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