Salathiel - 1843 Author:George Croly Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. There has appeared from time to time in Europe, during the last thousand years, a mysterious individual, a sojourner in all lands, vet a citizen of n... more »one ; professing the profoiindest secreta of opulence,'yet generally living in a state of poverty ; astonishing every one by the vigour of his recollections, and the evidence of his close and living intercourse with the eminent characters and events of every age, yet connected :with none—without lineage, or possession, or pursuit on eartha wanderer, and unhappy. A number of histories have been invented for him ; some purely fictitious, others founded on ill-understood records. Germany, the land of mysticism, where men labour to think all facts imaginary, and .turn all imaginations into facts, has toiled most in this idle perversion of truth. Yet those narratives have been in general but a few pages, feebly founded on the single, fatal sentence of his punishment for an indignity offered to the Great Author of the Christian faith. That exile lives ; that most afflicted of the people of affliction yet walks this earth ; bearing the sorrows of eighteen centuries on his brow—withering in soul with remorse for the guilt of an hour of madness. He has long borne the scoff in silence ; he has heard his princely rank degraded to that of a menial, and heard without a murmur; he has heard his unhappy offence charged to deliberate malice and cruelty, when it was but the misfortune of a zeal blinded and inflamed by the prejudices of his nation ; and he has bowed to the calumny as a portion of his punishment. But the time of this forbearance is no more. He feels himself at last wearing away ; and feels, with a sensation like that of returning to the common fates of mankind, a desire to stand clear with his fellow-men. In their pres...« less