Sir Charles had been a great
friend of the first Lord Lytton, the novelist, and they had
together dabbled in Black Magic. Sir Charles declared that the
last chapters in Bulwer-Lytton's wonderful imaginative work, A
STRANGE STORY, describing the preparation of the Elixir of Life in
the heart of the Australian Bush, were all founded on actual
experience, with the notable reservation that all the recorded
attempts made to produce this magic fluid had failed from their
very start. He had in his younger days joined a society of
Rosicrucians, by which I do not mean the Masonic Order of that
name, but persons who sought to penetrate into the Forbidden
Domain. Some forty years ago a very interesting series of articles
appeared in Vanity Fair (the weekly newspaper, not Thackeray's
masterpiece), under the title of "The Black Art." In one of these
there was an account of a seance which took place at the Pantheon
in Oxford Street, in either the "forties" or the "fifties." A
number of people had hired the hall, and the Devil was invoked in
due traditional form, Then something happened, and the entire
assemblage rushed terror-stricken into Oxford Street, and nothing
would induce a single one of them to re-enter the building.
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