was reported, about a century ago, to have strangled his own children, and to have walked after his death, he would assuredly be laughed to scorn by a London audience, whatever success he might hope to meet with at Berlin or Weimar. On the other hand, let it be ever so confidently reported that King John is to be seen every Christmas-eve eating stewed lampreys among the ruins of Swineford Abbey, or that King Richard may be met riding White Surry at the first mile-stone on the high road from Bosworth, on every Whitsunday, at one o’clock in the morning,—and, we will venture to say, not a hair on the head of the most credulous listener will be displaced, or even put out of curl, by the narrative. Nay, not a whit the less would the haunted spots be traversed at all hours, and at all seasons, without fear of consequences; while the most hardened sceptic may safely be defied, after reading the plain and unpoetical narrative of the reverend spectre in gown and cassock (which is to be found in Mr Cumberland’s Observer), to pass by the parsonage house at Warblington aforesaid, at any hour after the curfew, without so much at least of the sensation, to which we are now adverting, as would induce him to quicken his pace, wipe his forehead, and perhaps whistle “Lillibullero.”
Upon this subject then, it may be laid down as an undeniable axiom, that the more common and familiar, the more terrific is the apparition,—the more powerful, therefore, the effect of the story which is built upon such a foundation,—which is the same thing that was meant by the writers on demonology in the time of our good, believing King James, when they uniformly attribute to the class of spirits, which they entitle Παρεδριος (domestics, sitting close at your elbow,) the chief and most constantly prevailing influence over mankind. In short, with all due reverence for the old established requisites of rusty armour, and clanking chains, of winding-sheets, dry bones, and fleshless skulls, what we mean to assert is, that, at least in the present refined state of the social feelings, none of all these spectral appendages are calculated so to thrill the soul with that pleasurable horror of which we are speaking, as the simple and unostentatious narration of the return of a beloved friend, or near relation, from the world of spirits, in the precise form and likeness of his living self, in his customary habiliments, and, if altered at all in appearance, only so in the assuming a more than ordinary seriousness and solemnity of voice, countenance, and gesture. The fact perhaps is, that the progress of philosophy, which has, within the last century, destroyed almost the vestiges of gross and vulgar credulity, has hitherto spared the final retreat of (what, in compliance the usage of this civilized world of ours, we must nevertheless entitle) ancient superstition; or rather, that the impossibility of a visit from the grave has never been so fully demonstrated, as to render even the most sceptical mind completely proof against the impressions of so qualified, and seemingly probable, an imagination.
The nature of the circumstances by which such stories are generally accompanied, also adds considerably to to their credibility, as well as the very names of the actors, both the dead and the living. When Mr Naylor appeared to his friend, Mr Shaw, in his rooms at St John’s College,[1] he was neither “armed cap-à-pié,” nor
“Wrapp’d in the mouldering cerements of the grave,”
but accoutred in canonical gown and cassock, the living fellow being, at the same time, seated at his library-table, reading and smoking tobacco. They conversed together, the dead and the living, for some time very freely, says the story. At last, being informed by his ghostly visitant, that he was himself “well and happy” in that other world of which he spoke, Mr Shaw ventured to ask him, “whether any of his old acquaintance were with him?”—“The answer was, that there was not one of them; which answer, Mr Shaw said, struck him to the heart;”—and, so related, we will venture to say, it must strike every hearer with almost equal solemnity.
We might multiply examples without end; but as our only object, by all these profound reflections, is to recommend the study of the familiar and the adoption of ordinary occurrences, and a plain unambitious phra-
- ↑ See Gent. Mag. for May 1783, for this extraordinary, and, to all appearance, undeniably, authenticated story.
