e the effort. The seance of rather more
than an hour, in which Johnson took part, was certainly inadequate.
The phenomena were such as had been familiar to law and divinity, at
least since 856, A.D. {170a} The agencies always made accusations,
usually false. The knocking spirit at Kembden, near Bingen, in 856
charged a priest with a scandalous intrigue. The raps on the bed of
the children examined by the Franciscans, about 1530, assailed the
reputation of a dead lady. When the Foxes, at Rochester, in 1848-
49, set up alphabetic communication with the knocks, they told a
silly tale of a murder. The Cock Lane ghost lied in the same way.
The Fox girls started modern spiritualism on its wild and
mischievous career, as Elizabeth Parsons might have done, in a more
favourable environment. There was never anything new in all these
cases. The lowest savages have their seances, levitations, bindings
of the medium, trance-speakers; Peruvians, Indians, have their
objects moved without contact. Simon Magus, or St. Paul under that
offensive pseudonym, was said to make the furniture move at will.
{170b}

There is a curious recent Cock Lane case in Ireland where 'the
ghost' brought no accusations against anybody. The affair was
investigated by Mr. Barrett, a Professor in the Royal College of
Science, Dublin, who published the results in the Dublin University
Magazine, for December, 1877. The scene was a small lonely farm
house at Derrygonnelly, near Enniskillen. The farmer's wife had
died a few weeks before Easter, 1877, leaving him with four girls,
and one boy, of various ages, the eldest, Maggie, being twenty. The
noises were chiefly heard in her neighbourhood. When the children
had been put to bed, Maggie lay down, without undressing, in the
bedroom off the kitchen. A soft pattering noise was soon heard,
then raps, from all parts of the room, then scratchings, as in Cock
Lane. When Mr. Barrett, his friend, and the farmer entered with a
candle, the sounds ceased, but began again 'as if growing accustomed
to the presence of the light'. The hands and feet of the young
people were watched, but nothing was detected, while the raps were
going on everywhere around, on the chairs, on the quilt, and on the
big four-post wooden bedsteads where they were lying. Mr. Barrett
now played Moro with the raps, that is, he extended so many fingers,
keeping his hand in the pocket of a loose great-coat, and the sounds
always responde