en a revived memory of the trap-door down which Lytton
as a boy had "peeped with bristling hair into the shadowy abysses
of hellhole." In _Glenallan_,[126] an early fragment, we find
promising material for a tale of mystery--a villain with a
"strange and sinister expression," a boy who, like the youthful
Shelley, steals forth by night to graveyards, hoping to attain to
fearful secrets, and an aged servant, a living chronicle of
horrors, who relates the doings of an Irish wizard, Morshed
Tyrone, of such awful power that the spirits of the earth, air
and ocean ministered to him. In _Godolphin_ (1833) there is an
astrologer with the furrowed brow and awful eye, so common among
the people of terror, and a strangely gifted girl, Lucilla, who
turns soothsayer. But when Bulwer Lytton attempts a supernatural
romance he leaves far behind him the sphere of Gothic terrors and
soars into rarefied, exalted regions that inspire awe rather than
horror. The Dweller of the Threshold in _Zanoni_ is no
red-cloaked, demoniacal figure springing from a trap-door with a
deafening clap of thunder, but a "Colossal Shadow" brooding over
the crater of Vesuvius.

The romance, _Zanoni_ (1842), which Lytton considered the
greatest of his works and which Carlyle praised with what now
seems extravagant fervour, was based on an earlier sketch,
_Zicci_ (1838), and embodies a complicated theory which he had
conceived several years earlier after reading some mediaeval
treatises on astrology and the occult sciences. While his mind
was occupied with these studies, the character of Mejnour and the
main outlines of the story were inspired by a dream, which he
related to his son. According to Lytton's theory, the air is
peopled with Intelligences, of whom some are favourable, others
hostile to man. The earth contains certain plants, which, rightly
used, have power to arrest the decay of the human body, and to
enable man, by quickening his physical senses and mental gifts,
to perceive the aerial beings and to discover the secrets of
nature. This supernatural knowledge is in possession of a
brotherhood of whom two only, Mejnour and his pupil Zanoni, are
in existence. The initiation involves the surrender of all
violent passions and emotions, and the neophyte must be brought
into contact with the powerful and malignant being called the
Dweller of the Threshold:

"Whose form of giant mould
No mortal eye can fixed behold,"

Mejnour and Zanoni are suppose