Who would believe what strange bugbears
Mankind creates itself of fears?

That spring like fern, that insect weed,
Equivocally, without seed;

And have no possible foundation,

But merely in th' imagination :

And yet can do more dreadful feats,

Than hags, with all their imps and teats :

Make more bewitch and haunt themselves,

Than all their nurseries of elves.

For fear does things so like a witch,
"Tis hard t'unriddle which is which;
Sets up communities of senses,

To chop and change intelligences;
As Rosicrusian virtuosis

Can see with ears, and hear with noses :
And when they neither see nor hear,
Have more than both supplied by fear;
That makes 'em in the dark see visions,
And hag themselves with apparitions :
And when their eyes discover least,
Discern the subtlest objects best.

HUDIBRAS

FALLACY

OF

SPECTRAL APPEARANCES.

Persons, after a debauch of liquor, or under the influence of terror, or in the deliria of a fever, or in a fit of lunacy, or even walking in their sleep, have had their brain as deeply impressed with chimerical representations as they could possibly have been, had these representations struck their senses.-S -SHENSTONE: Opinion of Ghosts."

And Fancy's multiplying sight
View'd all the scenes invisible of night.

COWLEY.

And this they call a light and a revealing!
Wise as the clown who, plodding home at night
In autumn, turns at call of fancied elf,
And sees upon the fog, with ghastly feeling,
A giant shadow in its imminent might,

Which his own lanthorn throws up from himself.

"An

LEIGH HUNT.

SPECTRAL APPEARANCES.

man,

"IT faded on the crowing of the cock," says Marcellus to Horatio, speaking of the grand phantom of Hamlet's father-the most awful apparition yet evoked by the imagination of ‚—a royal shade more potent as the monarch of spirits, than when, in the body, it wielded the sceptre of the then mighty Denmark. But, with all its attributes of power, "the majesty of buried Denmark" could only "revisit the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous." As dawn came on, the illusion "faded."

Daylight is not propitious to ghosts, who require a dim and shadowy arena,-darkness when they can get it; or, in default of that, an artificial light which mostly includes heavy glooms favourable to "their exits and their entrances."

They glimmer in front of a picture, of which the background must be obscure; and they demand in their spectators a certain frame of mind brought about either by the temporary bewilderment of somnolency, by moral or physical derangement, by sorrow or fear, by boundless credulity, or by the natural depression of mental energy existing, more or less, in all human beings at very late hours.

Ghosts never prey on sagacious or healthy subjects, surrounded by cheerful accessories. "Your lordship," said Sir Thomas Wilde, some time ago, to Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, "is not the kind of man to see apparitions; besides, you do not eat suppers."

Phantoms, then, according to one of our greatest law-authorities, who is, moreover, an irresistible vindicator of common sense, must have ready-prepared witnesses, suffering under dyspepsia, or otherwise morbidly affected. In addition to this, they require to be furnished with a certain apparatus, like conjurors; or they are nothing.

To speak somewhat in the manner of the fantastical old physician of Norwich, one might