their own Frenchified foppery and pseudo-philosophy--unsatisfied with
want of all duty, purpose, noble thought, or noble work. With such a
temper of mind it fell in: but that very temper was open (as it always
is) to those dreams of a royal road to wisdom and to virtue, which have
haunted, in all ages, the luxurious and the idle.

Those who will, may read enough, and too much, of the wonderful secrets
in nature and science and theosophy, which men expected to find and did
not find in the higher degrees of Masonry, till old Voss--the translator
of Homer--had to confess, that after "trying for eleven years to attain a
perfect knowledge of the inmost penetralia, where the secret is said to
be, and of its invisible guardians," all he knew was that "the documents
which he had to make known to the initiated were nothing more than a well
got-up farce."

But the mania was general. The high-born and the virtuous expected to
discover some panacea for their own consciences in what Voss calls, "A
multitude of symbols, which are ever increasing the farther you
penetrate, and are made to have a moral application through some
arbitrary twisting of their meaning, as if I were to attempt expounding
the chaos on my writing-desk."

A rich harvest-field was an aristocracy in such a humour, for quacks of
every kind; richer even than that of France, in that the Germans were at
once more honest and more earnest, and therefore to be robbed more
easily. The carcass was there: and the birds of prey were gathered
together.

Of Rosa, with his lodge of the Three Hammers, and his Potsdam
gold-making;--of Johnson, alias Leuchte, who passed himself off as a