The Wonderful Story of Ravalette by Paschal Beverly Randolph

In giving what follows to the world, no one can be more alive to the fact that this is the latter half of the nineteenth century, and that the present is emphatically the era of the grandest Utilitarianism, Revolution, Matter of Fact, and Doubt that the world ever knew, than is the editor of the following extraordinary tale. He has no apologies to make for offering it—no excuses, even as a novelist, for departing from the beaten track of “War, Love, Murder, and Revenge,” “Politics, Passion, and Prussic acid,” which constitute the staple of the modern novel.

Disliking all long exordia, we propose to enter at once upon the work before us, by inquiring: Is there such a thing as real magic—not the ordinary, chemical, ambidextral jugglery, that passes current among the vulgar as magic—but the real old mysterious thing, whereof we read in old black-letter tomes?

Utterly repudiating the pretensions of modern charlatans, and conscienceless impostors, who deal in “spirit photographs,” and utter misty phrases about “Life in the Spheres,” “Gloria,” and “Jubilo,” together with schemes to reform the world—namely, by means of Indiana divorces, improved “Lieceums,” “Air-lying dispatches,” via Caput Assinorum, and much other.

“Canting, radical jabber and jaw,
’Bout Mornia and Hornia, and Starnos and ’Cor,
Hocus and pocus, and nong-tong-paw;
All stupid crams, not worth a straw.”