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whom I met in a very different circle of society. While Dr. Priestly occupied the post of librarian to Lord Shelburne, one day Mr. Petty, the precocious and gifted youth whom I have mentioned, sent for Dr. Priestly (Lord Shelburne then being absent, I think, in London). When the doctor entered, Mr. Petty told him he had passed a very restless night, and had been much disturbed by uncomfortable dreams, which he wished to relate to Dr. Priestly, hoping that by so doing, the painful impression would pass away. He then said that he dreamed that he had been very unwell, when suddenly the whole house was in preparation for a journey, he was too ill to sit up, but was carried, lying down, into the carriage; his surprise was extreme on seeing carriage after carriage in almost interminable procession. He was alone, and could not speak, he could only gaze in astonishment. The procession at last wound slowly off. After pursuing the road for many hours towards London, it at last appeared to stop at the door of a church. It was the church at High Wycombe, which is the burial-place of the Shelburne family. It seemed, in Mr. Petty's dream, that he entered, or rather, was carried into the church; he looked back, he saw the procession which followed him was in black, and that the carriage from which he had been taken bore the resemblance of a hearse. Here the dream ended, and he awoke. Dr. Priestly told him that his dream was the result of a feverish cold, and that the impression would soon pass off. Nevertheless, he thought it better to send for the family medical attendant. The next day, Mr. Petty was much better, on the third day he was completely convalescent, so that the doctor permitted him to leave his room; but as it was in January, and illness was prevalent, he desired him on no account to leave the house, and with that precaution, took his leave. Late the next afternoon, the medical man was returning from his other patients; his road lay by the gates of Bowood, and as Lord Shelburne was away, he thought he might as well call to see Mr. Petty, and enforce his directions. What was his surprise, when he had passed the lodge, to see the youth himself without his hat, playfully running to meet him! The doctor was much astonished, as it was bitterly cold, and the ground covered with snow. He rode to Mr. Petty to rebuke him for his imprudence, when suddenly he disappeared, whither, he knew not, but he seemed instantaneously to vanish. The doctor thought it very extraordinary, but that probably the youth had not wished to be found transgressing orders, and he rode on to the house. There he learnt that Mr. Petty had just expired.'Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, pp. 73-74.

Such apparitions as these are quite frequent enough to be regarded as established. The appearance of Protesilaus to Laodamia was probably founded on similar occurrences among the Greeks; and Mr. Henderson tells us that St. Macarius the younger of Alexandria, A.D. 373, declares that the spirit wanders about the earth for two days after death, at its will.' Without exactly adopting the explanation of the good Saint, we own ourselves inclined to believe that in those kinds of death where a stupor or trance precedes actual dissolution, the spirit may be, in a manner, absent from the flesh, and yet not entirely removed to its resting-place; and thus that its own last thoughts and impulses may actually render it present to the persons to whom it is most attached, or whom it last recollected. Thus in the cases above cited, the two dying youths in India evidently flew to their rela

tives, and young Petty, on becoming worse, probably thought of the doctor. We believe a great proportion at least of these apparitions were of persons whose death took place in the manner above mentioned. We have heard of one case where the death was through convulsions, when the struggle is always long and apparently unconscious, and many more in cases of drowning. The dripping hand which announced the shipwreck of Hugh Miller's father, was perhaps an instance of this kind. And we have heard a curious, and to our own knowledge, true story, of the master of a sailing vessel who had promised his favourite aunt to announce his death to her if he were lost at sea. In process of time, he did appear wet and dripping, but strange to say, not to the aunt who had made the tryste, but to his wife. Of course his safety was despaired of, but he at length returned home, and it then appeared that his ship had been lost on the South American coast; he had staid by her to the last, and at the time of his apparition had been brought off so nearly drowned as to be insensible. Surely this would seem as if in his extremity his promise had, as it were, borne away his spirit, and yet that it had flown to the person the most prominent in his thoughts. An apparition almost exactly similar to this is related in a curious old book of the 17th century, called the Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed;' by Andrew Moreton, Esq.; the 4th edition being printed in 1740. His story is as follows:

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‘A certain lady of my acquaintance, going out of her chamber into a closet in the adjoining room, saw her husband walking along in the room before her. She immediately comes down in a great surprise, tells the family she had seen her husband, and she was sure it was he; though at the same time she knew her husband (who was the commander of a ship), was at sea, on a voyage to or from the Capes of Virginia.

The family takes the alarm, and tells her that to be sure her husband was dead, and that she should be sure to set down the day of the month, and the hour of the day, and it was ten thousand to one that she should find that he died that very moment, as near as could be found out.

Ábout two months after, her husband comes home very well, but had an accident befell him in his voyage, viz., that stepping into the boat or out of the boat, he fell into the sea, and was in danger of being lost, and this they calculated upon to be as near the time as they could judge, that he appeared to his wife.'-Moreton, p. 263-4.

Andrew Moreton, Esq., who tells this story as from his personal knowledge, intends throughout his book to argue against apparitions being attributed to the Devil, or being taken to be spirits of the individuals they represent, considering them rather as the work of an intermediate class of spiritual beings, of limited power and knowledge, and some beneficent, some malignant. He argues stoutly, but most of the stories he adduces rather fail of supporting his theory,

which is the greater reason for believing his honesty in the narration. He always gives his grounds for attaching more or less credit to his narration, and mostly tells whether they came to him on the immediate authority of his informant or otherwise. Another story told by him agrees with the hypothesis that it is the communication between spirit and spirit that creates the sense of having seen a phantom. Two brothers residing in London, sons of an old baronet, whom Mr. Moreton indicates as Sir G. H., had long been courting the same lady, and at last quarrelled so desperately about her, as actually to challenge one another to fight a duel. The affair was to come off at five o'clock in the morning, without seconds, as of course none would have undertaken the office for so unnatural a rencontre. The younger brother was at the place almost as soon as it was light, and was amazed at finding his rival there already. He drew his sword, and was surprised to see his antagonist coming to meet him with his sword likewise in his hand, but as he came nearer, to his astonishment he found that it was not his brother, but his old father, whom he had believed to be safe at home, sixty miles off, and that the weapon was only the little cane. Sir G. was wont to carry.

"Why, how now, Jack?' he said, 'What, challenge and draw on your father?' The youth answered by declaring that it had been a cowardly shift in his brother Tom to challenge him, and send his father. You would not have done so, Sir, when you were a young man.' The old gentleman answered that it was no time to talk but to fight, adding, 'There are no relations in love'-words which Jack had the day before used in his altercation with his brother-and therewith drawing his sword, he advanced on his son, who, in horror, threw down his sword and scabbard on the ground, crying, There, Sir, kill me with it! What do you mean?' And as his father ran upon him, he sprang aside, and seemed about to run away. His father stooped, picked up the sword, and stood still, and Jack, in his bewilderment, walked a good way back towards the town, but finding his father did not follow him, he decided, though weaponless, to keep his appointment, went back, but saw no one, and sitting down on the grass, waited for nearly two hours, and when at last he decided on going home, he found his sword lying at the very place where he had dropped it. This amused him more,' and he returned to his lodgings, where he was soon sought out by an old family servant, who brought him word that the esquire, as his brother was called in the household, was desirous of hearing whether he had not seen something extraordinary that morning, adding that he would have come himself, had he not been very

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unwell. Jack further found that his father was ill in bed in his own home, or at least had been so when he had sent the servant to town a few days before. He despatched the man to his brother with the reply, that he had either seen his father or the devil, whereupon the esquire came in haste; they had a complete reconciliation, and, comparing notes, found that as the elder son approached the place intended for the duel, he, too, had been met by his father, who asked him where he was going? He made some trifling excuse about joining a party who were going to Hampton Court, but his father reddened with anger, stamped with his foot, and declared that he knew the real end to be the murder of his younger son; nor would he listen to any arguments, telling the esquire that he knew Jack to be more earnest and honourably minded to the lady than himself, and had given his consent to his marriage with her, and ended by commanding him to be reconciled to his brother.

The two young men, being thoroughly friends, inquired at their father's usual lodgings and at the Black Swan Yard,' where his coach always stood,' and found that he was not known to be in town nor expected there. Becoming very uneasy about him, they agreed to ride home together, and inquire after him. They found him alive, recovering from his illness, and much relieved to see them on such good terms, for not only had he long known of their rivalry and ill-feeling about the young lady, but twice he had dreamt in one night that they had actually quarrelled, and were on the point of fighting, but that he had got up at four o'clock in the morning to prevent it. The impression was so strong that he had actually written a letter of warning to the esquire, which arrived at his lodgings a few hours after the two had set out for the country.

Of course there is now no opportunity of testing the veracity of this adventure, but it has every appearance of authenticity, and it appears to us that the coincidence proves that there was some communication between the anxious mind of the sick and anxious father at home and his sons-perhaps facilitated by bodily ailment. An almost similar story is told in the Shepherd's Calendar," by James Hogg, of two brothers of the name of Beattie. He there says that the circumstances were made public in the lifetime of the younger brother, and never contradicted by him, but he gives the tale in a less credible manner, making the father be brought to the spot in a dream by the witchcraft of the young lady's aunt. To these appearances at the moment of death-or by force of correspondence of mindbelongs that famous story which furnished Crabbe with his poem of Lady Barbara. It is curious to trace the story's development in the two versions given in the 'Diaries of a Lady of Quality,'

that collection of contemporary gossip by an intelligent cultivated woman, which cannot be read without a certain degree of interest. In her first version, purporting to be a copy made in 1794, by the Honorable Mrs, Maitland, from the dictation of the Lady Betty Cobb, to whom Lady Beresford had confessed the whole on her death-bed, the story is almost exactly what Crabbe versified. Lord Tyrone and his sister, having been bewildered and distressed by infidel teaching, agree that the first to die should come and inform the other whether there were indeed immortality for the soul.

And when a spirit, much as spirits might

I would to thee communicate my light.'

Lord Tyrone dies, and at the same moment appears to his sister, then married to Sir Martin Beresford, and not only satisfies her religious doubts, but predicts the number of her children, her foolish second marriage, and that she would die at forty-seven, after the birth of a son. Moreover, as tokens of the reality of his appearance, he causes the curtains of the bed to be drawn through a hook from the tester, writes in her pocket-book, and grasping her wrist with a hand cold as ice, leaves a burnt mark there that causes her always to wear a velvet ribbon. Of course all turned out as predicted. After her first husband's death, she lived a very retired life, only associating with the family of the clergyman of the parish, and Crabbe has most delicately and ingeniously marked out the train of persuasions which led her into marrying this clergyman's son, who behaved very ill to her. She was favourably recovering from the birth of the son who was to be fatal to her, when her father-in-law jestingly told her that he had settled an old dispute as to her real age, by consulting her baptismal register and that he found she was forty-seven instead of forty-eight. You have signed my death-warrant,' she said, and the next day, sending for him and Lady Betty Cobb, she told them the real story of her life, and on removing the ribbon, the sinews of her wrist were found shrunken. She died shortly after, and the ribbon and writing remained with her friend; her eldest son, as had been predicted by the ghost, married Lord Tyrone's daughter.

The second version of the story, which was related to Miss Wynne by the Llangollen ladies, made Lord Tyrone not the brother, but the first love, and omitted the whole original compact, only making him come for the ring he had once given her, and predicting her husband's death and her own second marriage and death after the birth of her son. The impress on the wrist was made in taking off the ring, which was never seen again. All the predictions were accomplished, and though she had tried

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