him, and said, 'Though, when I was alive and called to you, you would not come and save me, do not at any rate leave my death unavenged.' The friend went on to say that he had been murdered by the innkeeper, and that his body had been put on a cart covered over with manure, to be taken in the morning out of the city. He asked his living friend to go early and watch at the city-gate for the cart. The living friend went accordingly, and when a cart full of manure came out of the gate, he demanded of the slave who drove it what he had there. The man fled in terror, the corpse was discovered, and the innkeeper brought to justice ('De Divin.' I, § 57).

So far we have been considering only stories in which the apparition occurs spontaneously, but, of course, in antiquity, as to-day, the living often took the initiative in attempts to bring back the dead into communication with themselves. All through the ancient world people resorted to necromancy-the idea and the practice was not confined to any nation or any age. In the Old Testament you have the story of the witch of Endor calling up the spirit of Samuel, and Isaiah rebukes his contemporaries because they resorted to wizards. 'who peep and mutter,' that is, probably, speak in a state of trance in a strange thin voice, not their own, understood to be a voice from the other world. On behalf of the living,' Isaiah asks indignantly, 'should men seek unto the dead?'

Amongst the Greeks you find the idea of calling up the spirits of the dead as early as Homer, and you find necromancy rife in the last decadence of Greek civilisation. But there is a great difference in the mode by which communication with the dead was sought in antiquity, and the mode by which it is sought to-day. In the practice of modern spiritualists the method is a corporate effort, a séance, in which many people combine with the medium to 'generate power'-I think the phrase is—and the spirit is supposed to communicate by signs, such as table-rapping or automatic writing-only in exceptional cases, as spiritualists call it, materialising.' So far as I know, you hear nothing about séances or table-rapping in ancient times. The spirit was called up by a magician or a witch, acting as

an individual, in virtue of certain rites and ceremonies which had magical power, rites and ceremonies often pretty horrible; the spirit did not communicate by signs, but appeared and spoke, if the magic was successful. Sometimes the professional necromancers were attached to a particular shrine, to which people would come to receive oracles from the dead. If you wanted to communicate with the dead, that is to say, you did not ask your friends to sit with you round a table, but you went to the professional wizard or witch and let him or her do it all for you. If you knew the way, and the proper rites and formulas, you might perhaps do it for yourself.

In the earliest description we have of calling up the spirits of the dead in Greek literature, the 11th book of the 'Odyssey,' Odysseus, instructed by the witch Circe, does it for himself. Apparently in the earliest stratum of the story, as we have it in that book, Odysseus does not go to the world of the dead. He is made to do so in the later interpolations in the story, and according to the conversation between himself and Circe in the previous book, which is accommodated to the later idea of his journey. In the original story he sails across the Ocean to the land and city of the Cimmerians, a people of flesh and blood, though, since they live at the extremities of the inhabited earth in a land of perpetual mist and night, it may naturally be easier to establish communications there between this world and the realm of the dead. On the shores of the Ocean, that is to say, still in this living world, Odysseus performs the acts which will have power to bring up the spirits of the dead to him in visible shape from the house of Hades. He digs a small trench, pours libations to the dead of honey and wine and water, sprinkles white meal, prays to the dead, promising future offerings if they will appear, and cuts the throats of the sheep to be sacrificed, so that their blood gushes into the little trench and fills it. And then the shadowy hosts of the dead appear, drawn eagerly to the hot blood. But they are only phantoms without intelligence till they have drunk the blood. Then for a moment they recover the mind they had as living men and converse with the living man.

The great motive which led men to resort to necromancy was not the common motive in modern times,

the desire to regain communication with people whom one has loved here; the great motive was to get knowledge of things which one could not get in the ordinary way-especially knowledge of the future-but any knowledge that might be important for practical purposes. Herodotus tells a story about Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, in the seventh century B.C. Periander had hidden somewhere a treasure which had been entrusted to his keeping by a friend and then forgotten the place. In this embarrassment he sent to the oracle of the dead amongst the Thesprotians, in order that the spirit of his dead wife Melissa might be called up and say where the treasure was hidden. We can imagine that in domestic difficulties in former days, when Periander could not remember where he had put this or that, Melissa had been the natural person to whom he would run in a fret. 'Where on earth, O woman, did I put that wretched 'whatever it might be. And now that she was dead, and Periander was bothered to lay his hand on the hidden deposit, he could think of nothing better than calling up poor Melissa's spirit to tell him where he had put it.

Under the Roman Empire it is plain that many people had recourse to necromancy, and that calling up the dead was one of the things which the professors of magical arts regularly claimed to be able to do—' crematos suscitare mortuos,' as the witch Canidia puts it in the catalogue of her accomplishments in Horace. But no writer of classical times that I know gives us any concrete case of the calling up of a spirit which had come within his own experience or the experience of any one known to him, unless we count the case of Apion the Alexandrian grammarian of the first century A.D., whom the elder Pliny as a young man had apparently seen and talked to, and who, according to this same Pliny, used to declare that he had once called up the spirit of Homer and learnt from the ghostly lips of the poet himself in which of the seven cities he had really been born. Some suspicion, however, was cast on the story by the circumstance that when Apion, a blatant self-advertiser, was asked to pass on the precious bit of knowledge, he became coy, and said he felt bound to regard personal information of that kind, when given him by Homer, as strictly confidential. Lucan describes an evocation of the dead

by the witch Erichtho, but she is an imaginary character, and the whole description makes no pretence of being anything but highly coloured poetical fiction, though some of the details-for instance, that the corpse of the man whose spirit was to be called up must have the lungs undecayed-no doubt corresponded with traditional necromantic lore. The most effectual form of necromancy, men thought in those days, was not to procure a filmy ' materialisation,' but to compel a spirit to come back into a corpse newly dead and speak with its fleshly tongue. Servius (on the Eneid,' vi, 1. 149) says that the term necromantia ought properly to be confined to the re-animation of corpses: the calling up of shadowy appearances ought to be called sciomantia. Erichtho in Lucan brings from the battlefield the corpse of a soldier recently slain, but if a fresh corpse was not ready at disposal witches and necromancers were believed to commit murder in

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order to procure one. Witches were especially believed to kidnap and murder children; probably some of them really did so. And if it might be rather dangerous for people in lower life to commit murder, Emperors, when they wished to consult spirits from the other world, could murder with impunity. Several Emperors went in for necromancy, and we are expressly told of Didius Julianus and Elagabalus that they had little children killed for the purpose. This is a mode of communication with the other world a good deal grimmer than sitting round a table in a drawing-room and asking the spirit to spell out messages by innocent tapping.

When we look at our collection of ancient ghoststories as a whole, one must, I think, pronounce that they are exceedingly badly authenticated. Except Pliny's foolish story about the boys who had their heads shorn, all of them rest on hearsay and popular legend. If the modern evidence for ghosts leaves us unbelieving or sceptical, we are not likely to be impressed by these old stories. If, on the other hand, we regard the modern testimony to appearances of the dead as substantial, we shall naturally regard these old stories as having certain real facts of the same nature behind them. I have known at least one man, universally respected for his learning and common sense, who believed that he had one day, when out walking, met a ghost.

EDWYN BEVAN,

Art. 5.-NEWMAN'S OPPORTUNITY.

1. Apologia pro Vita sua. Longmans, 1864.

2. Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman during his Life in the English Church. Edited by Anne Mozley. Longmans, 1891.

3. Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman. By Wilfrid Ward. Longmans, 1912.

To the man who would understand Newman-a not impossible task-an excellent starting-point is given in J. A. Froude's famous description, which much pleased Newman when he read it in old age.

'When I entered at Oxford, John Henry Newman was beginning to be famous. The responsible authorities were watching him with anxiety, and men were looking with interest and curiosity on the apparition among them of one of those persons of indisputable genius who was likely to make a mark upon his time. His appearance was striking. He was above the middle height, slight and spare. His head was large, his face remarkably like that of Julius Caesar. I have often thought of the resemblance, and believed that it extended to the temperament. In both there was an original force of character which refused to be moulded by circumstances, which was to make its own way and become a power in the world; a clearness of intellectual perception, a disdain for conventionalities, a temper imperious and wilful, but along with it a most attaching gentleness, sweetness, singleness of heart and purpose. Both were formed by nature to command others, both had the faculty of attracting to themselves the passionate devotion of their friends and followers. ... He was the most transparent of men. He told us what he believed to be true. He did not know where it would carry him. No one who has ever risen to any great height in this world refuses to move till he knows where he is going. He is impelled in each step which he takes by a force within himself. He satisfies himself only that the step is a right one, and he leaves the rest to Providence. Newman's mind was world-wide. He was interested in everything which was going on in science, in politics, in literature. . . . Keble had looked into no lines of thought but his own. Newman had read omnivorously; he had studied modern thought and modern life in all its forms and with all its many-coloured passions. . . . What he said carried conviction along with