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 singular beauty, and still, in his mind, there was a
force that contrasted the decay of the body. Sir Philip had never met
with an intellect more powerful and more corrupt. The son of a notorious
usurer, heir to immense wealth, and endowed with the talents which justify
ambition, he had entered upon life burdened with the odium of his father's
name. A duel, to which he had been provoked by an ungenerous taunt on his
origin, but in which a temperament fiercely vindictive had led him to
violate the usages prescribed by the social laws that regulate such
encounters, had subjected him to a trial in which he escaped conviction