which they took their origin, and still retain their
professors.

Several pages of the manuscript were now
occupied with minute statements of the writer's
earlier disappointment in the objects of his singular
research. The so-called magicians, accessible to the
curiosity of European travellers, were either but
ingenious jugglers, or produced effects that
perplexed him by practices they had mechanically
learned, but of the rationale of which they were
as ignorant as himself. It was not till he had
resided some considerable time in the East,
and acquired a familiar knowledge of its current
languages and the social habits of its various
populations, that he became acquainted with men
in whom he recognised earnest cultivators of the
lore which tradition ascribes to the colleges and priesthoods
of the ancient world; men generally living
remote from others, and seldom to be bribed by
money to exhibit their marvels or divulge their
secrets. In his intercourse with these sages, Sir
Philip arrived at the conviction that there does
exist an art of magic, distinct from the guile of
the conjuror, and applying to certain latent powers
and affinities in nature a philosophy akin to that
which we receive in our acknowledged schools,
inasmuch as it is equally based upon experiment,
and produces from definite causes definite results.
In support of this startling proposition, Sir Philip
now devoted more than half his volume to the
detail of various experiments, to the process and
result of which he pledged his guarantee as
the actual operator. As most of these alleged
experiments appeared to me wholly incredible, and
as all of them were unfamiliar to my practical
experience, and could only be verified or falsified by
tests that would require no inconsiderable amount
of time and care, I passed, with little heed, over
the pages in which they were set forth. I was
impatient to arrive at that part of the manuscript
which might throw light on the mystery in which
my interest was the keenest. What were the
links which connected the existence of Margrave
with the history of Sir Philip Derval? Thus
hurrying on, page after page, I suddenly, towards
the end of the volume, came upon a name that
arrested all my attention—Haroun of Aleppo.
He who has read the words addressed to me in
my trance may well conceive the thrill that shot
through my heart when I came upon that name,
and will readily understand how much more
vividly my memory retains that part of the
manuscript to which I now proceed than all which
had gone before.

"It was," wrote Sir Philip, "in an obscure
suburb of Aleppo that I at length met with the
wonderful man from whom I have acquired a
knowledge immeasurably more profound and
occult than that which may be tested in the
experiments to which I have devoted so large
a share of this memoir. Haroun of Aleppo had,
indeed, mastered every secret in nature which the
nobler, or theurgic, magic seeks to fathom.

"He had discovered the great Principle of Life,
which had hitherto battled the subtlest anatomist:
—provided only that the great organs were not
irreparably destroyed, there was no disease that
he could not cure; no decrepitude to which he
could not restore vigour; yet his science was
based on the same theory as that espoused by the
best professional practitioners of medicine—viz.
that the true art of healing is to assist Nature to
throw off the disease—to summon, as it were, the
whole system to eject the enemy that has fastened
on a part. And thus his processes, though
occasionally varying in the means employed, all
combined in this—viz. the reinvigorating and recruiting
of the principle of life."

No one knew the birth or origin of Haroun;
no one knew his age. In outward appearance
he was in the strength and prime of mature
manhood. But, according to testimonies in
which the writer of the memoir expressed a belief
that, I need scarcely say, appeared to me
egregiously credulous, Haroun's existence under the
same name, and known by the same repute, could
be traced back to more than a hundred years. He
told Sir Philip that he had thrice renewed his
own life, and had resolved to do so no more—he
had grown weary of living on. With all his
gifts, Haroun owned himself to be consumed
by a profound melancholy. He complained
that there was nothing new to him under the
sun; he said that, while he had at his command
unlimited wealth, wealth had ceased to bestow
enjoyment; and he preferred living as simply as
a peasant: he had tired out all the affections
and all the passions of the human heart; he was
in the universe as in a solitude. In a word,
Haroun would often repeat, with mournful solemnity,
"The soul is not meant to inhabit this earth,
earth, and in fleshly tabernacle, for more than the
period usually assigned to mortals; and when by
art in repairing the walls of the body, we so retain
it, the soul repines, becomes inert or dejected."
"He only," said Haroun, "would feel
continued joy in continued existence who could
preserve in perfection the sensual part of man,  
with such mind or reason as may be independent
of the spiritual essence; but whom soul itself
itself has quitted ! Man, in short, as the grandest
of the animals, but without the sublime discontent
of earth, which is the peculiar attribute
of soul."

One evening Sir Philip was surprised to find
at Haroun's house another European. He paused
in his narrative to describe this man. He said
that for three or four years previously he had
heard frequent mention, amongst the cultivators
of magic, of an orientalised Englishman engaged
in researches similar to his own, and to whom was
ascribed a terrible knowledge in in tnose branches of
the art which, even in the East, are condemned
as instrumental to evil. Sir  Philip  here
distinguished at length, as he had so briefly
distinguished in his conversation with me, between
the two kinds of magic—that which he alleged to
be as pure from sin as any other species of
experimental knowledge, and that by which the