He felt an unjust resentment towards Viola at having secured such an ally.  But with that resentment was mingled a natural jealousy.  Zanoni threatened him with rivalry.  Zanoni, who, whatever his character or his arts, possessed at least all the external attributes that dazzle and command.  Impatient of his own doubts, he plunged into the society of such acquaintances as he had made at Naples—­chiefly artists, like himself, men of letters, and the rich commercialists, who were already vying with the splendour, though debarred from the privileges, of the nobles.  From these he heard much of Zanoni, already with them, as with the idler classes, an object of curiosity and speculation.

He had noticed, as a thing remarkable, that Zanoni had conversed with him in English, and with a command of the language so complete that he might have passed for a native.  On the other hand, in Italian, Zanoni was equally at ease.  Glyndon found that it was the same in languages less usually learned by foreigners.  A painter from Sweden, who had conversed with him, was positive that he was a Swede; and a merchant from Constantinople, who had sold some of his goods to Zanoni, professed his conviction that none but a Turk, or at least a native of the East, could have so thoroughly mastered the soft Oriental intonations.  Yet in all these languages, when they came to compare their several recollections, there was a slight, scarce perceptible distinction, not in pronunciation, nor even accent, but in the key and chime, as it were, of the voice, between himself and a native.  This faculty was one which Glyndon called to mind, that sect, whose tenets and powers have never been more than most partially explored, the Rosicrucians, especially arrogated.  He remembered to have heard in Germany of the work of John Bringeret (Printed in 1615.), asserting that all the languages of the earth were known to the genuine Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.  Did Zanoni belong to this mystical Fraternity, who, in an earlier age, boasted of secrets of which the Philosopher’s Stone was but the least; who considered themselves the heirs of all that the Chaldeans, the Magi, the Gymnosophists, and the Platonists had taught; and who differed from all the darker Sons of Magic in the virtue of their lives, the purity of their doctrines, and their insisting, as the foundation of all wisdom, on the subjugation of the senses, and the intensity of Religious Faith?—­a glorious sect, if they lied not!  And, in truth, if Zanoni had powers beyond the race of worldly sages, they seemed not unworthily exercised.  The little known of his life was in his favour.  Some acts, not of indiscriminate, but judicious generosity and beneficence, were recorded; in repeating which, still, however, the narrators shook their heads, and expressed surprise how a stranger should have possessed so minute a knowledge of the quiet and obscure distresses he had relieved.  Two or three sick persons, when abandoned by their physicians, he had visited, and conferred with alone.  They had recovered:  they ascribed to him their recovery; yet they could not tell by what medicines they had been healed.  They could only depose that he came, conversed with them, and they were cured; it usually, however, happened that a deep sleep had preceded the recovery.