f such supernatural
communications, arises from the dexterity and skill of the authors who
have made it their business to present such stories in the shape most
likely to attract belief. Defoe--whose power in rendering credible that
which was in itself very much the reverse was so peculiarly
distinguished--has not failed to show his superiority in this species of
composition. A bookseller of his acquaintance had, in the trade phrase,
rather overprinted an edition of "Drelincourt on Death," and complained
to Defoe of the loss which was likely to ensue. The experienced
bookmaker, with the purpose of recommending the edition, advised his
friend to prefix the celebrated narrative of Mrs. Veal's ghost, which he
wrote for the occasion, with such an air of truth, that although in fact
it does not afford a single tittle of evidence properly so called, it
nevertheless was swallowed so eagerly by the people that Drelincourt's
work on death, which the supposed spirit recommended to the perusal of
her friend Mrs. Bargrave, instead of sleeping on the editor's shelf,
moved off by thousands at once; the story, incredible in itself, and
unsupported as it was by evidence or enquiry, was received as true,
merely from the cunning of the narrator, and the addition of a number of
adventitious circumstances, which no man alive could have conceived as
having occurred to the mind of a person composing a fiction.

It did not require the talents of Defoe, though in that species of
composition he must stand unrivalled, to fix the public attention on a
ghost story. John Dunton, a man of scribbling celebrity at the time,
succeeded to a great degree in imposing upon the public a tale which he
calls the Apparition Evidence. The beginning of it, at least (for it is
of great length), has something in it a little new. At Mynehead, in
Somersetshire, lived an ancient gentlewoman named Mrs. Leckie, whose
only son and daughter resided in family with her. The son traded to
Ireland, and was supposed to be worth eight or ten thousand pounds. They
had a child about five or six years old. This family was generally
respected in Mynehead; and especially Mrs. Leckie, the old lady, was so
pleasant in society, that her friends used to say to her, and to each
other, that it was a thousand pities such an excellent, good-humoured
gentlewoman must, from her age, be soon lost to her friends. To which
Mrs. Leckie often made the somewhat startling reply: "Forasmuch as you
n