will quote one case from the fourth volume of the Psychological Magazine, related by a student of the University of Jena. "A young girl, about nine or ten years old, had spent her birthday, with several companions of her own age, in all the gayety of youthful amusement. Her parents were of a rigorous devout sect, and had filled the child's head with a number of strange and horrid notions about the devil, hell, and eternal damnation. In the evening, as she was retiring to rest, the devil appeared to her and threatened to devour her. She gave a loud shriek, fled to the apartment where her parents were, and fell down, apparently dead, at their feet. A physician was called in, and she began to recover herself in a few hours. She then related what had happened, adding that she was sure she was to be damned. This accident was immediately followed by a severe and tedious nervous complaint."

The ghost will not appear to tell us what will happen, but it may rise, and with awful solemnity, too, to tell us that which has happened. Such is the phantom of remorse-the shadow of conscience -which is, indeed, a natural penalty—a crime that carries with it its own consecutive punishment. Were the lattice of Momus fixed in the bosom, that window through which the springs of passion could be seen, there would be, I fear, a dark spot on almost every heart, as there is, to quote the Italian proverb, a skeleton in every house." Of these pangs of memory, the pages both of history and fiction are teeming. Not in the visions of sleep alone, but in the glare of noonday, the apparition of a victim comes upon the guilty mind"As when a gryphon through the wilderness, With winged course, o'er hill and moory dale, Pursues the Arimaspian, who, by stealth, Had from his wakeful custody purloined The guarded gold "

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Brutus, and Richard Plantagenet, and Clarence, and Macbeth, and Manfred, and Lorenzo, and Wallace, and Marmion, are but the archetypes of a very numerous family in real life, for Shakspeare, and Byron, and Schiller, and Scott have painted in high relief these portraits from the life.

Many a real Manfred has trembled as he called up the phantom of Astarte; many a modern Brutus has gazed at midnight on the evil spirit of his Cæsar; many a modern Macbeth points to the vacant chair of his Banquo, the ghost in his seat, and he mentally exclaims, "Hence, horrible shadow! unreal mockery, hence!"

IDA. Ay, and many a false heart, like Marmion, hears, as his life ebbs on the battle-field, the phantom voice of Constance Beverly:

"The monk, with unavailing cares,
Exhausted all the church's prayers.
Ever he said, that, close and near,
A lady's voice was in his ear,

And that the priest he could not hear,
For that she ever sung:

'In the lost battle, borne down by the flying,
Where mingles war's rattle with groans of the dying'-
So the notes rung."

We read in Moreton an exquisite story of the trial of a murderer, who had with firmness pleaded "not guilty." On a sudden, casting his eyes on the witness-box, he exclaimed, "This is not fair; no one is allowed to be witness in his own case.' The box was empty, as you may suppose, but the eye of his conscience saw his bleeding victim glaring on him, and ready to swear to his murder. He felt that his fate was sealed, and pleaded guilty to the crime.

"Deeds are done on earth,

Which have their punishment ere the earth closes
Upon the perpetrators. Be it the working
Of the remorse-stained fancy, or the vision
Distinct and real of unearthly being:

All ages witness that, beside the couch
Of the fell homicide, oft stalks the ghost

Of him he slew, or shows his shadowy wound."

It is this utter humiliation of the spirit, and the conviction of our polluted nature, that rankle so intensely in the wounded heart; and thence the repentant sinner feels so deeply that awful truth, that there is a Being infinitely more pure and godlike than himself.

Ev. A very fertile source of spectral illusion is the devotion to peculiar studies and deep reflection on interesting subjects. Mons. Esquirol records the hallucination of a lady who had been reading a terrific account of the execution of a criminal. Ever after, in all her waking hours, and in every place, she saw above her left eye the phantom of a bloody head, wrapped in black crape-a thing so horrible to her, that she repeatedly attempted the commission of suicide. And of another lady, who had dipped so deeply into a history of witches, that she became convinced of her having, like Tam O'Shanter's lady of the "cutty sark," been initiated into their mysteries, and officiated at their "sabbath" ceremonies.

Monsieur Andral, in his youth, saw in La Pitié the putrid body of a child covered with larva, and during the next morning, the spectre of this corpse lying on his table was as perfect as reality.

We have known mathematicians whose ghosts even appeared in the shape of coloured circles and squares, and Justus Martyr was haunted by the phantoms of flowers. Nay, our own Sir Joshua, after he had been painting portraits, sometimes believed the trees, and flowers, and posts to be men and women.

I knew myself a bombardier, whose brain had been wounded in a battle. To this man a post was

an enemy, and he would, when a sudden phrensy came on him, attack it in the street with his cane, and not leave it until he believed that his foeman was beaten or lay prostrate at his feet.

Intense feeling, especially if combined with apprehension, often raises a phantom. The unhappy Sir RC- on being summoned to attend the Princess Charlotte of Wales, saw her form robed in white distinctly glide along before him as he sat in his carriage: a parallel, nay, an explanation to the interesting stories of Astrophel.

Then the sting of conscience may warp a common object thus. Theodric, the Gothic king, unjustly condemned and put to death Boëthius and Symmachus. It chanced at that time that a large fish was served to him at dinner, when his imagination directly changed the fish's head into the ghastly face of Symmachus, upbraiding him with the murder of innocence; and such was the effect of the phantom, that in a few days he died. But these spectral forms were seen, like the dagger of Macbeth, and the hand-writing on the wall, by none but the conscience-stricken, a proof of their being ideal, and not real.

Not long after the death of Byron, Sir Walter Scott was engaged in his study, during the darkening twilight of an autumnal evening, in reading a sketch of his form and habits, his manners and opinions. On a sudden he saw, as he laid down his book and passed into his hall, the eidolon of his departed friend before him. He remained for some time impressed by the intensity of the illusion, which had thus created a phantom out of skins, and scarfs, and plaids, hanging on a screen in the Gothic hall of Abbotsford.

I learn from Dr. T. that a certain lady was on the eve of her marriage, but her lover was killed

as he was on his way to join her. An acute fever immediately followed this impression; and on each subsequent day, when the same hour struck on the clock, she fell into a state of ecstasy, and believed that the phantom of her lover wafted her to the skies; then followed a swoon of two or three hours' duration, and her diurnal recovery ensued.

CAST. I know not if it will make me happier, Evelyn, but I have learned from your lips to believe that many of those legends which I held as poetic fictions may be the stories of minds in which, under the influence of devoted affection, the slightest semblance to an object so beloved may work up the phantom of far distant or departed forms. You may have read the romantic devotion of Henry Howard to the fair Geraldine, the flower of England's court, and the chivalrous challenge of her beauty to the knights of France. During his travels on the Continent he fell in with the alchymist Cornelius Agrippa, who, by his sleight cunning, showed in a magic mirror (as he said) to the doting mind of the earl his absent beauty reclining on a couch, and reading by the light of a waxen taper the homage of his pen to her exquisite beauty. Then there was an archbishop of the Euchaites, a professor of magic in the ninth century. The Emperor Basil besought this pseudo-magus Santabaran for a sight of his long-lost and beloved son. He appeared before the emperor in a costume of splendour and mounted on a charger, and sinking into his arms, instantly vanished. This fantasy, and the glamourie of the witch of Falsehope over Michael Scott, and the vision of the wondrous tale of Vatheck, and the legend of the Duke of Anjou in Froissart, might be the rude shadows of some slight phantasmagoria working on a sensitive or impassjoned mind, may they not?