taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we
must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of
reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if
disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring
on a relapse. He began to devour romances and German tragedies, and,
by the recommendation of Mr Flosky, to pore over ponderous tomes of
transcendental philosophy, which reconciled him to the labour of
studying them by their mystical jargon and necromantic imagery. In
the congenial solitude of Nightmare Abbey, the distempered ideas of
metaphysical romance and romantic metaphysics had ample time and space
to germinate into a fertile crop of chimeras, which rapidly shot up
into vigorous and abundant vegetation.

He now became troubled with the _passion for reforming the world_.[2]
He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret
tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary
instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he
intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with
absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He
slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable
eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in
subterranean caves. He passed whole mornings in his study, immersed
in gloomy reverie, stalking about the room in his nightcap, which
he pulled over his eyes like a cowl, and folding his striped calico
dressing-gown about him like the mantle of a conspirator.

'Action,' thus he soliloquised, 'is the result of opinion, and to
new-model opinion would be to new-model society. Knowledge is power;
it is in the hands of a few, who employ it to mislead the many, for
their own selfish purposes of aggrandisement and appropriation. What