Page:Zanoni.djvu/119

Rh to whatever impressed his fancy or appealed to his passions. He had travelled through the more celebrated cities of Europe, with the avowed purpose and sincere resolution of studying the divine masterpieces of his art. But in each, pleasure had too often allured him from ambition, and living beauty distracted his worship from the senseless canvass. Brave, adventurous, vain, restless, inquisitive, he was ever involved in wild projects and pleasant dangers — the creature of impulse and the slave of imagination.

It was then the period when a feverish spirit of change was working its way to that hideous mockery of human aspirations, the Revolution of France. And from the chaos into which were already jarring the sanctities of the World's Venerable Belief, arose many shapeless and unformed chimeras, Need I remind the reader that, while that was the day for polished scepticism and affected wisdom, it was the day also for the most egregious credulity and. the most mystical superstitions — the day in which magnetism and magic found converts amongst the disciples of Diderot — when prophecies were current in every mouth — when the salon of a philosophical deist was converted into an Heraclea, in which necromancy professed to conjure up the shadows of the dead — when the Crosier and the Book were ridiculed, and Mesmer and Cagliostro were believed. In that Heliacal Rising, heralding the new sun before which all vapours were to vanish, stalked from their graves in the feudal ages all the phantoms that had flitted before the eyes of Paracelsus and