e happened to write himself. And they were not a few. On all
subjects known to man, from the Thirty-nine Articles of our English
Church, down to pyrotechnics, legerdemain, magic, both black and white,
thaumaturgy, and necromancy, he favored the world (which world was the
nursery where I, on his first coming home, lived among my sisters) with
his select opinions. On this last subject especially--of necromancy--he
was very great; witness his profound work, though but a fragment, and,
unfortunately, long since departed to the bosom of Cinderella, entitled,
"How to raise a ghost; and when you've got him down, how to keep him
down." To which work he assured us, that some most learned and enormous
man, whose name was six feet long, had promised him an appendix; which
appendix treated of the Red Sea and Solomon's signet-ring; with forms of
_mittimus_ for ghosts that might be mutinous; and probably a riot act,
for any _emeute_ among ghosts inclined to raise barricades; since he
often thrilled our young hearts by supposing the case (not at all
unlikely, he affirmed), that a federation, a solemn league and
conspiracy, might take place among the infinite generations of ghosts
against the single generation of men at any one time composing the
garrison of earth. The Roman phrase for expressing that a man had died,
viz., "_Abiit ad plures_" (He has gone over to the majority), my brother
explained to us; and we easily comprehended that any one generation of
the living human race, even if combined, and acting in concert, must be
in a frightful minority, by comparison with all the incalculable
generations that had trod this earth before us. The Parliament of living
men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper
and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts. Perhaps the
Pre-Adamites would constitute one wing in such a ghostly army. My
brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far enough from seeing or
foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have illustrated this dreadful duel
of the living human race with its ghostly predecessors, by the awful
apparition which, at three o'clock in the afternoon, on the 18th of
June, 1815, the mighty contest at Waterloo must have assumed to eyes
that watched over the trembling interests of man. The English army,
about that time in the great agony of its strife, was thrown into
squares; and under that arrangement, which condensed and contracted its
apparent numbers within a few black