te, though, perhaps, insensible alteration of conduct.... Of his
person he continued to speak as of an abhorrent enemy.... "Were a
blessing submitted to my choice, I would say, [said Arnaud] be it my
immediate dissolution." "I think," said his mother, ... "that you could
wish better." "Yes," adjoined Arnaud, "for that wish should be that I
ever had remained unborn."' He polishes the broken blade of a sword, and
views himself therein; the sight so horrifies him that he determines to
throw himself over a precipice, but draws back at the last moment. He
goes to a cavern, and conjures up the prince of hell. "Arnaud knew
himself to be interrogated. What he required.... What was that answer
the effects explain.... There passed in liveliest portraiture the
various men distinguished for that beauty and grace which Arnaud so much
desired, that he was ambitious to purchase them with his soul. He felt
that it was his part to chuse whom he would resemble, yet he remained
unresolved, though the spectator of an hundred shades of renown, among
which glided by Alexander, Alcibiades, and Hephestion: at length
appeared the supernatural effigy of a man, whose perfections human
artist never could depict or insculp--Demetrius, the son of Antigonus.
Arnaud's heart heaved quick with preference, and strait he found within
his hand the resemblance of a poniard, its point inverted towards his
breast. A mere automaton in the hands of the Demon, he thrust the point
through his heart, and underwent a painless death. During his trance,
his spirit metempsychosed from the body of his detestation to that of
his admiration ... Arnaud awoke a Julian!'"]

[202] {474}[For a _resume_ of M. G. Lewis's _Wood Demon_ (afterwards
re-cast as _One O'clock; or, The Knight and the Wood-Demon_, 1811), see
"First Visit to the Theatre in London," _Poems_, by Hartley Coleridge,
1851, i., Appendix C, pp. cxcix.-cciii. The _Wood Demon_ in its original
form was never published.]

[203] [Mrs. Shelley inscribed the following note on the fly-leaf of her
copy of _The Deformed Transformed_:--

"This had long been a favourite subject with Lord Byron. I think that he
mentioned it also in Switzerland. I copied it--he sending a portion of
it at a time, as it was finished, to me. At this time he had a great
horror of its being said that he plagiarised, or that he studied for
ideas, and wrote with difficulty. Thus he gave Shelley Aikins' edition
of the British poets, that it might