Chapter II

Shortly after the disastrous termination of Scythrop's passion for
Miss Emily Girouette, Mr Glowry found himself, much against his will,
involved in a lawsuit, which compelled him to dance attendance on the
High Court of Chancery. Scythrop was left alone at Nightmare Abbey. He
was a burnt child, and dreaded the fire of female eyes. He wandered
about the ample pile, or along the garden-terrace, with 'his
cogitative faculties immersed in cogibundity of cogitation.' The
terrace terminated at the south-western tower, which, as we have said,
was ruinous and full of owls. Here would Scythrop take his evening
seat, on a fallen fragment of mossy stone, with his back resting
against the ruined wall,--a thick canopy of ivy, with an owl in it,
over his head,--and the Sorrows of Werter in his hand. He had some
taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we
must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of
reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if
disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring
on a relapse. He began to devour romances and German tragedies, and,
by the recommendation of Mr Flosky, to pore over ponderous tomes of
transcendental philosophy, which reconciled him to the labour of
studying them by their mystical jargon and necromantic imagery. In
the congenial solitude of Nightmare Abbey, the distempered ideas of
metaphysical romance and romantic metaphysics had ample time and space
to germinate into a fertile crop of chimeras, which rapidly shot up
into vigorous and abundant vegetation.

He now became troubled with the passion for reforming the world.[2]
He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret
tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary
instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he
intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with
absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He
slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable
eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in
subterranean caves. He passed whole mornings in his study, immersed
in gloomy reverie, stalking about the room in his nightcap, which
he pulled over his eyes like a cowl, and folding his striped calico
dressing-gown about him like the mantle of a conspirator.

'Action,' thus he soliloquised, 'is the result of opinion, and to
new-model opinion would be to new-model society. Knowledge is power;
it is in the hands of a few, who employ it to mislead the many, for
their own selfish purposes of aggrandisement and appropriation. What
if it were in the hands of a few who should employ it to lead the
many? What if it were universal, and the multitude were enlightened?
No. The many must be always in leading-strings; but let them have wise
and honest conductors. A few to think, and many to act; that is the
only basis of perfect society. So thought the ancient philosophers:
they had their esoterical and exoterical doctrines. So thinks the
sublime Kant, who delivers his oracles in language which none but
the initiated can comprehend. Such were the views of those secret
associations of illuminati, which were the terror of superstition and
tyranny, and which, carefully selecting wisdom and genius from the
great wilderness of society, as the bee selects honey from the flowers
of the thorn and the nettle, bound all human excellence in a chain,
which, if it had not been prematurely broken, would have commanded
opinion, and regenerated the world.'

Scythrop proceeded to meditate on the practicability of reviving a
confederation of regenerators. To get a clear view of his own ideas,
and to feel the pulse of the wisdom and genius of the age, he wrote
and published a treatise, in which his meanings were carefully wrapt
up in the monk's hood of transcendental technology, but filled with
hints of matter deep and dangerous, which he thought would set
the whole nation in a ferment; and he awaited the result in awful
expectation, as a miner who has fired a train awaits the explosion of
a rock. However, he listened and heard nothing; for the explosion, if
any ensued, was not sufficiently loud to shake a single leaf of the
ivy on the towers of Nightmare Abbey; and some months afterwards he
received a letter from his bookseller, informing him that only seven
copies had been sold, and concluding with a polite request for the
balance.

Scythrop did not despair. 'Seven copies,' he thought, 'have been sold.
Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the
seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven
golden candle-sticks with which I will illuminate the world.'

Scythrop had a certain portion of mechanical genius, which his
romantic projects tended to develope. He constructed models of cells
and recesses, sliding panels and secret passages, that would have
baffled the skill of the Parisian police. He took the opportunity of
his father's absence to smuggle a dumb carpenter into the Abbey, and
between them they gave reality to one of these models in Scythrop's
tower. Scythrop foresaw that a great leader of human regeneration
would be involved in fearful dilemmas, and determined, for the benefit
of mankind in general, to adopt all possible precautions for the
preservation of himself.

The servants, even the women, had been tutored into silence. Profound
stillness reigned throughout and around the Abbey, except when the
occasional shutting of a door would peal in long reverberations
through the galleries, or the heavy tread of the pensive butler would
wake the hollow echoes of the hall. Scythrop stalked about like the
grand inquisitor, and the servants flitted past him like familiars. In
his evening meditations on the terrace, under the ivy of the ruined
tower, the only sounds that came to his ear were the rustling of the
wind in the ivy, the plaintive voices of the feathered choristers, the
owls, the occasional striking of the Abbey clock, and the monotonous
dash of the sea on its low and level shore. In the mean time, he drank
Madeira, and laid deep schemes for a thorough repair of the crazy
fabric of human nature.

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