st,
not less an impostor. "L'Homme se pique," says Charron. Man cogs the
dice for himself ere he rattles the box for his dupes. Was there
ever successful impostor who did not commence by a fraud on his own
understanding? Cradled in Orient Fableland, what though Margrave
believes in its legends; in a wand, an elixir; in sorcerers or Afrites?
That belief in itself makes him keen to detect, and skilful to profit
by, the latent but kindred credulities of others. In all illustrations
of Duper and Duped through the records of superstition--from the guile
of a Cromwell, a Mahomet, down to the cheats of a gypsy--professional
visionaries are amongst the astutest observers. The knowledge that
Margrave had gained of my abode, of my affliction, or of the innermost
thoughts in my mind, it surely demanded no preternatural aids to
acquire. An Old Bailey attorney could have got at the one, and any
quick student of human hearts have readily mastered the other. In fine,
Margrave, thus rationally criticised, is no other prodigy (save in
degree and concurrence of attributes simple, though not very common)
than may be found in each alley that harbours a fortune-teller who has
just faith enough in the stars or the cards to bubble himself while he
swindles his victims; earnest, indeed, in the self-conviction that he
is really a seer, but reading the looks of his listeners, divining
the thoughts that induce them to listen, and acquiring by practice
a startling ability to judge what the listeners will deem it most
seer-like to read in the cards or divine from the stars.

I leave this interpretation unassailed. It is that which is the most
probable; it is clearly that which, in a case not my own, I should have
accepted; and yet I revolved and dismissed it. The moment we deal
with things beyond our comprehension, and in which our own senses are
appealed to and baffled, we revolt from the Probable, as it seems to
the senses of those who have not experienced what we have. And the same
principle of Wonder that led our philosophy up from inert ignorance into
restless knowledge, now winding back into shadow land, reverses its
rule by the way, and, at last, leaves us lost in the maze, our knowledge
inert, and our ignorance restless.

And putting aside all other reasons for hesitating to believe that
Margrave was the son of Louis Grayle,--reasons which his own narrative
might suggest,--was it not strange that Sir Philip Derval, who had
instituted in