he said, had been in Chaldea, in the dawn of time; and that he
was the sole inheritor of the lost sciences and mysteries of his own and
the Egyptian race. He spoke of his personal intimacy with all the twelve
Apostles--and even the august presence of the Savior; and one of his
pretensions would have been most singularly amusing, had it not bordered
upon profanity. This was no less an assertion than that he had upon
several occasions remonstrated with the Apostle Peter upon the
irritability of his temperament! In regard to later periods of history,
he spoke with the careless ease of an every-day looker on; and told
anecdotes that the researches of scholars afterwards fully verified. His
predictions were, indeed, most startling; and the cotemporaneous
evidence is very strong and explicit, that he did foretell the time,
place, and manner of the death of Louis XV, several years before it
occurred. His gift of memory was perfectly amazing. Having once read a
journal of the day, he could repeat its contents accurately, from
beginning to end; and to this endowment he united the faculty of writing
with both hands, in characters like copperplate. Thus, he could indite a
love-letter with his right while he composed a verse with his left hand,
and, apparently, with the utmost facility--a splendid acquisition for
the Treasury Department or a literary newspaper! He would, however, have
been ineligible for any faithful Post Office, since he read the contents
of sealed letters at a glance; and, by his clairvoyant powers, detected
crime, or, in fact, the movements of men and the phenomena of nature, at
any distance. Like all the great Magi, and Brothers of the Rosy Cross,
of whom he claimed to be a shining light, he most excelled in medicine;
and along with remedies for "every ill that flesh is heir to," boasted
his "Aqua Benedetta" as the genuine elixir of life, capable of restoring
youth to age, beauty and strength to decay, and brilliant intellect to
the exhausted brain; and, if properly applied, protracting human
existence through countless centuries. As a proof of its virtues, he
pointed to his own youthful appearance, and the testimony of old men who
had seen him sixty or seventy years earlier, and who declared that time
had made no impression on him. Strangely enough, the Margrave of
Anspach, of whom I shall presently speak, purchased what purported to be
the recipe of the "Aqua Benedetta," from John Dyke, the English Consul
at Le