Nightmare Abbey | Page 5

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