of his lovely Countess Seraphina--nee Lorenza Feliciani? You have read
what Goethe--and still more important, what Mr. Carlyle has written on
him, as on one of the most significant personages of the age? Remember,
then, that Cagliostro was no isolated phenomenon; that his success--nay,
his having even conceived the possibility of success in the brain that
lay within that "brass-faced, bull-necked, thick-lipped" head--was made
possible by public opinion. Had Cagliostro lived in our time, public
opinion would have pointed out to him other roads to honour--on which he
would doubtless have fared as well. For when the silly dace try to be
caught and hope to be caught, he is a foolish pike who cannot gorge them.
But the method most easy for a pike-nature like Cagliostro's, was in the
eighteenth century, as it may be in the latter half of the nineteenth, to
trade, in a materialist age, on the unsatisfied spiritual cravings of
mankind. For what do all these phantasms betoken, but a generation
ashamed of its own materialism, sensuality, insincerity, ignorance, and
striving to escape therefrom by any and every mad superstition which
seemed likely to give an answer to the awful questions--What are we, and
where? and to lay to rest those instincts of the unseen and infinite
around it, which tormented it like ghosts by day and night: a sight
ludicrous or pathetic, according as it is looked on by a cynical or a
human spirit.

It is easy to call such a phenomenon absurd, improbable. It is rather
rational, probable, say certain to happen. Rational, I say; for the
reason of man tells him, and has always told him, that he is a
supernatural being, if by nature is meant that which is cognisable by his
five senses: that his coming into this world, his relation to it, his
exit from it--which are the three most important facts about him--are
supernatural, not to be explained by any deductions from the impressions
of his senses. And I make bold to say, that the recent discoveries of