emainder of his
life had been consumed. But he spoke of the lucubrations themselves
as valuable only where suggestive of some truths which Forman had
accidentally approached, without being aware of their true nature and
importance. They were debased by absurd puerilities, and vitiated by the
vain and presumptuous ignorance which characterized the astrology of the
middle ages. For these reasons the writer intimated his intention (if
he lived to return to England) to destroy Forman's manuscripts, together
with sundry other books, and a few commentaries of his own upon studies
which had for a while misled him,--all now deposited in the safes of the
room in which I sat.

After some years passed in the retirement of Derval Court, Sir Philip
was seized with the desire to travel, and the taste he had imbibed for
occult studies led him towards those Eastern lands in 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
recognized 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
on 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 details of various experiments, to the process
and result of which he pledged his guarantee as the actual operator. As
most of these alleged experiments a