appeared in Vanity Fair (the weekly newspaper, not Thackeray’s masterpiece), under the title of “The Black Art.”  In one of these there was an account of a seance which took place at the Pantheon in Oxford Street, in either the “forties” or the “fifties.”  A number of people had hired the hall, and the Devil was invoked in due traditional form, Then something happened, and the entire assemblage rushed terror-stricken into Oxford Street, and nothing would induce a single one of them to re-enter the building.  Sir Charles owned that he had been present at the seance, but he would never tell me what it was that frightened them all so; he said that he preferred to forget the whole episode.  Sir Charles had an idea that I was a “sensitive,” so, after getting my leave to try his experiment, he poured into the palm of my hand a little pool of quicksilver, and placing me under a powerful shaded lamp, so that a ray of light caught the mercury pool, he told me to look at the bright spot for a quarter of an hour, remaining motionless meanwhile.  Any one who has shared this experience with me, knows how the speck of light flashes and grows until that little pool of quicksilver seems to fill the entire horizon, darting out gleaming rays like an Aurora Borealis.  I felt myself growing dazed and hypnotised, when Sir Charles emptied the mercury from my hand, and commenced making passes over me, looking, with his slender build and his white hair and beard, like a real mediaeval magician.  “Now you can neither speak nor move,” he cried at length.  “I think I can do both, Sir Charles,” I answered, as I got out of the chair.  He tried me on another occasion, and then gave me up.  I was clearly not a “sensitive.”

Sir Charles had quite a library of occult books, from which I endeavoured to glean a little knowledge, and great rubbish most of them were.  Raymond Lully, Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and Van Helmont; they were all there, in French, German, Latin, and English.  The Alchemists had two obsessions:  one was the discovery of the Elixir of Life, by the aid of which you could live forever; the other that of the Philosopher’s Stone, which had the property of transmuting everything it touched into gold.  Like practical men, they seemed to have concentrated their energies more especially on the latter, for a moment’s consideration will show the exceedingly awkward predicament in which any one would be placed with only the first of these conveniences at his command.  Should he by the aid of the Elixir of Life have managed to attain the age of, say, 300 years, he might find it excessively hard to obtain any remunerative employment at that time of life; whereas with the Philosopher’s Stone in his pocket, he would only have to touch the door-scraper outside his house to find it immediately transmuted into the purest gold.  In case of pressing need, he could extend the process with like result to his area railings, which ought to be enough to keep the wolf from the door for some little while even at the present-day scale of prices.