510 THE MOUNTAIN. 



not forgetting the quondam world-renowned Connecticut 

 Count Cagliostro, the illustrious arch-quack, of quacks of 

 the western hemisphere, and grand Mogul of humbugs, the 

 famous Nimrod of mooncalves, and whom the North Ameri- 

 can continent has not murdered, as he does not belong to 

 the order of radical blasphemers, sinning unpardonably 

 against its popular faiths, but is rather, in his own per- 

 son, a sort of monkey deity astraddle of his woolly horse, a 

 veritable representative spirit of the mermaid order from the 

 realm of twaddledom, a kind of " Grand Lama" of Yankee 

 Buddhism, or rather, perhaps, a satanic scene-shifter in the 

 contemptible theatricalities of a rotten mammon-worshiping 

 world. A soil that could give birth and grow such a crea- 

 ture as the once illustrious proprietor of the " Ivy Island," 

 elevate him to the dignity of a niche in the temple of 

 heroes, installing him in a golden house of Nero, and give 

 twenty-five thousand dollars (whisper low !) for the most 

 flagrant, nauseous and diabolical confession of sin, made 

 off the scaffold of a common malefactor, on record : the fini- 

 kin, cynical, and would-be smart expose and dissection of a 

 tissue of cunningly-devised fables, by which thousands of 

 hard-earned dollars were extracted from the human race by 

 a brutal invasion and assassination of the best element of 

 man, the disposition to believe, or faith, through the instru- 

 mentality of a series of tricks and juggleries of a common 

 showman, a soil which can grow such a man will grow all 

 the humbugs of perdition. In this rich mould the genius 

 of Mesmer soon struck root and flourished, and conse- 

 quently the world has been shown the spectacle of a crop 

 of Jonah's gourd follies and delusions springing from 

 the mire of that dismal swamp, human gullibility. Trans- 

 cended and cast aside in his native land, this obsolete pro- 

 genitor of innumerable absurdities has sown a crop of bold 

 and noxious weeds, " an enemy of man who, while he slept, 

 came and sowed tares among the wheat," that have grown 

 into a harvest of wretched deceits, which, fortunately how- 

 ever for humanity, die of their own inanition, and still, from 



