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