had made a deep impression on his
mind, which was no doubt intensified by the vision which he thought he
saw in his rooms at Oxford, and by the discovery of the portrait at
Royston. Of those singular phenomena I have no explanation to offer.

The romantic element in his disposition rendered him peculiarly
susceptible to the fascination of that mysticism which breathed through
Temple's narrative. He told me that almost from the first time he read
it he was filled with a longing to visit the places and to revive the
strange life of which it spoke. This inclination he kept at first in
check, but by degrees it gathered strength enough to master him.

There is no doubt in my mind that the music of the _Gagliarda_ of
Graziani helped materially in this process of mental degradation. It is
curious that Michael Praetorius in the "Syntagma musicum" should speak of
the Galliard generally as an "invention of the devil, full of shameful
and licentious gestures and immodest movements," and the singular melody
of the _Gagliarda_ in the "Areopagita" suite certainly exercised from
the first a strange influence over me. I shall not do more than touch
on the question here, because I see Miss Maltravers has spoken of it
at length, and will only say, that though since the day of Sir John's
death I have never heard a note of it, the air is still fresh in my
mind, and has at times presented itself to me unexpectedly, and always
with an unwholesome effect. This I have found happen generally in times
of physical depression, and the same air no doubt exerted a similar
influence on Sir John, which his impressionable nature rendered from the
first more deleterious to him.

I say this advisedly, because I am sure that if some music is good for
man and elevates him, other melodies are equally bad and enervating. An
experience far wider than any we yet possess is necessary to enable us
to say how far this influence is capable of extension. How far, that
is, the mind may be directed on the one hand to ascetic abnegation by
the systematic use of certain music, or on the other to illicit and
dangerous pleasures by melodies of an opposite tendency. But this much
is, I think, certain, that after a comparatively advanced standard of
culture has once been attained, music is the readiest if not the only
key which admits to the yet narrower circle of the highest imaginative
thought.

On the occasion for travel afforded him by his honeymoon, an impulse
wh