
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
Bibliothèque 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