e la Magie_.

I should add that Leo Taxil in one of the illustrations represents a
lodge of the Templar-Mistress Rite, wherein the altar is over-shadowed
by a Baphomet which is a reduction in facsimile of the frontispiece to
Levi's _Rituel_, and all reasonable limits seem to be transgressed when
he quotes from Albert Pike's "Collection of Secret Instructions," an
extended passage which swarms with thefts from the same source, everyone
of which I can identify when required, showing them page by page in the
originals. Leo Taxil tells us that the "Collection" was communicated to
him, but by whom he does not say. We are evidently dealing with an
exceedingly complex question, and many points must be made clear before
we can definitely accept evidenced which is so mixed and uncertain in
character.

If we ask the author of these disclosures what opportunities he has had
to become personally acquainted with Masonry, we shall find that they
are exceedingly few, for he was expelled from the order after receiving
only the first degree. I do not say that this expulsion reflects in any
sense discreditably upon him as a man of honour, but it closed his
Masonic career almost as soon as it had begun, so that his title to
speak rests only on his literary researches and other forms of derived
knowledge, good enough, no doubt, in their way, but not so exhaustive as
could be wished in view of the position he has assumed. It was shortly
after this episode that Leo Taxil returned to the Catholic Church and
attached himself to the interests of the clerical party. Previously to
this his literary history must be for him a painful memory. He was a
writer of anti-clerical romances and the editor of an anti-clerical
newspaper--legitimate occupations in one sense, but in this instance too
frequently connected with literary methods of a gravely discreditable
kind. A catalogue of the defunct _Libraire Anti-Clericale_ is added to
one of the romances, and advertises, among other productions from the
same pen, the following contributions made by Leo Taxil to the
literature of sacrilege and scandal:--1st, a Life of Jesus, being an
instructive and satirical parody of the Gospels, with 500 comic designs;
2nd, The Comic Bible (_Bible Amusante_); 3rd, The Debaucheries of a
Confessor, a romance founded on the affair of the Jesuit Girarde and
Catherine Cadiere; 4th, a Female Pope, being the adventures and crimes
of Pope Joan, written in collaboration with F.