dark cave of Endor, when the ghost of Samuel
trembled in the lurid air, and scared Saul's
eyeballs. When the Israelites wandered
in the desert my magicians held dark and
fearsome sway in the wicked lands of Canaan.
They presided over the ghastly rites of
Moloch; they wrought enchantments among
the Amalekites, the Amorites, the Jebusites,
and the Hittites. In Judea, in Persia, in
Chaldea, my Magic, my Magicians, worked
signs and wonders (false but fearful) through
long ages. Wise men, soothsayers, sorcerers,
and astrologers, were in the trains of mighty
kings, of Darius the Mede, and Nebuchadnezzar
the king. Throughout the broad
miles-long streets of Nineveh and Babylon;
by the arched terraces; under the hanging
gardens; in the courts of marble palaces; by
the myriad-hued tablets on the wall of strong
warriors and fair youths such as Aholibah
sighed for; in the midst of the motley, bright
arrayed, swarthy, strong bearded throng
stalked my Magicians, and their incantations
were blended with the wars of Ninus, and
the orgies of Semiramis, and the conspiracies
of the captains and the liturgies of the priests.
When Belshazzar, the king, drunk deep with
his lords, and praised the gods of gold, and
brass, and iron, and wood, and when in the
same hour, there came forfh fingers of a
man's hand and wrote—over against the
candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of
the king's palace—words which none could
understand, did the king bethink himself in
his need of light inconsequential fairies? No:
he cried aloud for the astrologers, the
Chaldeans, the soothsayers—the wise men of
Babylon. And though we, the wise men,
could not read the interpretation or wiss that
the Medes and Persians were at the gate, yet
we only ceded to One, whom the king
Nebuchadnezzar had made master of all the
Magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and soothsayers
in the kingdom. Magic was vanquished, but
still recognised.

You have spoken of Queen Mab's sway in
Egypt, and of her myriad elves sporting upon
the tails of crocodiles. Sir, you are impertinent.
Let Queen Mab and her fairies disport
themselves in frivolous Persia and enervated
Arabia; but leave the land of Egypt—that
long, narrow, dusky land of wonders—to me,
the king of magic and mysticism. Where
that gigantic enigma, the Sphynx, rears its
dim, battered, mysterious, time-worn, yet
time-defying head, against the copper sky,
and amidst the shifting sand; where the
river of Nile reflects—

                              " the endless length
                Of dark red colonnades,"

where religion was philosophy, and philosophy
religion; yet where the purest doctrines of
metaphysics were mingled with the grossest
forms of Zoroastianism and the brutifying
worship of beasts and reptiles and vegetables,
and the profoundest morality was grafted
upon the rudest and most debasing African
fetichism; where phantom hieroglyphics
shadow forth the dim creed that the soul, after
its three thousand years' cycle of metempsychosis
or rather metensomatosis, shall return
to its human envelope again; and where the
spirits of kings, and princes, and priests are
pourtrayed migratory through the bodies of
swine, and birds that fly and reptiles that
crawl—there I and Magic dwelt. Mine was
Fetichism and Zoroastianism. Magic had no
sympathy with the light Bacchus in his
convivial, his joyous, his saltatory form. Queen
Mab, or Queen Ariadne, or Queen
Anybody may sport with him in Naxos, and
the sunny isles of the Archipelago; may
press the red grape for him, and hold the
golden chalice to his eager lips. But Bacchus,
as Osiris, the awful Lord of Amenti, belongs
not to Fairyland, but to the realm of Magic
and to me. My Magicians sat at his feet,
when, as he is painted in the royal tombs of
Biban el Moluk, he sits pro tribunal, weighing
the souls that have just departed from
the bodies in the fatal scales of Amenti, and
judging them according to their deserts. The
Magicians were at home in Egypt. When,
as the legend of Manetho tells us, the great
pyramid was built by King Suphis, the
Magicians stood by and aided the work with
their spells. When that King Pharaoh who
knew not Joseph or his people was so sorely
beset by the plagues raised by the indomitable
brothers of Israel, did not he call upon his
Magicians for aid? Did not their magic lore
stand them in such stead that their rods all
produced serpents, albeit Aaron's rod, through
a power that was preter-magical, swallowed
them all up eventually? As year after year
and age after age rolled their sternly
succeeding waves over the land of Egypt, and as
the remorselessly advancing and receding
tide brought from the womb of time the
myriad pebbles of mortality, and carried
them back into the abyss of eternity. Magic
was left high and dry—a monument and a
misleading Pharos, inscrutably cabalistic and
existent as the pillar of Pompey, and the
needle of Cleopatra, and the obelisk of Luxor.

Came the soft sons of Syria with the rich
dyes of Tyre and enervating arts. Came the
luxurious Greeks, and gave plasticity and
symmetry to the bizarre, yet awful sculptures
of the Egyptian Pantheon. The muscular
fauns, the brawny Hercules, the slim Adonis,
the cested Venus, the crested Diana came to
teach the limners and sculptors of Egypt how
to cast their deities in the mould of Zeuxis
and Praxiteles. But the Sphynx looked coldly
on in her unchangeable, enigmatical beauty,
and the Magicians stood by, unchangeable
too, their arms folded, gazing with a frown
half of anger, half of contempt at the clumsy
legerdemain of Paganism, at the boggling
tricks of the haruspices and the transparent
cheatery of the oracle. "These priests of
Bacchus and Venus," they thought, "are mere