But another exquisite display of vanity was yet reserved to me. was yet reserved to me. On reaching the garden, I was conducted by a small path towards what the Cerberus in charge called "the Island of Monte Cristo." I had seen many wonders, but this beat them all. The island-well, I should see could not but admire this gracefully-con- | the highest degree. Poor Dumas! he trived interior, at once so bizarre and so must have been very far gone indeed! I pretty, fitted up evidently with an idea of did pity him. the East and all the repose and luxury required under a tropical sun and cloudless sky. One room particularly interested me-Dumas's own writing room-containing his table and his inkstand, some papers he had left, and even the books he had read still turned down on the very page he had last perused. I looked at-I looked round. I perceived neither them with respect, and touched them with water, nor island, nor any probability of reverence, for, with all his faults and his either, as we were walking up the side of a bookmaking, no one can deny that he un-hill; but I had looked too far; I had misdoubtedly possesses the gift of genius. The very novel in memory of which the château was begun is evidence sufficient to prove that no book since the Waverley series ever spread over Europe more rapidly than did "Monte Cristo" and "Les Trois Mousquetaires." calculated the extent of the territory, and taken too literally the creation of Dumas's brain. For the island was before me, separated from the ground on which we stood by a ditch about a foot broad, crossed by a plank! extent; he sees in this minute ditch a mighty, rushing, rolling ocean-the blue Mediterranean dashing on the beach of Marseilles, for instance; in this plank, magnificent arches of marble spanning the rising waves; and on the space enclosed by the mighty breakers (in reality about a dozen yards square), no other than the island on which stands the Château d'If, that rocky majestic mass rising from the Mediterranean, crowned with its antique castles within whose dungeons Dantès, alias Monte Cristo, sighed ! It is a fine thing to have a brilliant We passed to the upper story, where I imagination; it is, indeed, a real blessing, found most luxurious bedrooms-rather for with such a gift the Barmecides' feast more furniture remaining here than below would be greater than a Lord Mayor's -and one lovely suite of rooms, the walls banquet! Monsieur Dumas seems imbucarved in stone with delicate and beauti-ed with this qualification to no ordinary ful arabesque patterns, the ceilings cut also in stone, hanging in points and pendants elaborately worked. Nothing could be prettier, more thoroughly Eastern, than the effect of the dazzling white of the walls, covered as it were with a network of the finest lace-a fitting abode for beauty such as only is revealed in visions to the poet, who forthwith torments half mankind by ravishing descriptions of ideal houris. The old cicerone who accompanied me said that these carvings had been executed by Arabs, whom Dumas had brought from Africa for the pose. There, again, was the author, imagining he possessed Fortunatus's purse, and could coin guineas as fast as he could write words. What a picture did this house present of the freaks of the imagination, and how the creditors must have stared when they beheld these fairy-like apartments belonging to a man that all the world knows lives, true to his craft, from hand to mouth. But, lost in pleasing delusions, he had indulged many a day-dream realizing his own descriptions, and had doubtless experienced happiness untold even in the partial creation before us. pur In another room was his picture, dressed as the Comte-Alexandre Dumas personifying a species of honest Cagliostro! This was eminently ridiculous -the very apex of vanity-and rich in And there is a building also on the small plot of ground, to make the delusion perfect in good sooth; and it is castellated, and has small towers and arched windows, very like, in form and appearance, a castle made of chocolate. But the most wonderful part of the whole is that every brick forming this building is inscribed with a name, and each name is the title of some book written by Alexandre Dumas, by right of creation Comte de Monte Cristo! Having built the edifice and thus inscribed his works on the walls, they are immortalized, and will live, like some Roman remains, for ever if the damp will allow the walls to stand. This most singular display of literary vainglory struck me as one of the very drollest devices that had ever visited an author's brain, and, moreover, exceedingly | ing critique in the Charivari-publishers, Gallic in character. Only imagine Lord great in pomp and circumstance, may fly idea! Duns may arrive cursing, bearing their bills-actresses in despair come from the Comédie Française to crave an audience -the last new ballet-dancer, about whom all Paris raves, may have journeyed all the way from the capital to ask a flourish But in all sober seriousness, the whole affair-the château, the island, and allwas most diverting; and whoever would study the full and free development of literary folly and vanity, should pay a visit to this place. If they do not return amused, I will never more take pen in hand. The visit was now concluded, and we returned to the gate, reconducted by the same animals who had greeted our arrival. The stables on the opposite side of the narrow road, are of a size suitable to the stud of a prince, or Lord Chesterfield before he was ruined. Fortunately for the purse and credit of Dumas, they are not finished, for if they had been tenanted, as he intended, with dozens of Arab steeds fresh from the desert, via the last steamer from Algeria, perhaps his faithful friends and admirers would have found it impossible to repurchase the domain, if horse-racing, steeplechases, and betting had been added to the other extravagances of the imaginary Comte de Monte Cristo. I continued my way to Marly, deeply reflecting upon the state of delusion the brain of a man deemed to be sane can arrive at. From the British Quarterly Review. HOURS WITH THE MYSTICS.* "A HISTORY of Mysticism-old visions | speculation,-who is bold enough to exand old obscurities." "Mysticism! almost everywhere synonymous with what is most visionary in religion, and most obscure in Hours with the Mystics: a Contribution to the History of Religious pect a hearing for that ?" Such are the inquiries of the author, who may be said to make his first appearance in the volumes before us. And yet how much that is attractive, and how much more that is deeply instructive, does this subject afford. What a long series of ages sweep before us as we contemplate the history of mys- | out into action, dissolved them into ecstasy, ticism! Stretching along from the ear- or frozen them into torpor." liest literature of India-itself perhaps of still earlier origin-down to the drawingroom utterances and prophecies of Madame de Krudener,-successively taking up its abode on the banks of the Ganges, and beside the Illissus, in the schools of Alexandria, and in the grim caverns of the Thebais, in the cell of the schoolman of the middle ages, even in the workshop of the artisan, and then bewildering with lofty dreams, or wild fancies, the ardent scholars of the Reformation. Nor, even in that age, when so many a long-worshipped idol was cast down, so many a vision of the past swept away, did mysticism vanish. The lofty and the mean still bowed alike to its sway; during the seventeenth century, the echo of its voice was heard, even within the gorgeous saloons of Versailles; and a century later, face to face with the blank unbelievers of the French Revolution, stood Swedenborg, with his doctrine of "Correspondences." It is in the East that mysticism is first to be found. The child of an unknown antiquity; although an innocent childhood has it never had, for in its very cradle this Hercules destroys, as deadly serpents, reason and morality." With the Hindoo mystic, indeed, "the distinction between good and evil is obliterated as often as he pleases;" while the same round of notions, common to the mystics of ancient India and modern Christendom, are characterized among the former by features of the most intense selfishness. Among the later Jews, mysticism is found in connexion with Platonism, and in the Essenes, but more especially the Therapeuta whom Philo describes, we perceive the first tendency toward that ascetic life, which the fathers of the desert, and the severer monastic orders, carried to such unnatural lengths. Philo claims notice as being "in a sort the intellectual father of Neo-Platonism-the first meeting-place of the waters of the eastern and western theosophies ;" but it is to Plotinus, under the guidance of Ammonius Saccas, that we trace its fuller development. Great was the influence of Plotinus, for It is scarcely surprising that a field so wide as this should have been almost wholly unoccupied; that incidental notices, or detached monographs, should have hitherto very inadequately supplied the want of a complete history of mysticism. The work, indeed, is one which demanded no "His philosophy and that of his successors was common labor and research, but Mr. to corrupt the Christian Church; and for hundVaughan has brought to it no common la-reds of years will there be a succession of prebor and skill, as our readers will perceive, while they turn over the pages with us, and spend a suggestive and instructive hour" with the mystics. 66 In the opening conversation, for the history is carried on alternately in dialogue and essays, the chief causes of mysticism are indicated. First, "the reaction against the frigid formality of religious torpor; then, heart-weariness, the languishing longing for repose-the charm of mysticism for the selfish or the weak; and last, the desire, so strong in some minds, to pierce the barriers that hide from man the unseen world-the charm of mysticism for the ardent and the strong." Scarcely strange is it, therefore, that the manifestations of mysticism should have been so many and so diverse, should have been "incorporated in theism, atheism, pantheism,-appeared in the loftiest speculations and in the grossest idolatry, been associated with the wildest license and most pitiless asceticism, driven men lates, priests, or monks, in whose eyes the frigid refinements of Plotinus will be practically, though not confessedly, regarded as representing God, far more worthily than the grand simplicity and the forcible figurativeness of scripture language. For the Christian's God will be substituted that sublime cipher devised by Plotinus, that blank something, of which you cannot say it exists, for it is above existence." But mere abstractions like these had little charms for wildly-imaginative and daring minds; so with Iamblichus, theurgic mysticism took its rise. Four great orders of spiritual beings-Gods, Demons, Demigods, and Souls-rule the upper world, each conferring his appropriate gift on the suppliant, while malignant demons, armed with mischievous powers, are ready to afflict both body and mind. It is curious to mark how closely, in some respects, Iamblichus approaches in his opinions modern notions. While in his assertion that the body possessed by the mysterious power is sometimes surrounded by a su pernatural light, sometimes is raised in the | also many dogmas-Macarius, especially air with the accompaniments of sweet mu--in common with the mystics of later sic or fearful sounds, we trace the source days; according to some, even quietism. from whence the medieval hagiologist de- It is, however, to the apocryphal Dionyrived his choicest marvels, the remark that sius the Areopagite, that Christian mystithe persons so acted upon are mostly the cism owes its more important peculiarities. young and feeble, especially if ignorant Who the writer of the works that pass and imbecile, brings him very close to the under the name of Dionysius really was, modern mesmerist. Indeed, as one of the is still a doubtful question. All that can speakers suggests, the common phenome- be ascertained is, that the writings claimna of mesmerism may have been among ing to be those of Paul's Athenian conthe sacred secrets preserved by the priests vert, were unknown alike to the church of Egypt and of Greece. Proclus is the and to the world until the fifth century; last great name among the Neo-Platonists; nor were they recognized as genuine until "the most eclectic of them all, perhaps, the middle of the sixth. Although in the because the most learned, and most syste- first instance being cited by heretics, their matic.?? And yet the result of his theory authority was of course disputed, erelong was only that philosophy is the best pre- they were found to be so favorable to the paration for quietism;" that "there is a growing claims of the hierarchy, that the God, who is the repose he gives, a God, seal of orthodoxy was impressed on them; of whom the more you deny, the more you for not only was it "the aim of Dionysius affirm!" Thus, as one of the speakers to accommodate the theosophy of Proclus beautifully remarks, as though it were the to Christianity," but "to strengthen all highest glory of man, forgetting all that the pretensions of the priesthood, and to his inquiry has achieved, to gaze at vacan- invest with a new traditionary sanction cy, inactive and infantine; to be like some the ascetic virtues of the cloister." It is peasant's child, left in its cradle for a while to Dionysius that the middle ages owe in the furrow of a field, shut in by the lit- that system of various orders of angelic tle mound of earth on either side, and natures, linked together in an ascending having but the blue æther above, dazzling scale, those and void, at which to look up with smiles of witless wonder." 66 Hitherto we have viewed only Pagan mysticism; but in the fathers of the desert we meet the first manifestations of Christian mysticism. It seems strange that these hermit saints, with their unnatural contempt of human society, their fearful penances and protracted vigils, which doubtless drove them to the verge of actual insanity, should have maintained so high a station, through so many ages, in the Latin as well as the Greek Church; and we cannot but wonder what claim, on the respect of any one, Paul of Thebes, with his ninety years' seclusion from every duty as well as pleasure of life; or St. Antony, wasting his days in the ruined Egyptian temple, from the strange imagery of whose walls his visions of demon-horrors were doubtless taken; or St. Enuphrius, who for sixty years never saw the face of a human being; could possibly have possessed. It must, we think, have been from the notion that these useless men led "the life of contemplation"-although contemplation in their case only caused them to see more devils than vast hell can hold"-and that they maintained "Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers," which he calls the Celestial Hierarchy, and to which the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the visible world-precious doctrine for a dominant priesthood-closely corresponds. "The orders of angelic natures and of priestly functionaries correspond to each other. The highest rank of the former receive illumination immediately from God. The lowest of the heavenly imparts divine light to the highest of the earthly hierarchy. Each order strives perpetually to approximate to that immediately above itself, from which it receives the transmitted influence; so that all, as Dante describes it, draw, and are drawn, and tend in common towards the centre, God. But the work of Christ is thrown into the background to make more room for the church. The Saviour answers, with Dionysius, rather to the Logos of the Scripture. He is allowed to be, as incarnate, the founder of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; but as such, he is removed from men by the long chain of priestly orders, and is less the Redeemer, than remotely the illuminator of the species." Platonist than to the Son of God revealed in Hence the Church became "the great mystagogue; and its liturgy and offices a profound and elaborate system of symbolism." With Dionysius, we bid farewell to the Greek Church, "that dwarf, watching a Nibelungen hoard, which after all never enriches anybody," as one of the speakers aptly remarks, and to that eastern mysticism, which "creeps under the sacerdotal vestments, is never known to quit the precincts of church and cloister, and clings close to the dalmatica, and lives on whiffs of frankincense," for the bolder mysticism of the West, which will often be found "far from candle, book, and bell, venturing to worship without a priest." It was from Dionysius that mysticism in the west derived its first impulse; and a copy of his works, sent by Pope Paul to Louis le Debonnaire, is said to have been his first introduction to the Latin Church. This must early have attracted some attention, for we find that Charles le Chauve, in 860, commanded that those works should be translated from Greek into Latin, and from thenceforward "Dionysius has come into a young world, and the Neo-Platonist element, which acted as a moral opiate in the east, became a vivifying principle in the west, where Platonism and mysticism together created a party in the church, the sworn foes of mere scholastic quibbling, of an arid and lifeless orthodoxy, and at last of the more glaring abuses which had grown up with ecclesiastical pretensions." The list of mystics in the Latin Church is headed by the illustrious name of St. Bernard; that true saint, whose works our puritan writers so often quote with such delight, and, while unwilling to yield to him the "popish" title of saint, so naïvely compromise between their scruples and their feelings by calling him "blessed Bernard." A very vividly-painted prose landscape, placing the fair valley of Clairvaux pleasantly before us, introduces us to the pre-eminent preacher, and writer, and statesman of the twelfth century, the founder of a new monastic order, the great opponent of Abelard, and heretics of every degree, the umpire between rival popes, and the preacher-heaven-inspired, as said the vast multitude, who, on the plain beside Clermont, listened to his burning eloquence of the second crusade. And yet vaux, after one of those famous journeys, no look or word would have betrayed a taint of spiritual pride, though every rank in church and state united to do him honor-though great cities would have made him almost, by force, their spiritual king-though the blessings of the people and the plaudits of the council followed the steps of the peacemaker-and though in the belief of all, a dazzling chain of miracles had made his pathway glorious. We should have found him in the kitchen, rebuking, by his example, some monk who had to wash the pots and pans; on the hill side cutting his tale, and bearing his burthen with the meanest novice, or seen him oiling his own boots, as they say the arch-tempter did one day; we should have interrupted him in the midst of his tender counsel to some distressed soul of his cloistered flock, or just as he had sat down to write a sermon on a passage in Canticles against the next church festival." The mysticism of St. Bernard comes before us in a far less extravagant form than that of his successors. In truth, he was too practical a man, he had too much real work to do to mistake mere shadows for substance. "He knew the world and men; he stood with his fellows in the breach, and the shock of conflict spoilt him for a dreamer." Thus mysticism is to him as the quiet and far-off retreat in which his mind, worn by external strife, delights to bury itself; the fair "pleasaunce," whither he turns to forget while pacing its soft greensward, the harsh and rugged pathway his feet were so often compelled to tread. His loftly imagination, though apt to run astray, prevents him from ever sinking into childish dreams of heavenly prettinesses, while his deep, earnest feeling equally forbids any approximation to "the mystical death, the self-annihilation, the holy indifference of the Quietists." "In the theology of Bernard reason has a His error in this place, but not the right one. respect is the primary source of that mystical bias so conspicuous in his religious teaching. Like Anselm, he bids you believe first, and understand, if possible, afterwards. He is not prepared to admit the great truth, that if reason yields to faith, and assigns itself anywhere a limit, it must be on grounds satisfactory to reason. To any measure of Anselm's speculative ability, Bernard could lay no claim. He was at home only in the province of practical religion. in which Anselm delighted, he was ready to But to inquiries and reasonings such as those award, not blame, but admiration. Faith, with Bernard, receives the treasure of divine truth, as it were, wrapped up (involutum); under"Could we have seen him at home at Clair- standing may afterwards cautiously unfold the |