the same name, and known by the same
repute, could be traced back to more than a hundred years. He told Sir
Philip that he had thrice renewed his own life, and had resolved to do
so no more; he had grown weary of living on. With all his gifts, Haroun
owned himself to be consumed by a profound melancholy. He complained
that there was nothing new to him under the sun; he said that, while
he had at his command unlimited wealth, wealth had ceased to bestow
enjoyment, and he preferred living as simply as a peasant; he had tired
out all the affections and all the passions of the human heart; he was
in the universe as in a solitude. In a word, Haroun would often repeat,
with mournful solemnity: "'The soul is not meant to inhabit this earth
and in fleshy tabernacle for more than the period usually assigned to
mortals; and when by art in repairing the walls of the body we so retain
it, the soul repines, becomes inert or dejected. He only," said Haroun,
"would feel continued joy in continued existence who could preserve in
perfection the sensual part of man, with such mind or reason as may
be independent of the spiritual essence, but whom soul itself has
quitted!--man, in short, as the grandest of the animals, but without the
sublime discontent of earth, which is the peculiar attribute of soul."

One evening Sir Philip was surprised to find at Haroun's house another
European. He paused in his narrative to describe this man. He said
that for three or four years previously he had heard frequent mention,
amongst the cultivators of magic, of an orientalized Englishman engaged
in researches similar to his own, and to whom was ascribed a terrible
knowledge in those branches of the art which, even in the East, are
condemned as instrumental to evil. Sir Philip here distinguished at
length, as he had so briefly distinguished in his conversation with me,
between the two kinds of magic,--that which he alleged to be as pure
from sin as any other species of experimental knowledge, and that by
which the agencies of witchcraft are invoked for the purposes of guilt.

The Englishman, to whom the culture of this latter and darker kind of
magic was ascribed, Sir Philip Derval had never hitherto come across. He
now met him at the house of Haroun; decrepit, emaciated, bowed down with
infirmities, and racked with pain. Though little more than sixty, his
aspect was that of extreme old age; but still on his face there were
seen the ruins of a once singu