rding to the learned judge's ruling, of his privilege. Scott
does not cite the similar legend in Hibernian Tales, the chap book
quoted by Thackeray in his Irish Sketch-book. In that affair, when
the judge asked the ghost to give his own evidence: 'Instantly
there came a dreadful rumbling noise into the court--"Here am I that
was murdered by the prisoner at the bar"'. The Hibernian Tales are
of no legal authority, nor can we give chapter and verse for another
well-known anecdote. A prisoner on a charge of murder was about to
escape, when the court observed him looking suspiciously over his
shoulder. 'Is there no one present,' the learned judge asked in
general, 'who can give better testimony?' 'My lord,' exclaimed the
prisoner, 'that wound he shows in his chest is twice as big as the
one I gave him.' In this anecdote, however, the prisoner was
clearly suffering from a hallucination, as the judge detected, and
we do not propose to consider cases in which phantasms bred of
remorse drove a guilty man to make confession.

To return to Scott; he remarks that believers in ghosts must be
surprised 'to find how seldom in _any_ country an allusion hath been
made to such evidence in a court of justice'. Scott himself has
only 'detected one or two cases of such apparition evidence,' which
he gives. Now it is certain, as we shall see, that he must have
been acquainted with several other examples, which did not recur to
his memory: the memory of 1831 was no longer that of better years.
Again, there were instances of which he had probably never possessed
any knowledge, while others have occurred since his death. We shall
first consider the cases of spectral evidence (evidence that is of a
dead man's ghost, not of a mere wraith) recorded by Sir Walter, and
deal later with those beyond his memory or knowledge. {250} Sir
Walter's first instance is from Causes Celebres, (vol. xii., La
Haye, 1749, Amsterdam, 1775, p. 247). Unluckily the narrator, in
this collection, is an esprit fort, and is assiduous in attempts to
display his wit. We have not a plain unvarnished tale, but
something more like a facetious leading article based on a trial

Honore Mirabel was a labouring lad, under age, near Marseilles. His
story was that, in May (year not given), about eleven at night, he
was lying under an almond tree, near the farm of a lady named Gay.
In the moonlight he saw a man at an upper window of a building
distant five or six pac