WILLOUGHBY. And this is all! After years of austerity and toil, Proclus—the scholar, stored with the opinions of the past, surrounded by the admiration of the present—the astronomer, the geometrician, the philosopher,—learned in the lore of symbols and of oracles, in the rapt utterances of Orpheus and of Zoroaster—an adept in the ritual of invocations among every people in the world—he, at the close, pronounces Quietism the consummation of the whole, and an unreasoning contemplation, an ecstasy which casts off as an incumbrance all the knowledge so painfully acquired, the bourne of all the journey. MRS. ATHERTON. As though it were the highest glory of man, forgetting all that his enquiry has achieved, hidden away from the world,—to gaze at vacancy, inactive and infantine;—to be like some peasant’s child left in its cradle for a while in the furrow of a field, shut in by the little mound of earth on either side, and having but the blue æther above, dazzling and void, at which to look up with smiles of witless wonder. Note to page 103. _Iamblichus, de Mysteriis_, sect. x. cc. 1, 4, 6; iii. 4, 8, 6, 24; i. 5, 6; ii. 3; iii. 31; ii. 4, 6, 7; iii. 1, 3. These passages, in the order given, will be found to correspond with the opinions expressed in the letter as those of Iamblichus. The genuineness of the treatise _De Mysteriis_ has been called in question, but its antiquity is undoubted. It differs only in one or two very trivial statements from the doctrines of Iamblichus as ascertained from other sources, and is admitted by all to be the production, if not of Iamblichus himself, of one of his disciples, probably writing under his direction. _Jules Simon_, ii. 219. For the opinions ascribed to Porphyry in this letter, see his _Epistola ad Anebonem_, passim. He there proposes a series of difficult questions, and displays that sceptical disposition, especially concerning the pretensions of Theurgy, which so much scandalized Iamblichus. The _De Mysteriis_ is an elaborate reply to that epistle, under the name of Abammon.