view; and seeking to know whether there | the contrary, the members of my family be not certain principles common to all literature and derived from the general mind of humanity, he passes from the biographical and the historical to the philosophical study of literature. That there are such general laws or principles applying to the various forms of literature, in whatever age and in whatever clime produced, is certain; but nowadays the prevalence of the historical method, as exercised most commonly within some narrow field, has caused a natural timidity in putting forth those large inductions which the historical method itself would justify if the range of its operation were extended. It is not desirable that the professor of English literature should become a lecturer on the science of the beautiful or the theory of the fine arts. In and through his historical criticism, however, will assuredly gleam certain openings and vistas leading in the direction of that criticism which I have termed philosophical. And if English literature be connected in our college and university courses with either Greek or Latin, or French or German literature, the thoughtful student can hardly fail to be aroused by his comparative studies to consider questions which demand an answer from philosophy. Two books which I should certainly like to see in the hand of every student of literature are the "Poetic" of Aristotle and Lessing's "Laocoon." EDWARD Dowden. From Blackwood's Magazine. A DEAD MAN'S VENGEANCE. CHAPTER I. I WRITE this confession in the hope that my sad example may prevent any over-confident and headstrong persons who may chance to read it from following the disastrous path of self-will and selfflattery which has led me into the misery which I now endure, and which will plunge me hereafter into punishments which I dare not think of. I know that I have no one to blame but myself. The power-the coveted possession of which has brought me down to destruction of both body and soul is by no means inherited, but is the result of years of careful cultivation on my part. No hereditary second sight, no mysterious biological power, no magic susceptibility, has been left me as a legacy by my forefathers. On for generations past have been easy-going respectable yeomen, contented with their placid country lives, and absolutely igno rant and careless of the ever-widening doctrines of modern schools of thought. My father is a well-to-do and respected farmer in the west country, my mother a hard-headed, thrifty Yorkshire woman. Both are narrow-minded, intensely conservative, and absolutely devoid of all spirituality and romance. I am the youngest of five sturdy uninteresting boys and girls-now men and women - of the heavy Anglo-Saxon type. In my boyhood I exhibited no distinguishing characteristics beyond a stubborn will, which brought me continually into trouble, and an unusually strong faculty of sympathy with other beings-both human and brute beasts. By sheer force of will and work I raised myself at a comparatively early age to the top of the grammar school in the neighboring town. My progress was considered to be so good that when I was of fitting age my father was persuaded to allow me to compete for an unimportant scholarship at one of the universities, and this I was fortunate enough to secure. A few months after this success a circumstance occurred, trivial in itself, which created a considerable impression upon me, and had no small influence in shaping my destiny. One lovely summer morning a Monday, I remember in my first long vacation, having risen early I went out to enjoy the cool breeze on the dewless tor behind our old home. I fell to thinking on the text of the young curate's Sunday evening sermon, which had haunted me through the night. It was “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?" Whether I had been inattentive, or whether the curate had failed to handle his theme skilfully or wisely, I do not know. But the effect of the sermon was to raise ambitions within me little short of blasphemous. With no very definite conception of the meaning of the text, and less of the conclusion to which my thoughts were leading me, the idea of our implied superiority to, and future power over the beings of another and a higher world fascinated me, and what was at first a whimsical fancy rapidly developed itself into desire, and soon I found myself — not without some sense of half-amused shame almost mechanically willing that a heavenly being should acknowledge me now, while I was still in this life, as its judge and master. I feel explanation is due here. When I was quite a young lad at the grammar | laughingly assented, laid a shilling in her school, our little town was visited by a hand, and showed her my palm. She professed mesmerist, who claimed to ex- took my hand in hers, and had only ercise command over the minds and bodies of men and women by directing upon them the concentrated power of his will, which, overpowering and beating down the volition of the persons on whom he operated, rendered them subservient to him in a greater or less degree, according to the extent of ascendancy which his will, naturally strong, and carefully trained to concentration, was able to obtain over the wills of those on whom he practised. His demonstrations were fairly successful, but the performance was not popular with the rustics, who were suspicious of witchcraft, and the professor left the town after giving only one exhibition of his powers. glanced at it when I noticed her manner change from liveliness to considerable gravity, and even alarm. Gradually, as her scrutiny continued, she became more and more agitated, and at last, pale as death, she fell on her knees before me, placed my hand reverently on her head, and then rising again, moved silently away. I stopped her and asked what was the cause of her emotion. She turned round and faced me, raised her hands in a supplicating attitude, and whispered rather than spoke, "Lord of the spirits, be merciful to me and to my father's house, for we are all your slaves to do with as you will." With that she bowed gracefully and deeply in semi-Oriental fashion; and though I called to her more than once to come back to me, she disappeared into the double hedge of the lane, and I saw her no more. I treasured up in my mind what he had said, and from that day began to practise putting my will privately against the wills of all with whom I came in contact. When wanting anything done by human being or animal, I was not content to ask This incident made a considerable imor to order, or where neither was possible pression on me at the time and flattered to wish, but I formed the habit of willing my boyish vanity more than I cared to with all my strength that the thing should confess to myself. Later in the day I be done. As time went on, I discovered took an opportunity of passing by where that I had undoubtedly acquired a certain the camp had been, but the gipsies had power over others, and the habit strength-flown, and no trace of them was left. ened itself until I was unable to resist The weeks passed by, and when it was endeavoring to bend even events to my will. And thus it was that I detected myself willing that some heavenly being should be my servant. I lingered for a short time on the hilltop, and then dismissing the absurd subject from my mind, began to descend towards home for breakfast. And now occurred the incident which has been the source of so much of my present wretchedness. A long, narrow lane with high banks and double hedges leads from the main road which winds round the foot of the tor to the outlying parts of my father's farm. Half-way the lane suddenly widens, and a grassy patch, shaded by three huge beeches, affords a favorite camping-ground to gipsies, who were common enough in those days in our part of the country. As I passed this place I noticed that a few gipsies had arrived since I started in the morning. A hundred yards or so farther on I was suddenly confronted by a young gipsy girl about eighteen years old, tall, dark, handsome, and straight, with a singularly powerful face, and dark, imperious eyes. She offered to tell my fortune if I would cross her hand with silver; and struck by her beauty and sweet voice, I time for me to return to college, the occurrence had nearly passed out of my mind. A few days after the commencement of term I happened to meet in a friend's rooms a man who had just come up. He was rather older than most of us undergraduates, and was in some ways a remarkable figure. Tall, dark, with a square-cut resolute face and flashing dark eyes, he impressed me at once as one who was my equal, if not my master, in strength of will; while there was something about him which showed he was a man of some knowledge of the world, which I was not. He seemed to recognize something sympathetic in my character, for before we had been many minutes in the same room we found ourselves talking to each other quite intimately. When I first saw him I felt there was something familiar in him, whether it was his face, voice, or manner, I could not tell. I knew I had never seen him before, yet he was not altogether a stranger to me. We thus became intimate rather rapidly, and in a short time it was agreed that, if possible, he should occupy the rooms next to mine, which by chance were vacant. To our mutual satisfaction this was shortly arranged, and he soon became my constant companion. tion at the present moment, told me that he needed the help of a man with a strong and disciplined will to help him in a plan which he had roughly sketched out for lessening, and perhaps removing, the sad load of sorrow with which he was burdened. I willingly promised him every assistance that I could give, and it suddenly flashed across my mind that by the aid of Inglott's magical power, in addition to my own peculiar faculties, I might attain an influence over the beings of this world and the other, which might almost entitle me to the name the gipsy girl gave me. It was my turn now to tell a part of my story to Inglott, and in the end we agreed to aid each other, and to instruct each other in the peculiar arts of which we respectively had knowledge. CHAPTER II. One night we had been reading together, to excuse his making any further revelaand were enjoying a quiet pipe after our labors, when our conversation turned upon the doings of the "thought-readers," whose performances were creating some stir at the time. My friend, whose name was Inglott, said that he did not believe it possible for any man to tell what was passing in the brain of another. I maintained that while "pin and pain finding was, in my opinion, rather "spot-hunting" than "thought reading," the perception of the unspoken thoughts of another man was by no means a thing to be considered outside the range of possibility. My discipline and practice of the past few years had indeed given me some facility in forcing those over whom I had gained ascendancy to adopt in conversation an unspoken word of my choosing. To my shame be it said, I had on more than one occasion, when a boy, made even the old rector (dead years ago) use perfectly irrelevant language in the middle of his HAVING made this compact, we lost no sermon, to his own consternation and the time in acting upon it. We began that boundless surprise of the congregation. same evening to practise the concentraIt did not then seem to me impossible tion of our wills upon some definite obthat a man should so train himself as to ject, more especially with a view to the practise to a successful result the con- establishment of a close relation between verse of the process with which I was so each other's intelligences. For instance, familiar. Indeed I flattered myself that II would silently desire him to do some had already acquired the gift to a small trifling act, blowing out a candle, bringing me a book, or such like, and very shortly I found that I could not only make him comprehend what I wished him to do, but could compel him to do it. On his part, I found him to be an apt pupil, so that on the second or third evening of practice I perceived some slight stirring of recognition in my own mind of what he was silently desiring me to do. Inglott found these efforts of concentration very tiring, as he was quite unaccustomed to such mental exertion, and when he began to feel fatigue, we turned to his branch of mystical science, and here I found I had everything to learn. I had had absolutely no experience in what is called spiritualism, and the most trivial manifestations of the presence and material power of the inhabitants of the invisible world were amazing, and even alarming to me. The, to me, extraordinary mediumistic power shown by my friend in our earlier experi ments very strongly moved my curiosity, and I determined to study necromancy and its allied arts deeply. For a long time I gave up nearly the whole of my days to reading such books on the subject of black art as I could obtain, and many weeks had not elapsed before I had a deeper theoretical knowledge of the sub extent. I did not say all this at first to Inglott, but on his pressing me for some time to give reasons for what he clearly considered to be an absurd belief, I made a clean breast of it, and told him of the mesmerist of my boyhood, and of my steady practice of the art of mesmerism. He appeared to be much interested, and we talked on the subject long into the night. When he left my rooms, I went to bed but not to sleep. The curate's text and the words of the gipsy girl kept recurring to me, and they made me restless and wakeful. Towards morning I began to drowse, but was wakened very early by Inglott bursting into my room in a state of considerable excitement. It appeared that he, too, could not sleep, and he had now come to ask my assistance in a matter which concerned him very deeply. He told me something of his history, how he had been brought up in Syria, where his father had for years held a consular appointment, and where he himself had imbibed a strong belief in the powers of necromancy and magic, and had, further, had some practical training in these arts. He hinted at a sorrow which had overshadowed his life, and then, begging me ject than Inglott. In practice, however, he throughout had the advantage of me in his imperturbable calmness and readiness of resource. It was long before I could meet the spirits face to face without some degree of agitation, but I gradually over came my weakness, and before the end of the term could face ordinary manifestations without betraying undue nervous ness. While carrying on this branch of our studies, we had by no means neglected the other, and by degrees we had brought our minds into such close relation, that through mere sympathy each was not only able to perceive to a greater or less extent what was passing in the other's mind, but each was able at will to reflect upon the mind of the other what was passing in his own. In fact, we had established a system of silent mental communication, which, however, was far from being perfect. One night, when we had continued our studies several months, as we were holding our usual séance, we became aware that we were about to be favored with a manifestation of greater importance than those to which we had been accustomed. There was a bright fire burning in the grate, although the weather was warm; but we had always found a fire an agreeable companion, inspiring confidence and lessening nervousness in our séances, and we were in the habit of lighting one whenever the heat was not actually oppressive. A sanctuary lamp, fed with a sweet-smelling Oriental oil, was burning faintly in a recess in the wall; and a small brasier of lighted charcoal was smouldering on the round table before which we sat. During the day we had been studying together a strange little volume on necromancy, which Inglott had translated for me from the Syriac; and we had just performed, to the best of our ability, a curious incantation, said to be of Chaldean origin, which we had found in the book. We were awaiting the result in silence, when suddenly we heard a sound as of very distant thunder, and then a slight tremor seized the room. In less than a minute this ceased, and a deadly silence ensued. As the silence continued, an awful feeling of oppression settled down slowly upon my spirit, and this increased until the sense of being overwhelmed was almost greater than I could bear. I looked across at Inglott, and I could see and feel that he was suffering very much in the same way that I was. It was only by exercising the greatest self-restraint that I could prevent myself from crying out, when, after a few VOL. LXII, 3174 LIVING AGE. minutes of this silence, I became conscious that the dim light in which we were sitting was being withdrawn. Slowly the light faded out of the fire and the lamp, and even the dull glow of the dying embers in the brasier ceased to be visible, while to the terrors of our position was added “the horror of great darkness." Just when the tension threatened to become quite unbearable, the strain on my nerves was suddenly eased, and from all parts of the room brilliant sparks of light, apparently chasing each other towards a point just above the cold brasier, became visible. These scintillations gradually concentrated themselves into a luminous floating globe, which hovered above us in a curiously persistent manner. Although the extreme tension on our minds was reduced, a very painful feeling of awe remained present with us, more especially as we found that we could influence this strange manifestation in no way. I should here explain that we had long since discovered that, by concentrating our wills together in any prearranged direction, we were able to influence very materially the form and intensity of the manifestation at the moment presented to us. We rarely found much difficulty in,. as it were, reducing the forces producing the results before us to their elements in resolving them and analyzing them, so to speak. But in the present instance we found that our wills were opposed by some strong power which evidently was resisting us; in short that, instead of finding ourselves face to face with effects as hitherto, we were now in the presence of an active cause, that, instead of dealing with mere phenomenal consequences, we now had to do with some mysterious originating power. I was able to convey mentally to my companion a certain amount of what was passing through my mind, and I could feel that he had arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the unusual importance of this manifestation. We silently resolved to beat down the resistance of this phenomenon by the combined strength of our wills, and to force the originating cause to develop itself to us in some tangible shape. All our efforts were, however, unavailing. We attained no success that night, beyond compelling the luminous object to expand and contract, to remain quiet or to move at our will; and we retired to bed, quite worn out, as the early light stealing through the closed shutters warned us that the day had broken, and the time for practical experiment had passed. I should mention that as the daylight ap. | all that Orientals hold most dear, to marry peared the luminous object disappeared him. My friend Inglott and a sister conin a shower of brilliant sparks, and the siderably younger than himself were the light and heat gradually returned into the only children of this marriage. These fire, the lamp, and the brasier. We both two had been brought up together in Daawoke late in the morning, and spent the mascus chiefly by the mother, owing to day in searching all our mystic authori- the long and frequent absences of the ties for directions as to the manner of father, and had there learned much of the treating such manifestations as the one mystic or black art, which is so largely presented to us the preceding night. practised in that city. A very warm and close attachment had existed between my friend and his sister, which had been re girl during a raid made by professional robbers on them when residing in the hills near the town, where they possessed a very beautiful and secluded summer retreat. My friend's father had been killed in the attack, and not long afterwards his mother had died broken-hearted, leaving to Inglott the sacred duty of recovering his sister and rescuing her from a bondage possibly worse than death, and of avenging the murder of his father. Inglott had spent a great portion of his patrimony in bribing the corrupt Turkish officials to aid him, but had hitherto failed to find any trace of his sister, or of his father's murderers. He had long sus pected one of the chief local officials of complicity in, or at least of knowledge of, the crime, but he had not succeeded in bringing home any sort of proof against him. What my friend desired was help in redeeming his promise to his dying moth In the evening we repeated the same forms and incantation as on the previous night, and we were favored with the reap-cently broken by the disappearance of the pearance of the same phenomenon. Per haps it was because we were prepared for its mode of approach that we were not so painfully overcome as we were on the first appearance; our thoughts were more collected and our wills more powerful. By dint of exhausting efforts we succeeded before midnight in forcing the luminous object to resolve itself into the semblance of a vigorous old man, whitebearded, and patriarchal in all but his savage scowl and malevolent eyes. With evident reluctance, and plainly repressing a violent emotion of hatred, the old man, wrapped in a long Oriental cloak or burnous, stood with his arms folded, and then, obedient to our silent desire, approached us, and saluting us with a surly obeisance, asked us what we wished of him. Not without some trepidation, which I concealed to the best of my ability, I bade him tell us who he was. He replied, with a strange foreign accent, that he was preser, and he now proposed to demand this ent to do our bidding to the best of his ability, but that it was no concern of ours who he was and whence he had come. He again asked us what we desired of him. We had at that time hardly contemplated such a result of our nightly exer. cises and studies, and had decided upon no definitive plan of action. Seeing our hesitation, he asked permission to withdraw, promising to return the following night to receive our commands. We let him go, and spent the rest of our night in discussing how best to utilize our new servant in attaining the objects we had set before us. Inglott now told me more of his story, which enabled me to understand what he desired and why he desired it. His father, it appeared, had been a well-known traveller, and in the course of his wanderings in the East, some little time before receiving his consular appointment, had met with and married under very romantic circumstances a Syrian lady, of high birth, great beauty, and rare culture, who had sacrificed her religion, position, and aid from our new supernatural servant. My own desires tended rather in the direction of attaining personal influence over others, and power over the inhab itants of the other world. But now that I seemed within measurable distance of at any rate a part of my desire, I felt no particular longing for its consummation. My good wishes were strongly enlisted in my friend's favor, and I was willing to waive my own claims to consideration, and was prepared to accede to any proposal he might make for utilizing the unknown powers of our shadowy coadjutor. Consequently we determined to invoke his assistance only in our search for the missing girl, and agreed that we should combine our will-power to force him to carry out our wishes, should he prove a reluctant servant. We had no prearranged plan of action, but relied on our individual tact and readiness, and on our acquired powers of mental intercommunication to shape in concert our action to our need when the time came and our strange servant was before us. |