With mournful interest, and yet with eager impatience, I opened the packet and trimmed my lamp.Conceive my dismay when I found the whole written in an unintelligible cipher.I present the reader with a specimen:
(Several strange characters.)
and so on for nine hundred and forty mortal pages in foolscap.Icould scarcely believe my eyes: in fact, I began to think the lamp burned singularly blue; and sundry misgivings as to the unhallowed nature of the characters I had so unwittingly opened upon, coupled with the strange hints and mystical language of the old gentleman, crept through my disordered imagination.
Certainly, to say no worse of it, the whole thing looked UNCANNY!
I was about, precipitately, to hurry the papers into my desk, with a pious determination to have nothing more to do with them, when my eye fell upon a book, neatly bound in blue morocco, and which, in my eagerness, I had hitherto overlooked.I opened this volume with great precaution, not knowing what might jump out, and--guess my delight--found that it contained a key or dictionary to the hieroglyphics.Not to weary the reader with an account of my labours, I am contented with saying that at last Iimagined myself capable of construing the characters, and set to work in good earnest.Still it was no easy task, and two years elapsed before I had made much progress.I then, by way of experiment on the public, obtained the insertion of a few desultory chapters, in a periodical with which, for a few months, I had the honour to be connected.They appeared to excite more curiosity than I had presumed to anticipate; and I renewed, with better heart, my laborious undertaking.But now a new misfortune befell me: I found, as I proceeded, that the author had made two copies of his work, one much more elaborate and detailed than the other; I had stumbled upon the earlier copy, and had my whole task to remodel, and the chapters I had written to retranslate.
I may say then, that, exclusive of intervals devoted to more pressing occupations, my unlucky promise cost me the toil of several years before I could bring it to adequate fulfilment.
The task was the more difficult, since the style in the original is written in a kind of rhythmical prose, as if the author desired that in some degree his work should be regarded as one of poetical conception and design.To this it was not possible to do justice, and in the attempt I have doubtless very often need of the reader's indulgent consideration.My natural respect for the old gentleman's vagaries, with a muse of equivocal character, must be my only excuse whenever the language, without luxuriating into verse, borrows flowers scarcely natural to prose.Truth compels me also to confess, that, with all my pains, I am by no means sure that I have invariably given the true meaning of the cipher; nay, that here and there either a gap in the narrative, or the sudden assumption of a new cipher, to which no key was afforded, has obliged me to resort to interpolations of my own, no doubt easily discernible, but which, I flatter myself, are not inharmonious to the general design.This confession leads me to the sentence with which I shall conclude: If, reader, in this book there be anything that pleases you, it is certainly mine;but whenever you come to something you dislike,--lay the blame upon the old gentleman!
London, January, 1842.
N.B.--The notes appended to the text are sometimes by the author, sometimes by the editor.I have occasionally (but not always)marked the distinction; where, however, this is omitted, the ingenuity of the reader will be rarely at fault.
ZANONI.
BOOK I.
THE MUSICIAN.
Due Fontane Chi di diverso effeto hanno liquore!
"Ariosto, Orland.Fur." Canto 1.7.
(Two Founts That hold a draught of different effects.)
