rrect, or whether the Cardinal Duc de
Rohan was the only distinguished person deluded by the artifices of the
Countess de la Motte, it is certain that Joseph Balsamo, commonly called
Alexandre, Count de Cagliostro, was capable of any knavery, however
infamous. Guile was his element; audacity was his breastplate; delusion
was his profession; immorality was his creed; debauchery was his
consolation; his own genius--the genius of cunning--was the god of his
idolatry. Had Cagliostro been sustained by the principles of rectitude,
he must have become the idol as well as the wonder of his
contemporaries; his accomplishments must have dazzled them into
admiration, for he possessed all the attributes of a Crichton. Beautiful
in aspect, symmetrical in proportions, graceful in carriage, capacious
in intellect, erudite as a Benedictine, agile as an Acrobat, daring as
Scaevola, persuasive as Alcibiades, skilled in all manly pastimes,
familiar with the philosophies of the scholar and the worldling, an
orator, a musician, a courtier, a linguist,--such was the celebrated
Cagliostro. In his abilities, he was as capricious as Leonardo, and as
subtle as Macchiavelli; but he was without the magnanimity of the one,
or the crafty prudence of the other. Lucretius so darkened the glories
of nature by the glooms of his blasphemous imagination, that he might
have described this earth as a golden globe animated by a demon.
Fashioned in a mould as marvellous as that golden orb, and animated in
like manner by a devilish and wily spirit, was Balsamo the Rosicrucian.

Between the period of his birth in 1743, and that of his dissolution in
1795, when incarcerated in a dungeon of San Leo, at Rome, Cagliostro,
rendered himself in a manner illustrious by practising upon the
credulity of his fellow-creatures. Holstein had witnessed his pretended
successes in alchemy. Strasburg had received him with admiration, as the
evangelist of a mystic religion. Paris had resounded with the marvels
revealed by his performances in Egyptian free-masonry. Molten gold was
said to stream at pleasure over the rim of his crucibles; divination by
astrology was as familiar to him as it had been of yore to Zoroaster or
Nostradamus; graves yawned at the beck of his potent finger; their
ghostly habitants, appeared at his preternatural bidding. The
necromantic achievements of Doctor Dee and William Lilly dwindled into
insignificance before those attributed to a man who, although ap