virtue against all wrong, promoting the advancement of men of merit, and in every way facilitating the acquirement of knowledge and science;”—­of this honest silly man, and his attempts to carry out all his fine projects by calling himself Spartacus, Bavaria Achaia, Austria Egypt, Vienna Rome, and so forth;—­of Knigge, who picked his honest brains, quarrelled with him, and then made money and fame out of his plans, for as long as they lasted;—­of Bode, the knight of the lilies of the valley, who, having caught Duke Ernest of Saxe Gotha, was himself caught by Knigge, and his eight, nine, or more ascending orders of unwisdom;—­and finally of the Jesuits who, really with considerable excuses for their severity, fell upon these poor foolish Illuminati in 1784 throughout Bavaria, and had them exiled or imprisoned;—­of all this you may read in the pages of Dr. Findel, and in many another book.  For, forgotten as they are now, they made noise enough in their time.

And so it befell, that this eighteenth century, which is usually held to be the most “materialistic” of epochs, was, in fact, a most “spiritualistic” one; in which ghosts, demons, quacks, philosophers’ stones, enchanters’ wands, mysteries and mummeries, were as fashionable—­as they will probably be again some day.

You have all heard of Cagliostro—­“pupil of the sage Althotas, foster-child of the Scheriff of Mecca, probable son of the last king of Trebizond; named also Acharat, and ‘Unfortunate child of Nature;’ by profession healer of diseases, abolisher of wrinkles, friend of the poor and impotent; grand-master of the Egyptian Mason-lodge of High Science, spirit-summoner, gold-cook, Grand-Cophta, prophet, priest, Thaumaturgic moralist, and swindler”—­born Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo;—­of him, and 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.