It was therefore judged no favourable augury for the spiritual
destination of the last Melmoth, that this extraordinary person had
visited, or been imagined to visit, the house previous to his decease.”

Such was the account given by Biddy Brannigan, to which she added her
own solemnly-attested belief, that John Melmoth the Traveller was still
without a hair on his head changed, or a muscle in his frame
contracted;--that she had seen those that had seen him, and would
confirm their evidence by oath if necessary;--that he was never heard to
speak, seen to partake of food, or known to enter any dwelling but that
of his family;--and, finally, that she herself believed that his late
appearance boded no good either to the living or the dead. John was still musing on these things when the lights were procured,
and, disregarding the pallid countenances and monitory whispers of the
attendants, he resolutely entered the closet, shut the door, and
proceeded to search for the manuscript. It was soon found, for the
directions of old Melmoth were forcibly written, and strongly
remembered. The manuscript, old, tattered, and discoloured, was taken
from the very drawer in which it was mentioned to be laid. Melmoth’s
hands felt as cold as those of his dead uncle, when he drew the blotted
pages from their nook. He sat down to read,--there was a dead silence
through the house. Melmoth looked wistfully at the candles, snuffed
them, and still thought they looked dim, (perchance he thought they
burned blue, but such thought he kept to himself.) Certain it is, he
often changed his posture, and would have changed his chair, had there
been more than one in the apartment. He sunk for a few moments into a fit of gloomy abstraction, till the
sound of the clock striking twelve made him start,--it was the only
sound he had heard for some hours, and the sounds produced by inanimate
things, while all living beings around are as dead, have at such an hour
an effect indescribably awful. John looked at his manuscript with some
reluctance, opened it, paused over the first lines, and as the wind
sighed round the desolate apartment, and the rain pattered with a
mournful sound against the dismantled window, wished----what did he wish
for?--he wished the sound of the wind less dismal, and the dash of the
rain less monotonous.----He may be forgiven, it was past midnight, and
there was not a human being awake but himself within ten miles when he
began to read. CHAPTER III. Apparebat eidolon _senex_. PLINY. The manuscript was discoloured, obliterated, and mutilated beyond any
that had ever before exercised the patience of a reader. Michaelis
himself, scrutinizing into the pretended autograph of St Mark at Venice,
never had a harder time of it.--Melmoth could make out only a sentence
here and there. The writer, it appeared, was an Englishman of the name
of Stanton, who had travelled abroad shortly after the Restoration. Travelling was not then attended with the facilities which modern
improvement has introduced, and scholars and literati, the intelligent,
the idle, and the curious, wandered over the Continent for years, like
_Tom Coryat_, though they had the modesty, on their return, to entitle
the result of their multiplied observations and labours only
“crudities.”

Stanton, about the year 1676, was in Spain; he was, like most of the
travellers of that age, a man of literature, intelligence, and
curiosity, but ignorant of the language of the country, and fighting his
way at times from convent to convent, in quest of what was called
“Hospitality,” that is, obtaining board and lodging on the condition of
holding a debate in Latin, on some point theological or metaphysical,
with any monk who would become the champion of the strife. Now, as the
theology was Catholic, and the metaphysics Aristotelian, Stanton
sometimes wished himself at the miserable Posada from whose filth and
famine he had been fighting his escape; but though his reverend
antagonists always denounced his creed, and comforted themselves, even
in defeat, with the assurance that he must be damned, on the double
score of his being a heretic and an Englishman, they were obliged to
confess that his Latin was good, and his logic unanswerable; and he was
allowed, in most cases, to sup and sleep in peace. This was not doomed
to be his fate on the night of the 17th August 1677, when he found
himself in the plains of Valencia, deserted by a cowardly guide, who had
been terrified by the sight of a cross erected as a memorial of a
murder, had slipped off his mule unperceived, crossing himself every
step he took on his retreat from the heretic, and left Stanton amid the
terrors of an approaching storm, and the dangers of an unknown country. The sublime and yet softened beauty of the scenery around, had filled
the soul of Stanton with delight, and he enjoyed that delight as
Englishmen generally do, silently. The magnificent remains of two dynasties that had passed away, the ruins
of Roman palaces, and of Moorish fortresses, were around and above
him;--the dark and heavy thunder-clouds that advanced slowly, seemed
like the shrouds of these spectres of departed greatness; they
approached, but did not yet overwhelm or conceal them, as if nature
herself was for once awed by the power of man; and far below, the lovely
valley of Valencia blushed and burned in all the glory of sunset, like a
bride receiving the last glowing kiss of the bridegroom before the
approach of night. Stanton gazed around. The difference between the
architecture of the Roman and Moorish ruins struck him. Among the former
are the remains of a theatre, and something like a public place; the
latter present only the remains of fortresses, embattled, castellated,
and fortified from top to bottom,--not a loop-hole for pleasure to get
in by,--the loop-holes were only for arrows; all denoted military power
and despotic subjugation _a l’outrance_. The contrast might have pleased
a philosopher, and he might have indulged in the reflection, that though
the ancient Greeks and Romans were savages, (as Dr Johnson says all
people who want a press must be, and he says truly), yet they were
wonderful savages for their time, for they alone have left _traces of
their taste for pleasure_ in the countries they conquered, in their
superb theatres, temples, (which were also dedicated to pleasure one way
or another), and baths, while other conquering bands of savages never
left any thing behind them but traces of their rage for power. So
thought Stanton, as he still saw strongly defined, though darkened by
the darkening clouds, the huge skeleton of a Roman amphitheatre, its
arched and gigantic colonnades now admitting a gleam of light, and now
commingling with the purple thunder-cloud; and now the solid and heavy
mass of a Moorish fortress, no light playing between its impermeable
walls,--the image of power, dark, isolated, impenetrable.