I, artist in words, dedicate, then, to you, artist whose ideas speak in marble, this well-loved work of my matured manhood.  I love it not the less because it has been little understood and superficially judged by the common herd:  it was not meant for them.  I love it not the more because it has found enthusiastic favorers amongst the Few.  My affection for my work is rooted in the solemn and pure delight which it gave me to conceive and to perform.  If I had graven it on the rocks of a desert, this apparition of my own innermost mind, in its least-clouded moments, would have been to me as dear; and this ought, I believe, to be the sentiment with which he whose Art is born of faith in the truth and beauty of the principles he seeks to illustrate, should regard his work.  Your serener existence, uniform and holy, my lot denies,—­if my heart covets.  But our true nature is in our thoughts, not our deeds:  and therefore, in books—­which are his thoughts—­the author’s character lies bare to the discerning eye.  It is not in the life of cities,—­in the turmoil and the crowd; it is in the still, the lonely, and more sacred life, which for some hours, under every sun, the student lives (his stolen retreat from the Agora to the Cave), that I feel there is between us the bond of that secret sympathy, that magnetic chain, which unites the everlasting brotherhood of whose being Zanoni is the type.

E.B.L.  London, May, 1845.

INTRODUCTION.

One of the peculiarities of Bulwer was his passion for occult studies.  They had a charm for him early in life, and he pursued them with the earnestness which characterised his pursuit of other studies.  He became absorbed in wizard lore; he equipped himself with magical implements,—­with rods for transmitting influence, and crystal balls in which to discern coming scenes and persons; and communed with spiritualists and mediums.  The fruit of these mystic studies is seen in “Zanoni” and “A strange Story,” romances which were a labour of love to the author, and into which he threw all the power he possessed,—­power re-enforced by multifarious reading and an instinctive appreciation of Oriental thought.  These weird stories, in which the author has formulated his theory of magic, are of a wholly different type from his previous fictions, and, in place of the heroes and villains of every day life, we have beings that belong in part to another sphere, and that deal with mysterious and occult agencies.  Once more the old forgotten lore of the Cabala is unfolded; the furnace of the alchemist, whose fires have been extinct for centuries, is lighted anew, and the lamp of the Rosicrucian re-illumined.  No other works of the author, contradictory as have been the opinions of them, have provoked such a diversity of criticism as these.  To some persons they represent a temporary aberration of genius rather than any serious thought or definite purpose; while others regard them