ands, now ruined and dismantled, a monument of
the splendour of a chivalry long since vanished from Naples, with the
lordly races of the Norman and the Spaniard.

As he entered the rooms reserved for his private hours, two Indians, in
the dress of their country, received him at the threshold with the grave
salutations of the East. They had accompanied him from the far lands in
which, according to rumour, he had for many years fixed his home.
But they could communicate nothing to gratify curiosity or justify
suspicion. They spoke no language but their own. With the exception of
these two his princely retinue was composed of the native hirelings of
the city, whom his lavish but imperious generosity made the implicit
creatures of his will. In his house, and in his habits, so far as they
were seen, there was nothing to account for the rumours which were
circulated abroad. He was not, as we are told of Albertus Magnus or the
great Leonardo da Vinci, served by airy forms; and no brazen image, the
invention of magic mechanism, communicated to him the influences of
the stars. None of the apparatus of the alchemist--the crucible and the
metals--gave solemnity to his chambers, or accounted for his wealth;
nor did he even seem to interest himself in those serener studies which
might be supposed to colour his peculiar conversation with abstract
notions, and often with recondite learning. No books spoke to him in his
solitude; and if ever he had drawn from them his knowledge, it seemed
now that the only page he read was the wide one of Nature, and that
a capacious and startling memory supplied the rest. Yet was there one
exception to what in all else seemed customary and commonplace, and
which, according to the authority we have prefixed to this chapter,
might indicate the follower of the occult sciences. Whether at Rome or
Naples, or, in fact, wherever his abode, he selected one room remote
from the rest of the house, which was fastened by a lock scarcely larger
than the seal of a ring, yet which sufficed to baffle the most cunning
instruments of the locksmith: at least, one of his servants, prompted by
irresistible curiosity, had made the attempt in vain; and though he had
fancied it was tried in the most favourable time for secrecy,--not a
soul near, in the dead of night, Zanoni himself absent from home,--yet
his superstition, or his conscience, told him the reason why the next
day the Major Domo quietly dismissed him. He compensa