the Cour
de Parlement in Paris. Maitre Chopin was for the lessors, Nau
appeared for the tenant. Chopin first took the formal point, the
Tours judge was formally wrong in breaking a covenant without
letters royal, a thing particularly bad in the case of a minor,
Nicolas Macquereau.

So much for the point of form; as to the matter, Maitre Chopin
laughed at the bare idea of noisy spirits. This is notable because,
in an age when witches were burned frequently, the idea of a haunted
house could be treated by the learned counsel as a mere waggery.
Yet the belief in haunted houses has survived the legal prosecution
of witches. 'The judge in Tours has merely and mischievously
encouraged superstition.' All ghosts, brownies, lutins, are mere
bugbears of children; here Maitre Chopin quotes Plato, and Philo
Judaeus in the original, also Empedocles, Marcus Aurelius,
Tertullian, Quintilian, Dioscorides. Perhaps Bolacre and his family
suffer from nightmare. If so, a physician, not a solicitor, is
their man. Or again, granting that their house _is_ haunted, they
should appeal to the clergy, not to the law.

Manifestly this is a point to be argued. Do the expenses of
exorcism fall on landlord or tenant? This, we think, can hardly be
decided by a quotation from Epictetus. Alexis Comnenus bids us seek
a bishop in the case of psychical phenomena ([Greek]). So Maitre
Chopin argues, but he evades the point. Is it not the business of
the owner of the house to 'whustle on his ain parten,' to have his
own bogie exorcised? Of course Piquet and Macquereau may argue that
the bogie is Bolacre's bogie, that it flitted to the house with
Bolacre; but that is a question of fact and evidence.

Chopin concludes that a lease is only voidable in case of material
defect, or nuisance, as of pestilential air, not in a case which,
after all, is a mere vice d'esprit. Here Maitre Chopin sits down,
with a wink at the court, and Nau pleads for the tenant. First, why
abuse the judge at Tours? The lessors argued the case before him,
and cannot blame him for credulity. The Romans, far from rejecting
such ideas (as Chopin had maintained), used a ritual service for
ejecting spooks, so Ovid testifies. Greek and Roman hauntings are
cited from Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius; in the last case (ghost of
Caligula), the house had to be destroyed, like the house at Wolflee
where the ghost, resenting Presbyterian exorcism, killed the Rev.
Mr. Thomson of Sout