y represent. Can any two persons be more totally
unlike each other, not merely as to form and years, but as to all the
elements of character, than the Grayle of whom you read, or believe
you read, and the Margrave in whom you evidently think that Grayle is
existent still? The one represented, you say, as gloomy, saturnine, with
vehement passions, but with an original grandeur of thought and will,
consumed by an internal remorse; the other you paint to me as a joyous
and wayward darling of Nature, acute yet frivolous, free from even
the ordinary passions of youth, taking delight in innocent amusements,
incapable of continuous study, without a single pang of repentance
for the crimes you so fancifully impute to him. And now, when your
suspicions, so romantically conceived, are dispelled by positive facts,
now, when it is clear that Margrave neither murdered Sir Philip Derval
nor abstracted the memoir, you still, unconsciously to yourself, draw
on your imagination in order to excuse the suspicion your pride of
intellect declines to banish, and suppose that this youthful sorcerer
tempted the madman to the murder, the woman to the theft--"

"But you forget the madman said 'that he was led on by the Luminous
Shadow of a beautiful youth,' that the woman said also that she was
impelled by some mysterious agency."

"I do not forget those coincidences; but how your learning would dismiss
them as nugatory were your imagination not disposed to exaggerate them!
When you read the authentic histories of any popular illusion, such
as the spurious inspirations of the Jansenist Convulsionaries, the
apparitions that invaded convents, as deposed in the trial of Urbain
Grandier, the confessions of witches and wizards in places the
most remote from each other, or, at this day, the tales of
'spirit-manifestation' recorded in half the towns and villages of
America,--do not all the superstitious impressions of a particular time
have a common family likeness? What one sees, another sees, though there
has been no communication between the two. I cannot tell you why these
phantasms thus partake of the nature of an atmospheric epidemic; the
fact remains incontestable. And strange as may be the coincidence
between your impressions of a mystic agency and those of some other
brains not cognizant of the chimeras of your own, still, is it not
simpler philosophy to say, 'They are coincidences of the same nature
which made witches in the same epoch all t