"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 eidolon of Roger Bigod has thrice come across my sight.

CAST. A ghost!

Ev. And Astrophel believes the truth of this vision! Such fantasy 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.

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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-glamouríe, 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 Poictiers; 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 trouble

some.

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 archmystagogue 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 tor

ments.

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 Etna 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 fantasy 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 a while 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.

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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 show themselves as such to their posterity afterward; 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

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