EVELYN. Let your smile be in pity, fair Castaly, on the illusions of Astrophel. Ensconced in his dark closet, within a charmed ring of black-letter folios, he has wofully warped his studies, and has read himself into the belief that he is a GIFTED SEER. Yet love him, lady, for his virtues; for his history is a very paradox. His heart is melting with charity for the beings of earth, yet his mind is half-weaned from their fellowship. At his imminent peril, he leaps into the Isis to save a drowning boy, and the world calls him misanthrope, withal. It is the fate indeed of many a cloistered scholar, whose ——“desires are dolphin like, And soar above the element they live in.” Such is Astrophel. IDA. He looks his part to perfection. There is a shadowy expression in his dark eye, as it were poring over the volume of his own thoughts. Beneath the slender shaft of yon eastern window, behold this proselyte to the sublime science of shadows. He approaches. EV. The _hour_ is on him yet.—Astrophel! ASTROPHEL. Whisper, and tread lightly, Evelyn, for this is haunted ground. Underneath this velvet turf rest the mouldering bones of a noble. I have held communion in my slumber with the spirit by which they were once animated and moved; and the mysteries of the tomb have been unfolded to me. The _eidōlon_ of Roger Bigod has thrice come across my sight. CAST. A ghost! EV. And Astrophel believes the truth of this vision! Such phantasy might well become the Cistercian monks, who once stalked along these gloomy cloisters, but not an Oxford scholar. ASTR. And why not an Oxford scholar, Evelyn? I _do_ believe in the existence of beings out of the common course of nature; and, indeed, the history of the world has ever proved the _general_ leaning to this belief, and my own mind feels that this universal adoption is a proof of _reality_ of existence. Smile at, or reason with me, you will not shake my faith, for I believe it true; and even Johnson confessed, that “although all argument might be against it, yet all belief is for it.” EV. The diffusion of this fallacy, Astrophel, proves only the universal sameness of the constitution of mind. You may, indeed, cite the high authority of Johnson, that “a belief in the apparitions of the dead could become universal only by its truth.” Yet, if this one word, _apparition_, be rightly interpreted, it will not imply the _existence_ of real phantoms, however ethereal, _before_ the eye, for the notion so construed would have been a grand error of Imlac; no, he adopts an _indefinite_ expression, conscious that mere metaphysics were not illustrative of this subtle question.