n, was a firm believer in
ghosts, as the following extract will show:--"That the dead are
seen no more," said Imlac, "I will undertake to maintain,
against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages, and
of all nations. * * * This opinion which, perhaps, prevails as
far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by
its truth(!): those that never heard of one another would not
have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience could make
credible."--_Rasselas_, chap. xxx.

[4] When the grammarians could not interpret some word in a
sentence, which they could make without it, they used to
attribute the unfortunate word to a natural redundancy in the
language, and in the same manner all ghost stories could be
solved by referring it to "an exuberance," &c. &c.

During the celebrated Peninsular campaign, as a lady, whose son, a French
officer in Spain, was seated in her room, she was astonished to perceive
the folding doors at the bottom of the apartment slowly open, and disclose
to her eyes, _her son_. He begged her not to be alarmed, and informed her
that he had been just killed by a grape-shot, and even showed her the wound
in his side; the doors closed again and she saw no more. In a few days she
received a letter, which informed her that her son had fallen, after
distinguishing himself in a most gallant manner, and mentioning the time of
his death, which happened at precisely the same moment the apparition was
seen by her! And when I add that the lady was not _at all addicted to
superstition_, the strangeness of the occurrence is considerably increased.
What inference is to be drawn from this extraordinary tale? I confess I
cannot, and do not, believe that apparitions revisit the earth even at the
"glimpses o' the moon," nor does this story at all change my opinion, and
for one grand reason, which is this--That it is highly improbable that the
course of nature would be interrupted for the production of so
insignificant an effect, for it appears an unnecessary exertion of divine
power, when the good attained would be little or none.

Let us, therefore, attribute it to a powerful imagination acting on a mind
already affected with anxiety, and I believe we shall have no occasion for
yielding to the idea of an apparition to explain the circumstance. I am
acquainted with another tale of the same kind, but