My Library

True I had heard much, and read more, concerning the celebrated fraternity—an association that has proved a veritable God-send to scores of paper-stainers in all parts of the globe where letters reign, as witness Charles Mackay, Kingsley, Robert Southey, and fifty others, not omitting Bulwer Lytton, his “Zanoni,” and “Strange Story,” nor Hargrave Jennings and his “Curious Things” about “Fire” and the “Outside World.” In my varied travels through Europe and the East, as well as in this, my native land, I have met with scores, not to say hundreds, who boasted themselves Rosicrucians; and it is but a little while since there appeared, in a “spiritual” sheet in Boston, first a learned lecture, by a female “medium,” on the Rosicrucians, and a long communication, purporting to come from a deceased adept of the Order, both of which were quite laughable by reason of the total and utter ignorance displayed. Probably both of these “enlighteners” had heard or read of Dr. Everard’s “Compte de Gabalis,” and took that humorous bit of badinage as the real, simonpure explanation of Rosicrucianism as, indeed, was natural, seeing that hundreds have fallen into the same comical error; for, upon applying the touch-stone to all these pretended adepts in the secrets, sublime and mighty, of the Order, it is found that, exceptionless, they are woefully deficient in even the rudiments of the genuine