corded; in repeating which, still, however, the narrators shook their
heads, and expressed surprise how a stranger should have possessed so
minute a knowledge of the quiet and obscure distresses he had relieved.
Two or three sick persons, when abandoned by their physicians, he had
visited, and conferred with alone. They had recovered: they ascribed to
him their recovery; yet they could not tell by what medicines they had
been healed. They could only depose that he came, conversed with them,
and they were cured; it usually, however, happened that a deep sleep had
preceded the recovery.

Another circumstance was also beginning to be remarked, and spoke yet
more in his commendation. Those with whom he principally associated--the
gay, the dissipated, the thoughtless, the sinners and publicans of the
more polished world--all appeared rapidly, yet insensibly to themselves,
to awaken to purer thoughts and more regulated lives. Even Cetoxa, the
prince of gallants, duellists, and gamesters, was no longer the same man
since the night of the singular events which he had related to
Glyndon. The first trace of his reform was in his retirement from the
gaming-houses; the next was his reconciliation with an hereditary enemy
of his house, whom it had been his constant object for the last six
years to entangle in such a quarrel as might call forth his inimitable
manoeuvre of the stoccata. Nor when Cetoxa and his young companions were
heard to speak of Zanoni, did it seem that this change had been brought
about by any sober lectures or admonitions. They all described Zanoni as
a man keenly alive to enjoyment: of manners the reverse of formal,--not
precisely gay, but equable, serene, and cheerful; ever ready to listen
to the talk of others, however idle, or to charm all ears with an
inexhaustible fund of brilliant anecdote and worldly experience. All
manners, all nations, all grades of men, seemed familiar to him. He was
reserved only if allusion were ever ventured to his birth or history.

The more general opinion of his origin certainly seemed the more
plausible. His riches, his familiarity with the languages of the East,
his residence in India, a certain gravity which never deserted his most
cheerful and familiar hours, the lustrous darkness of his eyes and hair,
and even the peculiarities of his shape, in the delicate smallness of
the hands, and the Arab-like turn of the stately head, appeared to fix
him as belonging to one at least o