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The Room in the Dragon Volant, a fiction by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu |
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Prologue |
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_ _The curious case which I am about to place before you, is referred to, very pointedly, and more than once, in the extraordinary Essay upon the Drug of the Dark and the Middle Ages, from the pen of Doctor Hesselius_. _This Essay he entitles_ Mortis Imago, _and he, therein, discusses the_ Vinum letiferum, _the_ Beatifica, _the_ Somnus Angelorum, _the_ Hypnus Sagarum, _the_ Aqua Thessalliae, _and about twenty other infusions and distillations, well known to the sages of eight hundred years ago, and two of which are still, he alleges, known to the fraternity of thieves, and, among them, as police-office inquiries sometimes disclose to this day, in practical use_. _The Essay,_ Mortis Imago, _will occupy, as nearly as I can at present calculate, two volumes, the ninth and tenth, of the collected papers of Dr. Martin Hesselius_. _This Essay, I may remark in conclusion, is very curiously enriched by citations, in great abundance, from medieval verse and prose romance, some of the most valuable of which, strange to say, are Egyptian_. _I have selected this particular statement from among many cases equally striking, but hardly, I think, so effective as mere narratives; in this irregular form of publication, it is simply as a story that I present it_. _ |
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