THE

PHILOSOPHY

OF

MYSTERY.

“We so intreateth this serious and terrible matter of Spirites, that now and then insertyng some strange stories of counterfeyts, doth both very lybely display their falsehood, and also not a little recreate his reader: and yet in the ende he so aptly concludeth to the purpose, that his hystories seeme not idle tales, or impertinent vagaries, but very truethes, naturally falling under the compasse of his matter.”

THE

PHILOSOPHY

OF

MYSTERY.

BY

WALTER COOPER DENDY,

FELLOW AND HONORARY LIBRARIAN OF THE MEDICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON;

SENIOR SURGEON TO THE ROYAL INFIRMARY FOR CHILDREN, &c. &c.

LONDON:

LONGMAN, ORME, BROWN, GREEN, & LONGMANS,

PATERNOSTER ROW.

———

1841.

Gilbert and Rivington, Printers,

St. John’s Square, London.

TO HIS COUSINS,

STEPHEN DENDY, ESQ.

OF PARIS,

AND

CHARLES COOK DENDY, ESQ.

OF SOUTHGATE HOUSE, CHICHESTER;

AND TO HIS BROTHER,

EDWARD STEPHEN DENDY,

THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED,

IN TOKEN OF THE AFFECTIONATE REGARD

OF THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS.

THE

PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTERY.

THE CHALLENGE.

“There are more things in heav’n and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”—Hamlet.

There was a shallop floating on the Wye, among the gray rocks and leafy woods of Chepstow. Within it were two fair girls reclining: the one blending the romantic wildness of a maid of Italy with the exquisite purity of English nature; the other illuming, with the devotion of a vestal, the classic beauty of a Greek.

There was a young and learned bachelor sitting at the helm. Study had stamped an air of thoughtfulness on his brow; yet a smile was ever playing on his lips, as his heart felt the truth and influence of the beautiful life around him.

Listen, gentle reader, we pray thy courtesy and thy patience, as a rude unskilful pen traces the breathed thoughts of these wanderers of the Wye.

Castaly. We have roamed, dear Ida, among the classic lands of the far-off Mediterranean: we have looked, from her pinnacles of snow, on the silvery gleaminess of Switzerland, and from purple sierras on the sunny splendour of Spain; yet these English meadows, with their fringes of wild bloom, come o’er the heart with all the freshness of an infant’s dream. Yon majestic crag of Wyndcliff is flinging its purple shadows athwart the water, and floods of golden glory are streaming through the beech-woods of Piercefield: and see, our little sail, white as the wing of a swan, is wafting us towards Abbey Tintern, along this beautiful valley, where the river almost doubles on itself; meandering among its mead-flowers and its mosses, as loth to leave its luxuriant bed. Listen! the breath of evening is among the trees that dip in the ripple of the Wye their leaves of shivering gold. What a scene for minions of the moon to revel in! Say, shall we charm the lingering hours of this midsummer night among the ivied cloisters of the abbey? But where is Astrophel, our moon-struck student, who, like Chaucer’s scholar, keeps

——“at his bed’s head,

A twenty books clothed in black and red,

Of Aristotle and his philosophy?”——

They have not taught him courtesy, or he would not steal away from the light of our eyes to commune with owls and ivy-bushes.

Yet we promise him our smile for your sake, Evelyn. Indeed, I am thinking his mysteries will chime in admirably with the solemnity of this lone abbey. We appoint him master of our revels.

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.

There was one Theophilus Insulanus, who, I think, calls all those who have not faith in phantoms, irreligious, because, forsooth, “these ghosts are never employed on subjects of frivolous concern.” I may be under the ban of this flimsy enthusiast, but you will not gain me as a proselyte, Astrophel, for, like our great poet, I have seen too many ghosts myself.

Yet I know some few self-created wizards, who have solved to their hearts’ content those two grand mysteries, the real existence and the purpose of ghostly visitations; who, like Owain Glyndwr, “can call spirits from the vasty deep,” and even expect that they will “come when they do call for them.” Others have laboured under self-glamourie, and believed themselves magicians, until put to the proof. I remember the painter, Richard Cosway, was under this illusion; and, when the old cynic Northcote desired him to raise Sir Joshua Reynolds, the pseudo-magus confessed himself foiled, by advancing this simple excuse, “I would, were it not sinful!”

It were well if these monomaniacs were laid in the famous bed of St. Hilary at Poitiers; for there, with the muttering of a prayer or two, as the legend tells us, madmen may be cured.

But, in truth, the light of divine reason has so far dispelled these fancies for the supernatural, that very few of us, I presume, are confident in the hope of raising a ghost when we want one; or of laying it in the Red Sea for a hundred years, by two clergymen, with “bell, book, and candle,” and scraps of mystic Latin, when it becomes rude or troublesome.

Ida. Will you not concede that many visionaries have believed, and written from pure and even holy motives?

Ev. There is no doubt of this, lady; yet while it has fanned the flame of superstition in minds of lower intellect, with many, the endeavour to prove too much has marred these motives, and weakened faith, even in the credulous; so that we may hope the wild romances of Beaumont, and Burthogge, and Baxter, and Aubrey, and Glanville, and that arch-mystagogue Moreton (whose book is half full of prolix dialogues between ghosts and ghost-seers), will soon be mere objects of interest and curiosity to the black-letter bibliomaniac and the more erudite legend-hunter.

Cast. We will not submit to your anathema, Evelyn. This learned clerk has challenged our faith. What a treasury of secrets might he unfold to us from the mystic tomes of antiquity, the wonders of profane psychology; from the tales of Arabia to Vatheck and the Epicurean—from the classic mythology of Homer to the wild romances of his humble prototype Ossian.

Let it be a match: we will listen, Astrophel, while you “unsphere the spirit of Plato;” and here we sit in judgment, on the velvet throne of this our court of Tintern.

NATURE AND MOTIVES OF GHOSTS.

“In the most high and palmy state of Rome,

A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead

Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.”

Hamlet, 4to. B.

Astr. It is not from the sources of mythology alone, that I adduce my illustrations of the reality of ghosts, but from the myriads of incidents which ancient and modern history record. Yet may I well crave your courtesy for the scraps of fable, and perchance of imposture, that may unwittingly creep into my discourse. Listen to me.

It was believed by the ancients that each body possessed three ghosts—to be released on its dissolution. The manes at once emigrated to the region of Pluto: the spiritus ascended to the skies: the umbra or shade still wandered on the earth. Or, as the poet has more comprehensively sung,

“Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra;

Quatuor ista loci bis duo suscipiunt:

Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra,

Orcus habet manes, spiritus astra petit.”

Meaning that there are four principles in man, and this is their destiny:—the flesh to earth; the ghost to the tomb; the soul to Hades; and the spirit to heaven.

The queen of Carthage, confiding in this creed, threatens Æneas that her umbra will haunt him upon earth, while her manes will rejoice in his torments.

The notions of other mystic scholars are thus recorded by old Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy:” as those of Surius—“that there be certain monsters of hell and places appointed for the punishment of men’s souls, as at Hecla in Iceland, where the ghosts of dead men are familiarly seen, and sometimes talk with the living. Saint Gregory, Durand, and the rest of the schoolmen, derive as much from Ætna in Sicily, Lipara, Hiera—and those volcanoes in America, and that fearful mount Heckleberg in Norway, where lamentable screeches and howlings are continually heard, which strike a terror to the auditors: fiery chariots are continually seen to bring in the souls of men in the likeness of crows, and devils ordinarily goe in and out.” And then, to bring this phantasy to a climax by a pandemonium of ghosts, listen to Bredenbachius, in his “Perigranions in the Holy Land,” where “once a yeare dead bodies arise about March, and walk, and after awhile hide themselves again: thousands of people come yearly to see them.” And this reminds me of the phantom of old Booty, who at the hour of his death in England was seen by the crew of a ship running into the crater of Stromboli in the remote Mediterranean,—a story which even in the present century was made the subject of discussion in a justice court.

Now, you must know, the ancients believed that only those who died of the sword possessed this privilege.

These are the words of Flavius Josephus: “What man of virtue is there that does not know that those souls which are severed from their fleshly bodies in battles by the sword are received by the ether, that purest of elements, and joined to that company which are placed among the stars:—that they become good demons and propitious heroes, and shew themselves as such to their posterity afterwards; while upon those souls that wear away in and with their distempered bodies, comes a subterranean night to dissolve them to nothing, and a deep oblivion to take away all the remembrance of them? And this, notwithstanding they be clean from all spots and defilements of this world; so that in this case the soul at the same time comes to the utmost bounds of its life, and of its body, and of its memorial also.”

The mystery of the nature of these ghosts I may not presume to define; but there are many learned writers of antiquity who believed in their materiality, and broached the intricate question of their quality and formation.

The alchymist Paracelsus writes of the astral element or spirit—one of the two bodies which compose our nature: being more ethereal, it survived some time after the death of the more substantial form, and sometimes became the familiar spirit of the magician. And what writes Lucretius the Epicurean to illustrate his credence in apparitions? That the surfaces of bodies are constantly thrown off by a sort of centrifugal force; that an exact image is often presented to us by this surface coming off as it were entire, like the cast skin of the rattle-snake or the shell of the chrysalis; and thus the ideas of our absent or departed friends strike on the mind.

The olden chymists, in the age of Louis XIV. accounted for spectral forms by the saline atoms of a putrid corpse being set free, and combining again in their pristine form. Listen, I pray you, to this grave philosophy of an abstruse essay, writ in 1794.

“The apparitions of souls departed do, by the virtue of their formative plastic power, frame unto themselves the vehicles in which they appear out of the moisture of their bodies. So ghosts do often appear in church-yards, and that but for a short time, to wit, before the moisture is wholly dried up.”

“Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp,

Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres,

Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave.”

And we read in the chronicles, that “during the time the ancients burned, not buried their dead, there was no such appearance of ghosts as is now.”

Why waves the coarse grass ranker over the grave? It is touched by the larva of the rotting carcase, which, ascending from its putrid chrysalis, a butterfly, or Psyche, flits awhile like an ephemera, and drops again into the vault.

A sentiment something like this, I believe, was the grand cause of the enrolment of the mummies by the Egyptians; for they thought while the body remained entire, the soul was flitting about it: and the early Christians even believed that a portion at least of the soul remained, uncorrupted by the body.

Evelyn will grant that among the Romans there was a devout wish to be buried near venerated beings and saints, an emanation from whose bodies, they believed, would inspire the hearts of the believers.

And here I will relate a story from the Dinan Journal of 1840, and also the fragment of a very mysterious tale told with all the solemnity of a faithful chronicle.

“We had the curious spectacle of a long procession of girls from Pleudiheus, passing through our streets to the chapel of Saint Anne, to offer up prayers for the repose of the soul of the mother of one of them, who has been dead twenty-two years, and who every five years has appeared to her daughter, urging her to have masses said for her. This time the troubled spirit prescribed the day, hour, and place of the service, and even the precise dresses she would have the votaries wear. Consequently, they were all lightly clothed in white, although the rain fell and the streets were full of mud.—Some of the inhabitants of Dinan affirm that they saw the ghost of the deceased, marching at the head of the procession to the door of the chapel, where it remained till the mass was finished, and then suddenly vanished.”

Returning from the harbour to Cadiz with some Spanish doñas, the Baron Geramb heard a voice in French, crying, “Save me! Help, help!” but at the time he took little or no heed of the matter. On the morrow was seen on the shore of the harbour a body on a black board, with lighted tapers by its side, which was covered by the Baron’s direction. During a tempest in the evening, some secret impulse directed him again to the shore. Before his bewildered sight arose from the spot a shapeless phantom wrapped in the black winding-sheet which he had provided.

The phantom moved along with gigantic strides, assuming a globular form, and then, whirling in spiral circles, bounded off, and appeared at a distance like a giant. The spectre led the Baron to the streets of Cadiz, its course being accompanied by a noise as of the tinkling of autumnal leaves. In Cadiz a door suddenly opened with force, and the spectre rushed like lightning into the house, and plunged into the cellar. There was the sound of deep groaning, and the Baron descended into the vault: there lay the corpse naked and livid, and on it was prostrated an aged man, uttering the deep sighs of abject misery and despair. In a gloomy corner of this cave of death leaned the phantom, revolving in its spiral whirls, and then changing to a floating cloud of light; and then there beamed forth the pale features of a youth, undulating as if on the bosom of a wave, which murmured in the ear. Then came the chaunting of anthems and prayers for the dead, and a glittering young girl in white robes glided into the cellar, and knelt in devotion by the body.

The phantom—and so the legend proceeds.

There is a wondrous mystery, I grant, enveloping this story; but if there be any truth in that alchymic re-animation, Palingenesy —

“If chemists from a rose’s ashes,

Can raise the rose itself in glasses;”

nay, if the sparkling diamond shines forth from a mass of charcoal, why may not the ashes of a body be made into a ghost, illustrative of the philosophy of substantial apparitions, adopted by Kircher,—a body rebuilt, after being resolved, for a time, into its constituent elements? The Parisian alchymists of the seventeenth century, indeed, demonstrated this mystery, and raised a phœnix from its ashes. They submitted to the process of distillation some earth from the cemetery of the Innocents; during which ceremony, they were scared by the appearance of perfect human shapes, struggling in the glass vessels they were employing. And, lastly, Dr. Ferriar thus deposes:—A ruffian was executed, his body dissected, and his skull pulverised by an anatomist. The student, who slept in the chamber of experiment, saw, in the night-time, a progressive getting together of the fragments, until the criminal became perfect, and glided out at the door.

And here is a legend of deeper mystery still.

There was a merry party collected in a town in France, and amongst all the gay lords and ladies there assembled, there was none who caused so great a sensation as a beautiful young lady, who danced, played, and sang in the most exquisite style. There were only two unaccountable circumstances belonging to her: one was, that she never went to church or attended family prayers; the other, that she always wore a slender, black velvet band or girdle round her waist. She was often asked about these peculiarities, but she always evaded the interrogatories; and still, by her amiable manners and beauty won all hearts. One evening, in a dance, her partner saw an opportunity of pulling the loop of her little black girdle behind: it fell to the ground, and immediately the lady became pale as a sheet; then, gradually shrunk and shrunk, till at length nothing was to be seen in her place but a small heap of grey ashes.

And what think you now, Evelyn?

Ev. I think your candle burned very blue, Astrophel, when you were poring over these midnight legends; yet, I believe, I may, by and by, explain the story of your Lady of the Ashes;—all, excepting the mystery of the sable girdle. But, methinks, you should not have stopped short of the qualities by which we may recognise the genus of these phantoms. There was once, as I have heard, a ghost near Cirencester, which vanished in a very nice perfume, and a melodious twang; and Master Lilly, therefore, concluded it to be a fairy: and Propertius, I know, writes of another; and he decided, that the scent diffused on her disappearance, proclaimed her to be a goddess! Glanville has set himself to argue upon, nay, demonstrate, all questions regarding materiality and immateriality, and the nature of spirits; puzzling us with mathematical diagrams, and occupying fifteen chapters on the nature of the witch of Endor: and Andrew Moreton, too, in his “Secrets,” comments, with pedantic profanation, on the “infernal paw-wawing of this condemned creature.” Coleridge, and even Sir Walter, who had a mighty love of legends, propose a question, whether she was a ventriloquist or an aristocratic fortune-teller, or an astrologer or a gipsy, imposing on the credulity of Saul. And yet that same Sir Walter very shrewdly suggested to Sir William Gell the manufacture of a ghost, with a thin sheet of tin, painted white, so that by half a turn the spectre would instantly vanish.

Cast. A ghost, I believe, according to the rules of phantasy, ought to be without matter or form, or indeed any sensible properties. Yet are very serious tales related of guns bursting when fired at them, and swords broken by their contact, and of loud voices issuing from filmy phantoms through which the moonbeams are seen to glimmer. A spirit ought, of course, to communicate with us in another way than that which we know, and possess those ethereal faculties of creeping through chinks or keyholes, and of resuming its airy form, like the sylph of Belinda, when the “glittering forfex” had cut it in twain. An exquisite morceau of such a phantom just now flits across my memory. It is of two old ladies dwelling in two border castles in Scotland. One of these dames was visited by the spectre bust of a man; and the other by the lower half of him. Which had the better bargain, I know not, but I believe —

Astr. Nay, it were not difficult, lady, to overwhelm me with tales like yours—the idle and unmeaning gossip of a winter’s night: but there are many spectral visitations so intimately associated with events, that the faculty even of prophecy cannot be doubted. Bodine, as Burton writes, is fully satisfied that “these souls of men departed, if corporeal, are of some shape, and that absolutely round, like sun and moone, because that is the most perfect form: that they can assume other aërial bodies, all manner of shapes at their pleasure, appear in what likeness they will themselves: that they are most swift in motion, can pass many miles in an instant, and so likewise transform bodies of others into what form they please, and, with admirable celerity, remove them from place to place: that they can represent castles in the ayre, armies, spectrums, prodigies, and such strange objects to mortal men’s eyes; cause smells, savors, deceive all the senses; foretel future events, and do many strange miracles.”

Then the eccentric Francis Grose has thus summed up many of their wondrous attributes: —

“The spirit of a person deceased is either commissioned to return for some especial errand, such as the discovery of a murder, to procure restitution of lands, or money unjustly withheld from an orphan or widow: or, having committed some injustice whilst living, cannot rest till that is redressed. Sometimes the occasion of spirits revisiting this world is to inform their heir in what secret place or private drawer in an old trunk they had hid the title-deeds of the estate, or where, in troublesome times, they had buried the money and plate. Some ghosts of murdered persons, whose bodies have been secretly buried, cannot be at ease till their bones have been taken up and deposited in sacred ground, with all the rites of Christian burial.” The ghost of Hamlet’s father walked on the platform at Elsineur, to incite his son to revenge his murder; and many modern phantoms have enlivened the legends of our local histories, bent on the same mysterious errand.

The mythology of the ancients, and the fairy superstition of our own land, are also replete with legends of these apparitions. The rites of sepulture were essential for the repose of the manes. If the body was not quietly entombed, the soul was wandering on the banks of Styx for one hundred years, ere it was permitted Charon to ferry it across the river. Thus spoke the shade of Patroclus to Achilles, in his dream:

“Thou sleep’st, Achilles, and Patroclus, erst

Thy best belov’d, in death forgotten lies.

Haste, give me burial: I would pass the gates

Of Hades, for the shadows of the dead

Now drive me from their fellowship afar.”

And this is a prevailing sentiment among the North American Indians:

“The bones of our countrymen lie uncovered, their bloody bed has not been washed clean, their spirits cry against us,—they must be appeased.”

In the letter of Pliny the Consul, to Sura, we learn that there was at Athens a house haunted by a chain-rattling ghost. Athenodorus, the philosopher, hired the house, determined to quiet the restless spirit. “When it grew towards evening, he ordered a couch to be prepared for him in the fore part of the house, and, after calling for a light, together with his pencil and tablets, he directed all his people to retire. The first part of the night passed in usual silence, when at length the chains began to rattle. However he neither lifted up his eyes, nor laid down his pencil, but diverted his observation by pursuing his studies with greater earnestness. The noise increased, and advanced nearer, till it seemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked up and saw the ghost exactly in the manner it had been described to him—it stood before him beckoning with the finger. Athenodorus made a sign with his hand that it should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers; but the ghost, still rattling his chains in his ears, he looked up and saw him beckoning him as before. Upon this he immediately arose, and, with the light in his hand, followed it. The spectre slowly stalked along as if encumbered with his chains, and, turning into the area of the house, suddenly vanished. Athenodorus, being thus deserted, made a mark with some grass and leaves where the spirit left him. The next day he gave information to the magistrates, and advised them to order that spot to be dug up. This was accordingly done, and the skeleton of a man in chains was there found; for the body having lain a considerable time in the ground, was putrified, and had mouldered away from the fetters. The bones, being collected together, were publicly buried; and thus, after the ghost was appeased by the proper ceremonies, the house was haunted no more.”

Yet, not only to entreat the rites of sepulture, the phantom will walk according to some law of those beings remote from the fellowship of human nature,—it may be to obtain readmission to that earth from which it was, by some fairy spell, in exile.

In the wilds of Rob Roy’s country, there is many a Highlander believing still the traditions of the Daoine Shi, or Men of Peace: and among the legends of Aberfoyle there is one phantom tale that is apropos to my illustrations.

There was one Master Robert Kirke. He was one evening taking his night walk on a fairy hill, or dunshi, in the vicinity of his manse. On a sudden he fell to the ground, struck, as it appeared to many, by apoplexy: the seers, however, believed it to be a trance inflicted on him by the fairy people for thus invading the sacred bounds of their kingdom. After the interment, the phantom of the minister appeared to one of his relatives, and desired him to go to Grahame of Duchray, his cousin, and assure him that he was not dead, but was at that time a prisoner in elf land, and the only moment in which the fairy charm could be dissolved, was at the christening of his posthumous child. The counter-spell was this: that Grahame should be present at the baptism, holding a dish in his hand, and that when the infant was brought, he should throw the dish over the phantom; the appearance of which at that moment was faithfully promised.

When the child was at the font, and while the guests were seated, the apparition sat with them at the table; but fear came upon the Græme at this strange glamourie: he forgot the solemn injunction, and it is believed that Mr. Kirke, to this day, “drees his weird in fairy land.”

PROPHECY OF SPECTRES.

“I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound.”

Hamlet.

Ev. These are very meagre spectres, Astrophel, or accomplices, as the lawyer would say, after the fact.

Astr. I have reserved Prophecies for this evening. In the earliest profane records of our globe, we read of the frequent visitations of prophetic phantoms. Listen, Evelyn, to a story of your own Pliny;—the legend of Curtius Rufus. When he was in low circumstances, and unknown in the world, he attended the governor of Africa into that province. One evening, as he was walking in the public portico, he was extremely surprised with the apparition of a woman, whose figure and beauty were more than human. She told him she was the tutelar power who presided over Africa, and was come to inform him of the future events of his life: that he should go back to Rome, where he should be raised to the highest honours, should return to that province invested with the proconsular dignity, and there should die. Upon his arrival at Carthage, as he was coming out of the ship, the same figure accosted him upon the shore. It is certain, at least, that being seized with a fit of illness, though there were no symptoms in his case that led his attendants to despair, he instantly gave up all hope of recovery, and this prediction was in all its points accomplished.

The shade of Romulus appeared to Julius Proculus, a patrician, foretelling the splendour of Rome. The fate of the battle of Philippi was shown to Brutus in his tent, by the evil spirit of Cæsar; and Cassius also saw the phantom of Julius on his horse, prepared to strike him, shortly before his suicide. In the Talmud we read of the announcement of the Rabbi Samuel’s death to two of his friends, six hundred miles off. Then, the host of legends in that ‘treasure-booke’ of mystery, “Wanley’s Wonders;” the visions of Dion; of Alexander; of Crescentius; of the Pope’s legate at the Council of Trent; of Cassius Severus of Parma; and myriads of analogies to these; nay, may we not believe that the Grecian bards wrote fragments of real history, when Patroclus foretels the death of Hector, Hector that of Achilles, and Mezentius of Orodes, or when Œdipus predicts the lofty fate of his family to Theseus?

But leave we the olden classics for the proofs of later ages. In the pine-forests of Germany, and in wild Caledonia, the legends of spirits and shadows abound in the gossip of the old crones, both in the hut of the jager and the sheiling of the Highland peasant.

The Taisch (like the Bodach Glas of Fergus Mac Ivor,) murmurs the prophecy of death, in the voice of the Taishtar, to one about to die; and the Wraith, Swarth, Waft, or Death-Fetch, appears in the Eidōlon, or likeness, of the person so early doomed, to some loved friend of the party, or sounds of wailing and prophetic voices scream and murmur in the mountain-blast. The wild romances of Ossian, and the shadowy mysteries so brightly illustrated in the poesy of the “Lay,” the “Lady of the Lake,” and “Marmion,” prove how deeply the common mind of Scotland leans to her mysteries; how devoutly her seers foretell a doom. The evidence of Martin, the historian of the Western Isles, is clear and decisive testimony of the possession of a faculty of foresight; and in the reflecting minds of many sages, who seek not to explain it by the term coincidence, or to impute the vision to mere national superstition. Indeed, in their records we have rules noted down, by which the seer may overcome the imperfections of his vision. If this be filmy or indistinct, the cloak or plaid must be turned, and the sight is clear; but then the fated seer is often presented with his own wraith.

In Aubrey’s “Miscellanies” we read how Sir Richard Napier, immediately before his death, was journeying from Bedfordshire to Berks, and saw his own apparition lying stark and stiff on the bed; how Lady Diana Rich, the Earl of Holland’s daughter, was met by her death-fetch in the garden at Kensington, a month ere she died of small-pox;—and listen to this legend of Aventine.

“The emperor Henry went down through the Strudel: in another vessel was Bruno, bishop of Wurtzberg, the emperor’s kinsman. There sat upon a rock, that projected out of the water, a man blacker than a Moor, of a horrible aspect, terrible to all who beheld it, who cried out, and said to Bishop Bruno, ‘Hear! hear! Bishop: I am thine evil spirit; thou art mine own; go where thou wilt, thou shalt be mine: yet, now will I do nought to thee, but soon shalt thou see me again.’ The bishop crossed and blessed himself; but the holy sign was powerless. At Posenbeis, where dwelt the Lady Richlita of Ebersberg, the floor of the banqueting-room fell, in the evening: it was the death-fall of the bishop.”

As the protector Seymour was walking with his duchess, at their country seat, they perceived a spectral bloody hand thrust forth from a wall; and he was soon after beheaded.

It is recorded, that, like Julius Cæsar, James of Scotland had three warnings. The saintly man in Lithgow palace, and another phantom, in Jedburgh, warned King James of his fate: the latter wrote a Latin couplet on the mantel-piece in the hall: had he read it wisely, he had not died at Flodden.

The demon, or the guardian angel of Socrates, was also a prophetic mentor—not only to the sage himself, but even to his companions in his presence; and the slighting of its counsel often brought regret to those who were the subjects of its warning.

In the minds of Xenophon and Plato its influence was devoutly believed, and from the hive of the Attic bee I steal this honied morsel:—“One Timarchus, a noble Athenian, being at dinner in company with Socrates, he rose up to go away, which Socrates observing, bade him sit down again, for, said he, the demon has just now given me the accustomed sign. Some little time after, Timarchus offered again to be gone, and Socrates once more stopped him, saying, he had the same sign repeated to him. At length, when Socrates was earnest in discourse, and did not mind him, Timarchus stole away; and, in a few minutes after, committed a murder, for which, being carried to execution, his last words were, ‘That he had come to that untimely end for not obeying the demon of Socrates.’ ”

When Ben Jonson was sojourning at Hawthornden, he told Mr. Drummond of his own prophetic vision, that, “about the time of the plague in London, being in the country at Sir Robert Cotton’s house, with old Camden, he saw, in a vision, his eldest son, then a young child, and at London, appear unto him, with the mark of a bloody cross on his forehead, as if it had been cut with a sword; at which, amazed, he prayed unto God; and in the morning, he came to Mr. Camden’s chamber, to tell him, who persuaded him it was but an apprehension, at which he should not be dejected. In the mean time, there came letters from his wife, of the death of that boy in the plague. He appeared to him of a manly shape, and of that growth he thinks he shall be at the resurrection.”

From Walton’s Lives I select the following fragment: it is a vision of Doctor Donne, the metaphysician, whose wife died after the birth of a dead child. “Sir Robert (Drury) returned about an hour afterwards. He found his friend in a state of extasy, and so altered in his countenance, that he could not look upon him without amazement. The doctor was not able for some time to answer the question, what had befallen him; but, after a long and perplexed pause, at last said, ‘I have seen a dreadful vision since I last saw you. I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms: this I have seen since I saw you.’ To which Sir Robert answered, ‘Sure, Sir, you have slept since I went out, and this is the result of some melancholy dream, which I desire you to forget, for you are now awake.’ Donne replied, ‘I cannot be more sure that I now live, than that I have not slept since I saw you; and am as sure, that at her second appearing, she stopped, looked me in the face, and vanished.’ ”

There was a promise by Lord Tyrone to Lady Beresford of a visitation from the tomb. Even when the phantom appeared to her in the night, the lady expressed her diffidence in its reality, but it placed a mark upon her wrist, and adjusted her bed-curtains in some supernatural fashion, and even wrote something in her pocket-book: so that with earnestness she related to her husband in the morning this impressive vision; and it was not long ere missives came, which by announcing the death of Lord Tyrone proved the spectre prophetic.

The tragedian John Palmer died on the stage at Liverpool. At the same hour and minute, a shopman in London, sleeping under a counter, saw distinctly his shade glide through the shop, open the door, and pop into the street. This, an hour or two after, he mentioned very coolly, as if Mr. Palmer himself had been there.

Cardan saw, on the ring-finger of his right hand, the mark of a bloody sword, and heard at the same time a voice which bade him go directly to Milan. The redness progressively increased until midnight: the mark then faded gradually, and disappeared. At that midnight hour his son was beheaded at Milan.

It was told by Knowles, the governor of Lord Roscommon when a boy, that young Wentworth Dillon was one day seized with a mood of the wildest eccentricity, contrary to his usual disposition. On a sudden he exclaimed, “My father is dead!” And soon after missives came from Ireland to announce the fact.

The father of Doctor Blomberg, clerk of the closet to George IV., was captain in an army serving in America. We are told by Doctor Rudge, that six officers, three hundred miles from his position, were visited after dinner by this modern Banquo, who sat down in a vacant chair. One said to him, “Blomberg, are you mad?” He rose in silence, and slowly glided out at the door. He was slain on that day and hour.

In the “Diary of a Physician” (an embellished record of facts), we read the story of the spectre-smitten Mr. M——, whose leisure hours were passed in the perusal of legends of diablerie and witchcraft. One evening, when his brain was excited by champagne, he returned to his rooms, and saw a dear friend in his chair; and this friend had died suddenly, and was at that moment laid out in his chamber;—a combination of horrors so unexpected and intense, that monomania was the result.

May I also recount to you this vision from Moore’s Life of Byron? “Lord Byron used sometimes to mention a strange story which the commander of the packet, Captain Kidd, related to him on the passage. This officer stated, that being asleep one night in his berth, he was awakened by the pressure of something heavy on his limbs, and, there being a faint light in the room, could see as he thought distinctly the figure of his brother, who was at that time in the same service in the East Indies, dressed in his uniform, and stretched across the bed. Concluding it to be an illusion of the senses, he shut his eyes and made an effort to sleep. But still the same pressure continued, and still as often as he ventured to take another look, he saw the figure lying across him in the same position. To add to the wonder, on pulling his hand forth to touch this form, he found the uniform, in which it appeared to be dressed, dripping wet. On the entrance of one of his brother officers, to whom he called out in alarm, the apparition vanished; but in a few months after, he received the startling intelligence, that on that night his brother had been drowned in the Indian seas. Of the supernatural character of this appearance Captain Kidd himself did not appear to have the slightest doubt.”

From Dr. Pritchard, I quote this fragment:—“A maid-servant, who lived in the house of an elderly lady, some years since deceased, had risen, early on a winter’s morning, and was employed in washing by candle-light the entry of the house; when she was greatly surprised at seeing her mistress, who was then in a precarious state of health, coming down stairs in her night dress. The passage being narrow, she rose up to let her mistress pass, which the latter did with a hasty step, and walked into the street, appearing, to the terrified imagination of the girl, to pass through the door without opening it. The servant related the circumstance to the son and daughter of the lady, as soon as they came down stairs, who desired her to conceal it from their mother, and anxiously waited for her appearance. The old lady entered the room, while they were talking of the incident, but appeared languid and unwell, and complained of having been disturbed by an alarming dream. She had dreamed that a dog had pursued her from her chamber down the staircase, and along the entry, and that she was obliged to take refuge in the streets.”

In the manuscripts of Lady Fanshawe, how evident is the fact of spectral prophecy! Sir Richard Fanshawe and his lady were sleeping in a baronial castle in Ireland, surrounded by a moat. At midnight she was awoke by a ghostly and fearful screaming; and, gleaming before the window in the pale moonlight, a female spectre hovered, her light auburn hair dishevelled over her shoulders. While the lady looked in mute astonishment, the spectre vanished, uttering two distinct shrieks. Her terrific story was told in the morning to her host, who evinced no wonder at the mystery, “Indeed,” quoth he, “I expected this. This was the prophetic phantom of our house, the spectre of a lady wedded to an ancestor, and drowned by him in the moat from false notions of dignity, because she was not of noble blood. Since this expiation, the phantom appears before every death of my near relations, and one of these died last night in my castle.”—Here may be the prototype of the “White Lady of Avenel.”

Among the most exalted families we have other confident records of the recurrence of prophetic phantoms, antecedent to great events. A spectre of this kind formed a part of the household establishment of the Macleans. During the peninsular war, at the moment that the head of the clan died at Lisbon, this wraith was seen to ride screaming along the shore in Scotland.

Arise Evans, in a 12mo. tract, “sold at his house in Long Alley in Blackfriars in 1653,” entitled “An Echo from Heaven,” foretold the restoration of Charles II.; and his true prophecy was based on the vision of a young face with a crown on, appearing after the shades of Fairfax and of Cromwell.

There is an incident in Roman history so impressive in its catastrophe, so exact in its periods, that few, I think, will deny the inspiration. At the moment that Stephanus stabbed Domitian in his palace at Rome, the philosopher Apollonius Tyaneus, in his school at Ephesus, exclaimed: “Courage, Stephanus! strike the tyrant home!” and a minute after, when Parthenius completed this homicide, he added, “he suffers for his crimes—he dies.”

I have slightly sketched these illustrations, and I presume to term them prophecies. There are others so complex, yet so complete in every part, as to convert, I might hope, even the unbelief of Evelyn. To the relations of Sir Walter and Dr. Abercrombie, I will add one from Moreton, in his “Essay on Apparitions:” “The Reverend D. Scott, of Broad Street, was sitting alone in his study. On a sudden the phantom of an old gentleman, dressed in a black velvet gown, and full bottom wig, entered, and sat himself down in a chair opposite to the doctor. The visitor informed him of a dilemma in which his grandson, who lived in the west country, was placed, by the suit of his nephew for the recovery of an estate. This suit would be successful, unless a deed of conveyance was found, which had been hidden in an old chest in a loft of the house. On his arrival at this house, he learned that his grandson had dreamed of this visit, and that his grandfather was coming to aid him in the search. The deed was found in a false bottom of the old chest, as the vision had promised.”

In a letter of Philip, the second Earl of Chesterfield, is told the following strange story, which, although not a prophecy, cannot be within the pale of our philosophy. “On a morning in 1652, the earl saw a thing in white, like a standing sheet, within a yard of his bedside. He attempted to catch it, but it slid to the foot of the bed, and he saw it no more. His thoughts turned to his lady, who was then at Networth, with her father, the Earl of Northumberland. On his arrival at Networth, a footman met him on the stairs, with a packet directed to him from his wife, whom he found with Lady Essex her sister, and Mrs. Ramsey. He was asked why he returned so suddenly. He told his motive; and on perusing the letters in the packet, he found that his lady had written to him requesting his return, for she had seen a thing in white, with a black face, by her bedside. These apparitions were seen by the earl and countess, at the same moment, when they were forty miles asunder.”

The miraculous spirit which the influence of Joan of Arc infused into the desponding hearts of the French army, is writ on the page of history. Before her proposition for the inauguration of Charles VII. at Rheims, she heard a celestial voice in her prayer, “Fille, va, va! je seray à ton ayde—va!” and her revelation of secrets to the king, which he thought were locked within his own bosom, raised in the court implicit belief in her inspiration.

And now, Evelyn, I ask you,

“Can such things be,

And overcome us like a summer cloud,

Without our special wonder?”——

Ere you smile at my phantasie, and overwhelm me with doubts and solutions, I pr’ythee let me counsel your philosophy. Dig to a certain depth in the field of science, and you may find the roots and the gold dust of knowledge: penetrate deeper, and you will strike against the granite rock, on which rest the cold and profitless reasonings of the sceptic.

Cast. You look on me, Astrophel, as on a bending proselyte. Yet, sooth to tell, it may be difficult to convert me, although I am half won to romance already by the witch-thoughts of him who gilded the science of the heart and mind, with all the iridescent charm of poesy; an unprofessing philosopher, yet with marvellous insight of human hearts,—my own loved Shakspere. And you listen to my Lord Lyttelton, he will tell you, in his “Dialogues of the Dead,” that “in the annihilation of our globe, were Shakspere’s works preserved, the whole science of man’s nature might still be read therein.” And so beautifully are his sketches of the heart and the fancy blended withal, that we hang with equal delight on the mystic philosophy of Hamlet, the witchcraft of Mab, and Ariel, and Oberon, with their golden wreaths of gay blossoms, as on the dying visions of Katherine, as pure and holy as the vesper-breathings of a novice. Yet the shade of superstition never darkened the brow of Shakspere. Therefore, plume not yourself on your hope of conquest, Astrophel: Evelyn may win me yet. Philosophy may frown on the visions of an enthusiast, while she doth grace her pages with a poet’s dream. But you will not wear the willow, Astrophel: there is a beam of pity for you in the eyes of yon pensive Ida.

Ida. You are a witch, Castaly. Yet I have as little faith in the quaint stories of Astrophel. A mystery must be purified and chastened by sacred solemnity, ere it may be blended with the contemplation of holy study. And yet there is an arch voluptuary, Boccacio, the coryphæus of a loose band of novelists, who has stained a volume by his profane union of holiness and passion. The scenes of his Decameron are played amidst the raging of the plague, by flaunting youths and maidens, but that moment arisen from the solemnity of a cathedral prayer!

Astr. You will call up the shade of Valdarfar, Ida, that idol of the Roxburghe club, and printer of the Decameron ——

Ida. If he appear, he shall vanish at a word, Astrophel. Yet we may not lightly yield the influence of special visitations, even in our own days, when solemn belief is chastened by holy motives, and becomes the spring of living waters. Even the taint of superstition may be almost sanctified on such a plea; and Baxter may be forgiven half his credulity when he wrote his “Saints’ Rest,” and the “Essay on Apparitions,” to convert the sceptics of London, who, in the dearth of signs and wonders, expressed their willingness to believe the soul’s immortality, if they had proofs of ghostly visitations.

I will myself even quote a mystery, (I believe recorded in Sandys’s Ovid,) for the sake of the moral which it bears. It is the legend of “The Room of the Ladyes Figure:” whether it be a tale of Bavaria, or a mere paraphrase from the Saxon Sabinus, I know not.

This is the story of Otto, a Bavarian gentleman, of passionate nature, mourning for his wife. On one of his visits to her tomb, a mournful voice, which murmured, “A blessed evening, sir!” came o’er his ear; and while his eyes fell on the form of a young chorister, he placed a letter in his hands, and vanished. His wonder was extreme, while he read this mysterious despatch, which was addressed “To my dear husband, who sorrows for his wife,” and signed, “This, with a warm hand, from the living Bertha,” and appointing an interview in the public walk. Thither, on a beautiful evening, sped the Bavarian, and there, among the crowd, sat a lady covered by a veil. With a trembling voice he whispered “Bertha,” when she arose, and, with her warm and living arm on his, returned to his once desolate home. There were odd thoughts, surmises, and wonderings, passing among the friends of Otto, and suspicions of a mock funeral and a solemn cheat; but all subsided as time stole over, and their wedded life was without a cloud: until a paroxysm of his rage one fatal day was vented on the lady, who cried, “This to me! what if the world knew all!”—with this broken sentence she vanished from the room. In her chamber, whither the search led, erect, as it were gazing on the fire, her form stood; but when they looked on it in front, there was a headless hood, and the clothes were standing as if enveloping a form, but no body was there! Need I say, that a thrill of horror crept through all at the mystery, and a fear at the approach of Otto, who, though deeply penitent, was deserted by all but a graceless reprobate, his companion, and his almoner to many a stranger, who knew not the unhallowed source of bounty?

That belief cannot be an error, which associates divine thoughts with the events of human life. I remember, as I was roaming over the wild region of Snowdonia, we sat above the valley and the lakes of Nant Gwinant, on which the red ridge of Clwd Coch threw a broad and purple shadow, while over Moel Elion and Myneth Mawr, the sun was bathed in a flood of crimson light. The Welsh guide was looking down in deep thought on Llyn Gwinant; and, with a tear in his eye, he told us a pathetic story of two young pedestrians, who were benighted among the mountains, on their ascent from Beddgelert. They had parted company in the gloom of the evening, and each was alone in a desert. On a sudden, the voice of one of them was distinctly heard by the other, in the direction of the gorge which bounds the pass of Llanberis, as if encouraging him to proceed. The wanderer followed its sound, and at length escaped from this labyrinth of rocks, and arrived safely at Capel Currig. In the morning, his friend’s body was found lying far behind the spot where the phantom voice was first heard, and away from the course of their route. Was this a special spirit, a solemn instance of friendship after death, as if the phantom had been endowed with supernatural power, and become the guardian angel of his friend; or the special whisper of the Deity in the ear of the living? A belief in this spiritual visitation is often the consolation of pure Christianity, for “the shadow of God is light!” With some the hope of heaven rests on it; and holy men have thought, that the presence of a spirit may even sanctify the being which it approaches with an emanation of its own holiness. Nay, do we not witness a blessing like this in the common walks of life; as in that beautiful story (told by the Bishop of Gloucester) of the vision of her dead mother, by the daughter of Sir James Lee, in 1662?

Is not the effect of these visitations, to a chastened mind, ever fraught with good? It may be merely a wisdom or a virtue in decision; as when my Lord Herbert, of Cherbury, prayed to God to declare whether he should publish his book “De Veritate;” he heard a gentle voice from heaven, which answered his prayer, with a solemn approval of his design. It may be the checking of our pride of life, or our self-glory for success; a divine lesson that may counsel us against worldly wisdom, in this golden precept, “Seek to be admired by angels rather than by men.” So that complete conversion may follow the vision of a spirit. Doddridge has given us the stories of Colonel Gardiner and the Rev. Vincent Perronet; and in the “Baronii Annales” we read of Ticinus, a departed friend of Michael Mercator, then a profane student in philosophy, who, according to a preconcerted promise, appeared to him at the moment that he died, afar off in Florence. The vision so alarmed his conscience, that he at once became a devout student in divinity.

In the city of Nantes, as we see it written by William of Malmsbury, in the twelfth century, dwelt two young ecclesiastics. Between them was a solemn compact, that within thirty days after the death of either, his shade should appear, sleeping or waking, to the survivor, to declare if the true psychology was the doctrine of Plato, or of the Epicureans; if the soul survived the body, or vanished into air. The shade appeared like one dying, while the spirit passeth away; and discoursing, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, of the pains of infernal punishments, stretched forth his ulcerous arm, and asked if “it seemed as light;” then, dropping the caustic humour from his arm on the temples of the living witness, which were corroded by the drop, he warned him of the same penalties if he entered not into holy orders, in the city of Rennes. This solemn warning worked his conversion, and he became a pious and exemplary devotee, under the holy wings of Saint Melanius.

In these instances, is not the special influence of the Deity evident? and why will our profane wisdom still draw us from our leaning to this holy creed, causing us to “forsake the fountains of living water, and hew out unto ourselves broken cisterns that can hold no water?”

How awfully beautiful is the Mosaic picture of the first mortal communion with the Creator, when the vision of God was heard by Adam and Eve, walking in the garden in the cool of the day; or, when the Deity appeared to Abraham and to Moses, and his word came to Manoah, and to Noah, with the blessings of a promise; or, when his angels of light descended to console, and to relieve from chains and from fire; or, when the angel of the Lord first appears in the vision to Cornelius; and the trance, or rather the counterpart of the vision, comes over St. Peter, at Joppa; and the arrival of the men, sent by the centurion, confirms the miracle: and then, the last sublime revealings of the Apocalypse. You will not call it presumption, Evelyn, that I adduce these holy records to confirm our modern faith; and ask you, why philosophy will yet chain our thoughts to earth, and affirm our visions to be a meaningless phantasy?

ILLUSION OF SPECTRES.

“More strange than true. I never may believe

These antique fables.”

Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Ev. Your holy thoughts, fair Ida, are but an echo of my own. The grand causes and awful judgments of the inspired æras of the world prove the truth by the necessity of the miracles, not only in answer to the Pharisees and Sadducees, who required a sign, but even before the eyes of the early disciples, whose apathetic hearts soon forgot the miracles, and their divine Master himself; for, as he was walking on the sea, “at the fourth watch, they thought he was a spirit.”

I would fain, however, adopt the precept of Lord Bacon, to waive theology in my discussions and my illustrations, because I am unwilling to blend the sacred truths of spiritual futurity with arguments on the imperfection of material existence.

In the abstract spiritual evidence of all modern superstition, I have little faith. These records are scarcely more to be confided in than fairy tales, or fictions like those of many antique sages: as the rabbins, that “the cherubim are the wisest, the seraphim the most amiable, of angels;” or of the visionary Jew of Burgundy, whom, in 1641, John Evelyn spoke with in Holland,—“He told me that, when the Messias came, all the ships, barkes, and vessels of Holland should, by the powere of certaine strange whirle winds, be loosed from their ankers, to convey their brethren and tribes to the holy citty.” Or even that of Melancthon, that his sable majesty once appeared to his own aunt in the shape of her husband, and grasping her hand, so scorched and shrivelled it, that it remained black ever after. These are fair samples of credulity.

You will call me presumptuous, but, believe me, Astrophel, it is superstition which is presumptuous and positive, and not philosophy; for credulity believes on profane tradition, or the mere assertion of a mortal. But the glory of philosophy is humility; for they who, like Newton, and Playfair, and Wollaston, and Davy, look deeply into the wonder and beauty of creation, will be ever humbled by the contemplation of their own being,—an atom of the universe. A philosopher cannot be proud; for, like Socrates, he confesses his ignorance, because he is ever searching for truth. He cannot be a sceptic; for when he has dived into the deeps of science, his thoughts will ascend the more toward the Deity: he has grasped all that science can afford him, and there is nothing left for his mighty mind but divine things and holy hopes. Philosophy is not confident either, because she ever waits for more experience and more weight of testimony.

How often, Astrophel, must we be deceived, like children, by distance, until experience teaches us truth. By this we know that the turrets of distant towers are high, yet they dwindle in our sight to the mere vanishing point, as the child believes them. Such is the power of demonstration.

The ancient polytheists could not be other than idolaters and believers in prophecy. The rabbins were schooled, in addition to the books of Moses, in those of Zoroaster, in the Talmud, which was the magic volume of the Jews, and the Takurni, or Persian Almanac, the annual expositor of natural and judicial astrology in the clime of the sun.

The sages who lived immediately after the light of Christianity had been shed over the Holy Land, had not forgotten the miracles wrought in the holy city; but they profaned Omnipotence by making them purposeless.

Superstition then formed a part of the national creed: even a mere word, as “Epidamnum,” they dreaded to pronounce, as it was of such awful import; and credulity and blind faith in the prophetic truth of omens and oracles prevailed. We read in Montfaucon, that twelve hundred believed in this miracle of Virgil:

“Captus a Romanis invisibiliter exiit, ivitque Neapolim:”

that he rendered himself invisible to the Romans and escaped to Naples. The influence of this blind infatuation was the spring of many actions, which, like the daring of the Indian fatalist in battle, were vaunted as deeds of heroic self-martyrdom.

Marcus Curtius, the trembling of the earth having opened a chasm in the Roman forum, leaped into it on horseback, when the soothsayers declared it would not close until the most valuable thing in the city was flung into it. And the two Decii offered themselves as the willing sacrifice, to ensure a victory for their country,—one in the war with the Latins, the other in that of the Etrurians and Umbrians.

Aristotle and Galen were exceptions. It is true, that Socrates believed himself under the influence of a demon, a sort of delegate from the Deity,—indeed, that God willed his death; for when his friend pressed him on his trial to compose his defence, he answered thus:—“The truth is, I was twice going about to make my apology, but was twice withheld by my demon.” But remember, Astrophel, the Greek word which the philosopher employed, τò δαιμóνιον, and you will rather confess that it implies the Deity, as if some divine inspiration taught him; or perchance, as some of his commentators believe, this invisible monitor was merely the impersonation of the faculty of judgment, and of that deep knowledge and forethought with which his mind was fraught.

Cicero, too, is said to have written arguments to prove the divine origin of the oracle of Delphi; but it is well believed by classics, that Addison has, in his letter in the Spectator, mistaken Cicero for Cato.

Recollect, Astrophel, this is an old point with us, when we were reading the subject of Auguries, in his book, “De Divinatione,” in which he wonders “that one soothsayer can look another in the face without laughing;” and you remember Lucian ridicules ghost-seeing as the whim of imagination. You have cited Pliny. True,—Pliny is an interesting story-teller; although he warps somewhat the phantoms of his dreams. But what is the first sentence of his letter to Sura?—“I am very desirous to know your opinion concerning spectres; whether you believe them to have a real existence, and are a sort of divinities, or are only the visionary impressions of a terrified imagination.”

And what did Johnson confess?—That “this is a question, which, after five thousand years, is still undecided; a question, whether in theology or philosophy, one of the most important that can come before the human understanding.” So you see the vaunted creed of Johnson was at least like the coffin of Mahomet, poised between the affirmative and negative of the proposition. The sage was a strict spiritualist, and, as Boswell says, “wished for more evidence of spirit in opposition to materialism.” On some points he was also mighty superstitious, and constantly affirmed his conviction that he should himself run mad. This augury failed, and therefore the prophetic nature of second sight needs more convincing proof than the creed of Johnson.—In his own words, “Foresight is not prescience.”

As to the second sight of Caledon, he confesses that, although in his journey he searched diligently, he saw but one seer, and he was grossly ignorant, as indeed they usually are. “He came away only willing to believe;” the learned and literary even in the far Hebrides, especially the clergy, being altogether sceptics.

In the consideration of this question in the study of psychology, it has been an error to conclude that, because in some certain works arguments are adduced by imaginary characters, in support of the appearance of departed spirits: such was the positive belief of their authors. If then, for instance, the arguments of Imlac, in Rasselas, which aim at the proof of spectral reality, or rather the appearance of departed beings, be adduced as an evidence of Johnson’s own belief, I might observe that it were equally rational to identify the minds or dispositions of Massinger and Sir Giles Overreach,—of Shakspere and Iago.

Like the Catholic priesthood, who rule the ignorant by the force of superstition, leaders have been induced to profess the possession of this faculty, to overawe their proselytes by their own deeper knowledge; as Numa vaunted his intimacy with the nymph Egeria at her fountain.

For this purpose, even the Corsican general, Pascal Paoli, assumed the profession of a seer, and the mystery of his prescience was on the lips of every Corsican. When Boswell asked, if the fulfilments of his prophecies were frequent, a Corsican grasped a bundle of his hair, and whispered, “Tante, tante, signore!”

But I will not play the dullard, Astrophel, while you, with your legendary romance, charm the listening ears of ladyes fayre. I will have my turn of story-telling, (avoiding the myriads of queer tales, told by superstitious and unlettered visionaries, on the look out for marvels, by servant maids and rustics, and silly people, the chief actors in ghost stories). And therefore, in the face of these negative conclusions, even of Johnson, hear one unparalleled story, culled from the rich treasury of Master Aubrey’s “Miscellanies.” It was of an earl of Caithness, who, desirous of ascertaining the distance of a vessel which was laden with wine for his cellars, proposed a question to a seer. The answer was, “At the distance of four hour’s sail.” It may be some doubt was expressed of the truth of this oracle; for, to prove his gift of clairvoyance, he laid before the earl the cap of a seaman in the ship, which he had that moment taken off his head. The vessel duly arrived, and lo! a sailor claimed the cap in the seer’s hand, affirming that, four hours before, it had been blown from his head by the gale. Is not this the very acme of effrontery?

Carolan, the inspired bard of Erin, confessed he could not compose a planxty for a certain lady of Sligo, even when he made an effort to celebrate her wondrous beauty; and one day in despair he threw away his harp and fell into a lament, that some evil genius was hovering over him: from his harp strings, (in contrast with those of Anacreon,) he could sweep only a mournful music, and he thence prophesied, and that truly, the death of the lady within the year.

Dubuison, a dentist of Edinburgh, on the day preceding the death of President Blair, met him in the street, and was addressed by the president with a peculiar expression. On the day before the death of Lord Melville, the dentist was met by him exactly on the same spot, and accosted by my lord in the very same words. On the death of Lord Melville, Dubuison exclaimed that he should be the third. He became immediately indisposed, and died within an hour.

In the “Miscellanies” of Aubrey, we read, that John Evelyn related to the Royal Society the case of the curate of Deptford, Mr. Smith, who, in November, 1679, was sick of an ague. To this reverend clerk appeared the phantom of a master of arts, with a white wand in his hand, who promised that if he lay on his back three hours, from ten to one, his ague would leave him. And this prophecy was also to the very letter fulfilled.

Napoleon, when he was marching upon Acre, had a djerme, or Nile boat, with some of his troops, destroyed; the boat’s name was L’Italie; and from this he said, “Italy is lost to France.” And so it was.

During the siege of Jerusalem, for seven days a man paraded round the walls, exclaiming with a solemn voice, “Woe to Jerusalem!” and on the seventh day he added, “Woe to Jerusalem, and myself!” When, at the moment of this anathema, a missile from the enemy destroyed him.

Do you wonder that the prophecy of Monsieur Cazotte of his own decapitation, recorded in his “Œuvres de M. de la Harpe,” should have been fulfilled? for in 1788, when this prophecy was uttered, the guillotine was daily reeking with patrician blood; and the Duchess of Grammont, Vicq d’Azyr, Condorcet, and Cazotte himself, among a host of others, were dragged to the scaffold.

When dark events were overclouding Poland, to Sorvenski the warrior, a convert to magnetism, it was imparted in a vision, that Warsaw should be deluged in blood, and that he should fall in battle. In two years these forebodings were fulfilled.

It is known that Lord Falkland and Archbishop Williams both warned Charles I. of his fate; but it required no ghost to tell him that. And I have known many deeply interested in the fate of absent friends; and knowing their circumstances and locality, so prophesy, that they seemed to have all the faculty of clairvoyance. The young ladies of Britain, during the Peninsular war, were often dreaming of the apparitions of their lovers, perhaps at the hour of their expiring on the field of battle: coincidences that must make a deep impression on sensitive minds. Were I justified in divulging secrets and confessions, I might relate some curious stories of these inauspicious dreams.

At the moment of the duel between Mr. Pitt and Mr. Tierney, on Wimbledon Common, a lady of fashion in London exclaimed, “This is the important moment!”

Oliver Cromwell had reclined on his couch, and extreme fatigue forbad the coming on of sleep. On a sudden his curtains opened, and a gigantic female form imparted to him, that he should be the greatest man in England. The puritanical faith and ambition of Cromwell might have raised, during the distracted state of the kingdom, something even beyond this; and who may decide, if the spectre had whispered, “Thou shalt be king hereafter,” that the protector would have refused the crown, as, on the feast of Lupercal, it had been refused by Cæsar?

“General Oglethorpe,” writes Boswell, “told us that Prendergast, an officer in the Duke of Marlborough’s army, had mentioned to many of his friends, that he should die on a particular day. Upon that day a battle took place with the French; and after it was over, and Prendergast was still alive, his brother officers, while they were yet in the field, jestingly asked him, where was his prophecy now? Prendergast gravely answered, ‘I shall die, notwithstanding what you see.’ Soon afterwards there came a shot from a French battery, to which the orders for a cessation of arms had not yet reached, and he was killed upon the spot!”

But can these shallow stories be cited as prophecies? The links in the chain of causation are evident, and the veriest sceptic cannot doubt their sequence, where there was so strong a probability. It is merely by reflecting on the past and judging the future by analogy. Natural events of human actions have laws to govern them, and there is seldom foresight without the reflection on these laws. Lord Mansfield, when asked how the French revolution would end, replied, “It is an event without a precedent, and therefore without a prophecy.”

Astr. Then you do not believe, where you cannot develop the causes of events. Like all rational philosophers, you must have demonstrative proof. In which class of sceptics shall I enrol you, Evelyn?—As a proselyte of Aristotle, who will deny not only the existence of spirits, but affirm heaven and hell to be a fable, and that the world is self-existent: or with the Epicureans, who believed the impious doctrine of blind chance,—that the sun and stars were vapours, and the soul perishable; or with the modern lights of reason,—Sir Isaac Newton, who confessed the Paradise Lost to be a fine poem, though it proved nothing; or the Abbé Lauguerne, who, for the self-same reason, despised the brilliancy of Racine and Corneille; or with the Sadducees themselves, who denied both prophecy and spirit?

Ev. Perhaps the Sadducees might have referred visions to the right cause, for phantoms differ little from Locke’s “substance which thinks.” But the mere metaphysician blinks the question (as Lord Bacon does that of experimental chemistry,—“Vix unum experimentum adduci potest quod ad hominum statum levandum et juvandum spectat”); thus wofully depreciating the progress of chemical science, as if the discoveries of Wollaston, of Davy, of Dalton, and of Faraday were fruitless. Remember, modern philosophers are not like Xenophon, who (says Socrates) called all fools who differed from his opinion.

Even Baxter confesses the frequency of imposture in ghost stories, yet leans to the belief of all which he cannot account for.

Now if philosophy had not doubted, science would be stationary. We might still believe, with Heraclitus, that the sun was only a foot in breadth; or, with Copernicus, that it revolved in its orbit, while the earth was at rest. Remember, Astrophel, the way to the temple of Science is through the portals of doubt: it is a mark of weakness, “jurare in verba magistri.” Even the prince philosopher of Denmark doubted the prophetic truth of his father’s ghost on its mere appearance—(“The spirit I have seen may be a devil,”)—until the scene of the play, and the stricken conscience of the king, and then only, he believed that “it was an honest ghost.”

“It is true,” as Lord Chesterfield wrote in 1653, “I know that God can make any such things to appear, but because he can, therefore to conclude that he doth, is ill argued: and though divers books are full of such stories, yet the soberest sort of men in all ages have doubted the truth of them.” I might add to these the visions which have been so strangely warped to interpret a subsequent event. Those of William Rufus, and Innocent the Fourth, and Henry the Second of France, and a thousand others from ancient history, between the assumed prophecy and fulfilment of which, there is about as much truth as when Lady Seymour dreamt of having found a nest of nine finches, and soon after was married to Finch, Earl of Winchelsea, and was blessed with a brood of nine children.

With the coincidences of life we have all been struck; the ignorant and timid and superstitious among us with wonder: but how comparatively trivial are these tiny drops in the wide ocean of events, and what myriads of dreams and visions from which there are no results!

A simple incident occurred to me in the autumn of last year, which was so complete in its association as to be for a moment startling to myself.

Influenced by a sort of veneration for the memory of the good Gilbert White of Selborne, I made a pilgrimage to that calm and rustic village, so exquisitely embosomed among green meads, and beech-crowned chalk hills, and forests embrowned with heath and fern.

On my entrance to the village, I was reflecting on the “idiot boy” who fed on honey which he pressed from the bees he caught, when lo! at the first door a figure, which grinned at me, and mowed and muttered, but without the slightest verbal utterance. He was an idiot, but not White’s idiot; yet a visionary mind might readily for a moment believe it to be a phantom of the foolish boy, immortalized, as it were, in the “Natural History of Selborne.”

There was an imposing occurrence also, during the funeral procession of Sir Walter Scott to Dryburgh. A halt took place for many minutes (in consequence of an accident) precisely on the summit of the hill at Bemerside, where a beautiful prospect opens, to contemplate which, Sir Walter was ever wont to rein up his horse.

“In 1811,” writes Lord Byron in a letter to Mr. Murray, “my old school and form fellow Peel, the Irish secretary, told me he saw me in St. James’s Street; I was then in Turkey. A day or two afterwards he pointed out to his brother a person across the way, and said, ‘There is the man I took for Byron:’ his brother answered, ‘Why, it is Byron, and no one else.’ I was at this time seen to write my name in the Palace Book. I was then ill of a malaria fever. If I had died, here would have been a ghost story.”

While Lord Byron was at Colonna, his dervish Tahiri, as we read in his notes to the “Giaour,” who professed the faculty of second hearing, prophesied an attack of the Mainotes as they passed a certain perilous defile, but nothing came of it: the attack was not made; and it is probable that some ringing in the ears of the dervish, and a knowledge that the defile was a haunt of brigands, were the springs of this notion.

And there are events, too, which have all the intensity of romance and seem involved in the deepest mystery, and which, like Washington Irving’s tale of the “Spectre Bridegroom,” assume all the air of the supernatural, until the enigma is solved, and then we cry, “How clear the solution!”

Among the myriads of explained mysteries in the north, I will cite that of the farmer of Teviotdale, who, in the gloom of evening, saw on the wall of a cemetery a pale form throwing about her arms, and mowing and chattering to the moon. With not a little terror he spurred his horse, but as he passed the phantom it dropped from its perch, and, like Tam o’ Shanter’s Nannie, fixing itself on the croup, clasped him tightly round the waist with arms of icy coldness. He arrived at home; with a thrill of horror exclaimed, “Tak aff the ghaist!” and was carried shivering to bed. And what was the phantom? A maniac widow, on her distracted pilgrimage to the grave of her husband, for whom she had indeed mistaken the ill-fated farmer.

The president of a literary club at Plymouth being very ill during its session, the chair out of respect was left vacant. While they were sitting, his apparition, in a white dress, glided in and took formal possession of the chair. His face was “wan like the cauliflower;” he bowed in silence to the company, carried his empty glass to his lips, and solemnly retired. They went to his house, and learned that he had just expired! The strange event was kept a profound secret, until the nurse confessed on her death-bed that she had fallen asleep, that the patient had stolen out, and, having the pass-key of the garden, had returned to his bed by a short path before the deputation, and had died a few seconds after.

In the records of his life, by Taylor, we read of a trick of the great actor, who, like Brinsley Sheridan, had an inkling for practical jokes. It was on a professional visit of Dr. Moncey. “Garrick was announced for King Lear on that night, and when Moncey saw him in bed he expressed his surprise, and asked him if the play was to be changed. Garrick was dressed, but had his night-cap on, and the quilt was drawn over him to give him the appearance of being too ill to rise. Dr. M. expressed his surprise, as it was time for Garrick to be at the theatre to dress for King Lear. Garrick, in a languid and whining tone, told him that he was too much indisposed to perform himself, but that there was an actor named Marr, so like him in figure, face, and voice, and so admirable a mimic, that he had ventured to trust the part to him, and was sure the audience would not perceive the difference. Pretending that he began to feel worse, he requested Moncey to leave the room in order that he might get a little sleep, but desired him to attend the theatre, and let him know the result. As soon as the Doctor quitted the room, Garrick jumped out of bed and hastened to the theatre. Moncey attended the performance. Having left Garrick in bed, he was bewildered by the scene before him, sometimes doubting and sometimes being astonished at the resemblance between Garrick and Marr. At length, finding that the audience were convinced of Garrick’s identity, Moncey began to suspect a trick had been practised upon him, and instantly hurried to Garrick’s house at the end of the play; but Garrick was too quick for him, and was found by Moncey in the same state of illness.” These are truths which are indeed stranger than fiction.

Were a miracle once authenticated, our scepticism might cease, but we cannot be convinced of supernatural agency till something be done or known which could not be so by common means, or which through the medium of deception or contrivance imposes on the mind such belief; of which impression Alston the painter once told Coleridge a melancholy story. ’Twas of a youth at Cambridge, who dressed himself up in white as a ghost to frighten his companion, having first drawn the bullets from pistols which he kept at the head of his bed. As the apparition glided by his bed, the youth laughed and cried out, “Vanish! I fear you not.” The ghost did not obey him, and at length he reached a pistol and fired at it, when, seeing the ghost immoveable and invulnerable as he supposed, a belief in a spirit instantly came over his mind, and convulsion succeeding, his extreme terror was soon followed by his death.

I have read (I believe in Clarendon), that the decapitation of Charles I. was augured (after death) from his coronation robes being of white velvet instead of purple; and this it was remembered was the colour of a victim’s death-garment; and in Blennerhasset’s history of James II., that the crown at his coronation tottered on his head, and at the same moment the royal arms fell from the altar of some London church. All this is too childish to be spoken of seriously, and reminds me of the General Montecuculi, who on some saint’s day had ordered bacon in his omelette. At the moment it was served, a peal of thunder shook his house, when he exclaimed, “Voilà bien du bruit pour une omelette!”

We wonder not to find Lily, into whose moth-eaten tomes I have sometimes peeped for amusement, prating thus of consequences. There is an old paper of his graced with “the effigies of Master Praise God Barebone,” where, among other judgments, the blindness of Milton is recorded as a penal infliction of the Deity, for “that he writ two books against the kings, and Salmasius his defence of kings.” But we do wonder at such a weakness in Sir Walter Raleigh, that he should thus write in his History of the World,—“The strangest thing I have read of in this kind being certainly true, was, that the night before the battle of Novara, all the dogs which followed the French army ran from them to the Switzers; and lo! next morning the Switzers were beaten by the French.”

And yet a greater wonder is, that so many solemn stories should have crept into our national legends, in which there is no truth: in which philosophers and divines have very innocently combined to bewilder us.

There is an assumed incident associated with a melancholy event in the noble family of Lansdowne, most illustrative of my observation. In the “Literary Recollections” of the Rev. Richard Warner, is recorded the interesting story of the apparition of Lord William Petty, at Bowood, related to Mr. Warner by the Rev. Joseph Townsend, rector of Pewsey in Wiltshire, and “confirmed by the dying declaration of Dr. Alsop, of Calne.”

It is affirmed that Lord William Petty, who was under the care of Dr. Priestley, the librarian, and the Rev. Mr. Jervis, his tutor, was attacked, at the age of seven, with inflammation of the lungs, for which Mr. Alsop was summoned to Bowood. After a few days, the young nobleman seemed to be out of danger; but, on a sudden relapse, the surgeon was again sent for in the evening.

“It was night before this gentleman reached Bowood but an unclouded moon showed every object in unequivocal distinctness. Mr. Alsop had passed through the lodge-gate, and was proceeding to the house, when, to his astonishment, he saw Lord William coming towards him, in all the buoyancy of childhood, restored apparently to health and vigour. ‘I am delighted, my dear lord,’ he exclaimed, ‘to see you, but, for Heaven’s sake, go immediately within doors,—it is death to you to be here at this time of night.’ The child made no reply, but, turning round, was quickly out of sight. Mr. Alsop, unspeakably surprised, hurried to the house. Here all was distress and confusion, for Lord William, had expired a few minutes before he reached the portico.

“This sad event being with all speed announced to the Marquis of Lansdowne, in London, orders were soon received at Bowood, for the interment of the corpse, and the arrangement of the funeral procession. The former was directed to take place at High Wickham, in the vault which contained the remains of Lord William’s mother; the latter was appointed to halt at two specified places, during the two nights on which it would be on the road. Mr. Jervis and Dr. Priestley attended the body. On the first day of the melancholy journey, the latter gentleman, who had hitherto said little on the subject of the appearance to Mr. Alsop, suddenly addressed his companion with considerable emotion in nearly these words: ‘There are some very singular circumstances connected with this event, Mr. Jervis, and a most remarkable coincidence between a dream of the late Lord William and our present mournful engagement. A few weeks ago, as I was passing by his room door one morning, he called me to his bedside,—‘Doctor,’ said he, ‘what is your Christian name?’ ‘Surely,’ said I, ‘you know it is Joseph.’ ‘Well, then,’ replied he, in a lively manner, ‘if you are a Joseph, you can interpret a dream for me, which I had last night. I dreamed, Doctor, that I set out upon a long journey; that I stopped the first night at Hungerford, whither I went without touching the ground; that I flew from thence to Salt Hill, where I remained the next night; and arrived at High Wickham on the third day, where my dear mamma, beautiful as an angel, stretched out her arms and caught me within them.’ ‘Now,’ continued the Doctor, ‘these are precisely the places where the dear child’s corpse will remain on this and the succeeding night, before we reach his mother’s vault, which is finally to receive it.’ ”

Now here is a tissue of events, as strange as they are circumstantial; and I might set myself to illustrate the apparition by the agitated state of Mr. Alsop’s mind, were it not for the utter fallacy of this mysterious story, on which the late Rev. Mr. Jervis, of Brompton, whom I knew and esteemed, deemed it essential to publish “Remarks,” in the year 1831. From these, you will learn that Mr. Warner is in error regarding the “address, designation, and age of the Hon. William Granville Petty, the nature and duration of his disorder, and the name of the place of interment.” And then it comes out that neither Dr. Priestley nor Mr. Jervis attended the funeral, nor conversed at any time on the circumstance. And, regarding Mr. Alsop’s death-bed declaration, Mr. Jervis, who was in his intimate confidence, never heard of such a thing until Mr. Warner’s volume was pointed out to him.

This strange story, believed by good and wise men, involved a seeming mystery, until we read in Mr. Jervis’s “Remarks,” one simple sentence in reference to the gentleman by whom it was first told,—that “the enthusiasm of his nature predisposed him to entertain some visionary and romantic notions of supernatural appearances.”

PHANTASY FROM MENTAL ASSOCIATION.

“This is the very coinage of your brain:

This bodiless creation, ecstacy

Is very cunning in.”

Hamlet.

Cast. How delightful to wander thus among the reliques of that age, when her citizens, the colonists of Britain, migrated from imperial Rome, and built their Venta Silurum, or Caerwent, from the ruins of which these now mouldering walls were formed. As we trod those pictured pavements of Caerwent beneath the blue sky of yesternoon, I felt all the inspiration of Astrophel, and a pageantry of Roman patricians seemed to sweep along the fragments of those painted tesselæ.

“Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain,

Our thoughts are link’d by many a hidden chain;

Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise,

Each stamps his image as the other flies.”

There is a happy combination of antiquity and simplicity in this land of Gwent. Almost within the shadow of the Roman Caerleon, the Monmouthshire peasants, at Easter and Whitsuntide, assemble to plant fresh flowers on the graves of their relatives. How I love these old customs! the chanting of the carol at Christmas; its very homeliness so redolent of love and friendship: and that quaint old Moresco dance which was introduced to England by the noble Katherine of Arragon. Then the pastimes of Halloween and Hogmanay in Scotland, and the Walpurgis night of Germany, and the May-day in Ireland, the festival of their patron saint, and the Midsummer night when the bealfires cast an universal lumination over the fells of the green isle, and the still more sacred fire, lighted up in November in worship of their social deity, Samhuin, whose potent influence charms the warm hearts of all the maids of Erin around the winter hearth of their homes. I listen unto these pleasures as if they were mine own: as children associate all the legends of their school histories with themselves and their own time.

In every spot of this land of Wales the very names of the olden time are before us: the romaunt of Prince Arthur and his knights is ever present to our fancy, for he hath, as on the crag that towers over Edinburgh, a seat on many a mountain rock in Wales; as the Cadair Arthur over Crickhowel, and the semicircle on Little Doward, and Maen Arthur on the moors of Cardigan.

Astr. I never look on scenes like this without the echo of that beautiful apostrophe of Johnson, among the ruins of Iona, whispering in my ear.

Inspired by such an influence, I have roamed over the Isle of Elephanta, and gazed on its gorgeous pagoda hewn from the rock, and adorned by gigantic statues and mysterious symbols of the same eternal granite: on the beauteous excavations of Salsette: on the wonders of Elora, and on the classic reliques of Persepolis: on the beautiful columns of Palmyra, the Tadmor in the wilderness, where Solomon built his “fenced city;” as well as those arabesque and gothic temples, the abbeys and cathedrals of our own island. I too have almost dared to think that superstition and idolatry might be forgiven for the splendours of its architecture, even for the elevation of those giant blocks of Stonehenge and Avebury, the mouldering altars of the druidical priesthood, in the city consecrated to their god.

So do I feel in this court-yard of Chepstow Castle, whilom the Est-brig-hoel of Doomsdaye Booke, and in later times so blended with English history. See you not the Conqueror and his knights in panoply on prancing steeds before you? See you not Fitz Osborne and Warren, its former lords, loom out upon your sight? And, lo! the portal opens, and the dungeon of Henry Martin, the regicide, yawns like a bottomless pit before us. The shade of Charles Stewart rises; and again the phantom of Cromwell, uttering his epithets of scorn, as if the wanton puritan were about to dash the ink in the face of his colleague as he signed the death-warrant of the king. And now the scene changes, and behold the doomed one is chained to those massive rings of iron, and there with groaning dies.

Ev. I am most willing that you should thus indulge in your wild rhapsody, Astrophel, for it is the happy illustration of one potent cause of spectral illusion—association. There are few whose minds are not excited in some degree when they tread the localities of interesting events. By memory and its combinations something like an inspired vision may often seem to come over us—a day-dream. Or, if we have been brooding over a subject or gazing on the relics of departed or absent love and friendship: or while we stand on a spot consecrated by genius, or when we have passed the scene of a murder, still will association fling around us its visionary shadows.

Shortly after the death of Maupertuis, the president of the Academy of Berlin, Mr. Gleditsch, the curator of natural history, was traversing the hall in solitude, when he saw the phantom of the president standing in an angle of the room with his eyes intensely fixed on him: an effect perfectly explicable by the association of intense impression of memory in the very arena of the president’s former dignity.

You will remember the story of a rich libertine, told by Sir Walter Scott. Whenever he was alone in his drawing-room, he was so haunted by a spectral corps de ballet, that the very furniture was, as it were, converted into phantoms. To release himself from this unwelcome intrusion he retired to his country house, and here, for a while, he obtained the quiet which he sought. But it chanced that the furniture of his town house was sent to him in the country, and on the instant that his eyes fell on his drawing-room chairs and tables, the illusion came afresh on his mind. By the influence of association the green figurantes came frisking and capering into his room, shouting in his unwilling ears, “Here we are! here we are!”

It is not, however, essential that there be substance at all to excite these spectres. Idea alone is sufficient.

Do you think it strange that a ghost should appear fleshless and shadowy without some supernatural influence? Be assured that the only influence exists in the sublime and intricate workings of that mind which in its pure state was itself an emanation from the Deity; which is only shadowed by illusion while in its earthly union with the brain, and which, on the dissolution of that brain, will again live uncombined, a changeless and eternal spirit.

It is as easy to believe the power of mind in conjuring up a spectre as in entertaining a simple thought: it is not strange that this thought may appear embodied, especially if the external senses be shut: if we think of a distant friend, do we not see a form in our mind’s eye, and if this idea be intensely defined, does it not become a phantom?

“Phantasma est sentiendi actus, neque differt a sensione aliter quam fieri differt a factum esse.”

“A phantom is an act of thinking,” &c.

You have dipped deeply into Hobbes, Astrophel, and will correct me if I misquote this philosopher of Malmsbury.

It was in Paris, at the soirée of Mons. Bellart, and a few days after the death of Marshal Ney, the servant, ushering in the Mareschal Aîné, announced Mons. Le Mareschal Ney. We were startled; and may I confess to you, that the eidōlon of the Prince of Moskwa was for a moment as perfect to my sight as reality?

Now it is as easy to imagine a fairy infinitely small as a giant infinitely large. Between an idea and a phantom, then, there is only a difference in degree; their essence is the same as between the simple and transient thought of a child, and the intense and beautiful ideas of a Shakspere, a Milton, or a Dante.

“Consider your own conceptions,” said Imlac, “you will find substance without extension. An ideal form is no less real than material, but yet it has no extension.”

You hear I adopt the word idea, as referring to the organ of vision, but sight is not the only sense subject to illusion. Hearing, taste, smell, touch, may be thus perverted, because the original impression was on the focus of all the senses, the brain.

Indeed, two of these illusions are often synchronous: as when a deep sepulchral voice is uttered by a thin filmy spectre, like the ghosts of Ossian, through which the moonbeams and the stars were seen to glimmer. But the illusion of the eye is by far the most common, and hence our adopted terms refer chiefly to the sight: as spectre, phantom, phantasm, apparition, eidōlon, ghost, shadow, shade.

The ghost then is nothing more than an intense idea. And as I have caught the mood of story-telling, listen to some analogies of those deep impressions on the mind which are the spring of all this phantasy.

That destructive brainworm, Demonomania, is often excited in the mind of a proselyte by designing religious fanatics. Let the life of the selected person be ever so virtuous and exemplary, she (for it is usually on the softer sex that these impostures are practised) becomes convinced of the influence of the demon over her, and she is thus criminally taught the necessity of conversion—is won over to the erroneous doctrine of capricious and unqualified election.

These miseries do not always spring from self-interested impostors. The parent and the nurse, in addition to the nursery tales of fairies and of genii, too often inspire the minds of children with these diabolical phantoms. The effect is always detrimental,—too often permanently destructive. I will quote one case from the fourth volume of the Psychological Magazine, related by a student of the university of Jena.—“A young girl, about nine or ten years old, had spent her birth-day with several companions of her own age, in all the gaiety of youthful amusement. Her parents were of a rigorous devout sect, and had filled the child’s head with a number of strange and horrid notions about the devil, hell, and eternal damnation. In the evening, as she was retiring to rest, the devil appeared to her, and threatened to devour her. She gave a loud shriek, fled to the apartment where her parents were, and fell down apparently dead at their feet. A physician was called in, and she began to recover herself in a few hours. She then related what had happened, adding, that she was sure she was to be damned. This accident was immediately followed by a severe and tedious nervous complaint.”

The ghost will not appear to tell us what will happen, but it may rise, and with awful solemnity too, to tell us that which has happened. Such is the phantom of remorse,—the shadow of conscience,—which is indeed a natural penalty: a crime that carries with it its own consecutive punishment. Were the lattice of Momus fixed in the bosom, that window through which the springs of passion could be seen, there would be, I fear, a dark spot on almost every heart,—as there is, to quote the Italian proverb, “a skeleton in every house.” Of these pangs of memory, the pages both of history and fiction are teeming. Not in the visions of sleep alone, but in the glare of noonday, the apparition of a victim comes upon the guilty mind, —

“As when a gryphon through the wilderness,

With winged course, o’er hill and moory dale,

Pursues the Arimaspian, who, by stealth,

Had from his wakeful custody purloined

The guarded gold.”

Brutus, and Richard Plantagenet, and Clarence, and Macbeth, and Manfred, and Lorenzo, and Wallace, and Marmion, are but the archetypes of a very numerous family in real life,—for Shakspere, and Byron, and Schiller, and Scott, have painted in high relief these portraits from the life.

Many a real Manfred has trembled as he called up the phantom of Astarte; many a modern Brutus has gazed at midnight on the evil spirit of his Cæsar; many a modern Macbeth points to the vacant chair of his Banquo, the ghost in his seat, and he mentally exclaims,—“Hence, horrible shadow! unreal mockery, hence!”

Ida. Aye, and many a false heart, like Marmion, hears, as his life ebbs on the battle-field, the phantom voice of Constance Beverly:

“The monk, with unavailing cares,

Exhausted all the church’s prayers.

Ever he said, that, close and near,

A lady’s voice was in his ear,

And that the priest he could not hear,

For that she ever sung:

‘In the lost battle, borne down by the flying,

Where mingles war’s rattle with groans of the dying’ —

So the notes rung.”

We read in Moreton an exquisite story of the trial of a murderer, who had with firmness pleaded—“not guilty.” On a sudden, casting his eyes on the witness-box, he exclaimed, “This is not fair; no one is allowed to be witness in his own case.” The box was empty, as you may suppose; but the eye of his conscience saw his bleeding victim glaring on him, and ready to swear to his murder. He felt that his fate was sealed, and pleaded guilty to the crime.

“——Deeds are done on earth,

Which have their punishment ere the earth closes

Upon the perpetrators. Be it the working

Of the remorse-stained fancy, or the vision

Distinct and real of unearthly being:

All ages witness that, beside the couch

Of the fell homicide, oft stalks the ghost

Of him he slew, or shows his shadowy wound.”