boyish armoury of eloquence and scorn fought over again the long-lost
battle, hiss and groan falling unheeded into the stream of his young
voice. But vain, vain! hard is the Hanoverian heart in boy, as in man,
and all your glowing periods were in vain--vain as, your peroration told
us, 'was the blood of gallant hearts shed on Culloden's field.' Poor N.,
you had but one timorous supporter, even me, so early your _fidus
Achates_--but one against so many. Yet were you crestfallen? Galileo
with his 'E pur si muove,' Disraeli with his 'The time will come,' wore
such a mien as yours, as we turned from that well-foughten field. Yes!
and you loved to take in earnest vague Hanoverian threats of possible
arrest for your baby-treason, and, for some time, I know, you never
passed a policeman without a dignified tremor, as of one who might at
any moment find a lodging in the Tower.

But the most serious of all N.'s 'mad' enthusiasms was that of which the
Reader has already received some hint, in the few paragraphs of his own
confessions above, that which 'had almost sent him to the Himalayas.'

It belongs to natures like his always through life to cherish a half
belief in their old fairy tales, and a longing, however late in the day,
to prove them true at last. To many such the revelations with which
Madame Blavatsky, as with some mystic trumpet, startled the Western
world some years ago, must have come with most passionate appeal; and to
Narcissus they came like a love arisen from the dead. Long before, he
had 'supped full' of all the necromantic excitements that poet or
romancer could give. Guy Mannering had introduced him to Lilly; Lytton
and Hawthorne had sent him searching in many a musty folio for Elixir
Vitas and the Stone. Like Scythrop, in 'Nightmare Abbey,' he had for a
long period slept with horrid mysteries beneath his pillow. But suddenly
his interest had faded: these phantoms fled before a rationalistic