Page:Tales of the Dead.djvu/14

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vi
Preface

on the subject, and which they have so thoroughly exhausted, that it would be almost impossible to advance any thing new. Persons curious to learn every thing relative to apparitions, will be amply recompensed by consulting the two writers above mentioned. They give to the full as strange recitals as any which are to be found in this work. Although the Abbé Lenglet-Dufresnoy says there really are apparitions; yet he does not appear to believe in them himself: but Dom Calmet finishes (as Voltaire observes) as if he believed what he wrote, and especially with respect to the extraordinary histories of Vampires. And we may add, for the benefit of those anxious to make deeper search into the subject in question, that the Abbé Lenglet-Dufresnoy has given a list of the principal authors who have written on spirits, demons, apparitions, dreams, magic, and spectres.

Since this laborious writer has published this list, Swedenborg and St. Martin have rendered themselves notorious by their Works; and there have also appeared in Germany treatises on this question of the appearance of spirits. The two authors who have the most largely entered into the detail are Wagener and Jung. The first, whose book is entitled The Spectres[1], endeavours to explain apparitions by at-

  1. Die Gespenster Kurze Erzæhlungen aus dem Reiche der Wahrheit. Berlin, 1797, et suiv. in 8vo.