Gift PREFACE. There has appeared from time to time in Europe, during the last thousand years, a mysterious individual a sojourner in all lands, yet a citizen of none; professing the profoundest secrets of opulence, yet generally living in a state of poverty; astonishing every one by the evidence of his intercourse with the eminent characters of every age, yet connected with none— without lineage, possession, or pursuit on earth -a wanderer and unhappy! A number of histories have been invented for him; some purely fictitious, others founded on ill-understood records. Germany, the land of mysticism, has toiled the most in this idle perversion of truth. Yet, those narratives have been in general but a few pages, feebly founded on the fatal sentence of his punishment for an indignity offered to the Author of the Christian faith. That exile lives! that most afflicted of the people of affliction yet walks this earth; bearing the sorrows of eighteen centuries on his brow—withering in soul, for the guilt of an hour of madness. He has long borne the scoff of man in silence; he has heard his princely rank degraded to that of a menial, and heard without a murmur; he has heard his unhappy offence charged to deliberate malice, when it was but the misfortune of a zeal inflamed by the passions of his people; and he has bowed to the calumny, as a portion of his punishment. But, the time for this forbearance is no more. He feels himself at last wearing away; and feels, with a not uncheered sensation, like that of returning to the common fates of mankind, a desire to stand clear with his fellow-men. In their presence |