Moonchild

his only guide. In particular, he swore by the "Black Pullet," which seemed to him less dangerous than the "Grand Grimoire," or the forgery attributed to Pope Honorius. He wanted to evoke the devil, but was terrified lest he should be successful. However, nobody could be more pedantically pious than he in following out the practical prescriptions of these absurd charm-books. This individual might usually have been discovered during that honeymoon in the Naples villa, seated in the arm-chair of the apartment which he had rented in the Galeria Vittoria. He would be clad in a frockcoat of City cut, for he affected the "professional man," and his air would be preoccupied. The arrival of his colleagues for consultation would apparently startle him from a profound speculation upon the weightier matters of the law. It would be only by an effort that he spoke in English; the least distraction would send him back into Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, none of which languages he understood. He was a peddler of words; his mind was a rag-and-bone shop of worthless and disjointed mediaevalism. After a severe struggle, he would "proceed to an allocution." He never "spoke"; he "monologized." The first formal conference took place when they had been about a week in Naples. "My fathers learned in Art Magic," he began, [158] addressing Gates and Abdul, "venerable and archetypal doctors of the Hermetic Arcanum, it hath been sacramentally imposed upon our sophistic Tebunah by the monumentally aggregated psycho-mentality of Those whose names in respect of known dedications must here — juxta nos — be heled ob Danaos (as I should adumbrate advisedly, for is it not script, concerning cowans, in the archives of the Clermont Harodim?) that a term, in fine, should mete the orbit and currency of the heretic and apostate, quem in Tartarum conjuro, hight Grey, in his areopagus of the averse hierarchy. I exiterate, clam populo, that all warrants of precursors falt no ratification, peradventure, in the actual concatenation, sed, me judice, it is meliorated that by virtue and cosmodominicy of Satanas — cognomen ineffabile, quod reverentissime proloquor! — the opus confronts the Sir Knights of the Black Chapter — in via sua propria — in the authentic valley and this lucus tenebrosa Neapolitanensis, as the near — nay, the next! — conflagration of barbaric pilum against retiarial ludibry. Worthy Fathers and reverend in the doctrine, salutatio in summo imperio — per totam orbem — in the supranominal