Mr W. R. H. Trowbridge, to whose recent book I am greatly indebted for material for this brief sketch of Cagliostro’s life, well observes that “there is perhaps no other equally celebrated personality in modern history whose character is so baffling to the biographer.” History has condemned him purely on the evidence of his most unscrupulous enemies. But while dismissing such one-sided portraits, it is no easy matter to arrive at an unprejudiced valuation of the real man. Of his latest biographer’s impartiality and candour, as well as his careful research of authorities, it is impossible to speak too highly. His conclusions will be all the more widely accepted in view of the fact that he is himself in no sense an occultist. In spite of a rather long chapter dealing with “Eighteenth Century Occultism,” we feel instinctively and at every turn that the subject is one in which he is obviously out of his depth. Indeed, only on the second page of his biography we come across the following surprising statement. Speaking of “theosophists, spiritualists, occultists,” all of whom are unceremoniously lumped together, he observes: By these amiable visionaries Cagliostro is regarded as one of the princes of occultism whose mystical touch has revealed the arcana of the spiritual world to the initiated, and illumined the path along which the speculative scientist proceeds on entering the labyrinth of the supernatural. Every occultist knows this to be sheer rubbish. Cagliostro has never been regarded as an authority in any school of occultism. Many, if not most occultists, have been inclined to believe that he was more than half a quack. Mr Trowbridge—it is to be said to his credit—has judged him in the light of the evidence more fairly than they. The truth is that, Cagliostro with all his good qualities, with all his generosity of heart, his human sympathy, his nobility—yes, it really was nobility—of character, was beyond and above all things a poser and a mystery-monger. He had a magnetic personality, a mediumistic temperament, and almost certainly some clairvoyant power, though it is noticeable that he invariably employed a little boy or girl whose assistance was essential to his predictions. Beyond this, and, I think we must say, more important than all this, he had an incontestable natural healing gift, which he aided by no small knowledge of practical medicine. In these qualifications we have the secret of his success, and also the clue to his failure. He was excessively vain, and loved to impress the multitude. He loved, moreover, to impress them by surrounding himself with an atmosphere of mystery and posing as an occultist, which (probably) he never was. He has left no body of teaching behind him. He has left no followers, no disciples. He was merely the comet of a season, though an exceptionally brilliant one. It would be absurd to class him in the same category as such master occultists as Cornelius