we are reminded at the same time of all that was agreeable in him. We never saw, for instance, even the gilt ball at the top of the College of Physicians, without thinking of that pleasant mention of it in Garth's "Dispensary," and of all the wit and generosity of that amiable

man:

"Not far from that most celebrated place,*
Where angry Justice shows her awful face:
Where little villains must submit to fate,
That great ones may enjoy the world in state;
There stands a dome, majestic to the sight,
And sumptuous arches bear its oval height:
A golden globe, placed high with artful skill,
Seems, to the distant sight, a gilded pill."

Gay, in describing the inconvenience of the late narrow part of the Strand, by St Clement's, took away a portion of its unpleasantness to the next generation, by associating his memory with the objects in it. We did not miss without regret even the "combs" that hung "dangling in your face" at a shop which he describes, and which was standing till the improvements took place. The rest of the picture is still alive ("Trivia," book iii.):

"Where the fair columns of St Clement stand,

Whose straitened bounds encroach upon the Strand;
Where the low pent-house bows the walker's head,
And the rough pavement wounds the yielding tread;
Where not a post protects the narrow space,
And, strung in twines, combs dangle in thy face;
Summon at once thy courage, rouse thy care,
Stand firm, look back, be resolute, beware.
Forth issuing from steep lanes, the collier's steeds
Drag the black load; another cart succeeds;

A TALE FOR A CHIMNEY CORNER. A man who does not contribute his quota of grim stories now-a-days seems hardly to be free of the republic of letters. He is bound to wear a death's head as part of his insignia. If he does not frighten everybody, he is nobody. If he does not shock the ladies, what can be expected of him?

We confess we think very cheaply of these stories in general. A story, merely horrible or even awful, which contains no sentiment elevating to the human heart and its hopes, is a mere appeal to the least judicious, least healthy, and least masculine of our passions-fear. They whose attention can be gravely arrested by it are in a fit state to receive any absurdity with their wits off; and this is the cause why less talents are required to enforce it than in any other species of composition. With this opinion of such things, we may be allowed to say, that we would undertake to write a dozen horrible

stories in a day, all of which should make the common worshippers of power, who were not in the very healthiest condition, turn pale. We would tell of haunting old women, and knocking ghosts, and solitary lean hands, and Empusas on one leg, and ladies growing longer and longer, and horrid eyes meeting us through key-holes, and plaintive heads, and shrieking statues, and shocking anomalies of shape, and things which when seen drive people mad; and indigestion knows what besides. But who would measure talents with a leg of veal, or a German sausage? Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it

And wait impatient till the road grow clear."

There is a touch in the winter picture in the same poem, which everybody will recognise : "At White's the harnessed chairman idly stands,

And swings around his waist his tingling hands." The bewildered passenger in the Seven Dials is compared to Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth. And thus we come round to the point at which we began.

Before we rest our wings, however, we must take another dart over the city, as far as Stratford-at-Bow, where with all due tenderness for boarding-school French, a joke of Chaucer's has existed as a piece of local humour for nearly four hundred and fifty years. Speaking of the Prioress, who makes such a delicate figure among his Canterbury Pilgrims, he tells us, among her other accomplishments, that

"French she spake full faire and featously;" adding, with great gravity

"After the school of Stratford-atte-Bowe; For French of Paris was to her unknowe."

* The Old Bailey.

story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offences, particularly of blood and wounds. A child has a reasonable respect for a raw-head-and-bloodybones, because all images whatsoever of pain and terror are new and fearful to his inexperienced age: but sufferings merely physical (unless sublimited like those of Philoctetes) are commonplaces to grown man. Images, to become awful to him, must be removed from the grossness of the shambles. A death's head was a respectable thing in the hands of a poring monk, or of a nun compelled to avoid the idea of life and society, or of a hermit already buried in the desert. Holbein's "Dance of Death," in which every grinning skeleton leads along a man of rank, from the Pope to the gentleman, is a good memento mori; but there the skeletons have an

air of the ludicrous and satirical. If we were threatened with them in a grave way, as spectres, we should have a right to ask how they could walk about without their muscles. Thus, many of the tales written by such authors as the late Mr Lewis, who wanted sentiment to complete his talents, are quite puerile. When his spectral nuns go about bleeding, we think they ought in decency to have applied to some ghost of a

surgeon. His little grey men, who sit munching hearts, are of a piece with fellows that eat cats for a wager.

Stories that give mental pain to no purpose, or to very little purpose compared with the unpleasant ideas they excite of human nature, are as gross mistakes, in their way, as these, and twenty times as pernicious: for the latter become ludicrous to grown people. They originate also in the same extremes, either of callousness, or morbid want of excitement, as the others. But more of these hereafter. Our business at present is with things ghastly and ghostly.

A ghost story, to be a good one, should unite as much as possible objects such as they are in life with a preternatural spirit. And to be a perfect one at least, to add to the other utility of excitement a moral utility-they should imply some great sentiment; something that comes out of the next world to remind us of our duties in this; or something that helps to carry on the idea of our humanity into after-life, even when we least think we shall take it with us. When "the buried majesty of Denmark" revisits earth to speak to his son Hamlet, he comes armed, as he used to be, in his complete steel. His visor is raised, and the same fine face is there; only, in spite of his punishing errand and his own sufferings, with

"A countenance more in sorrow than anger." When Donne, the poet, in his thoughtful eagerness to reconcile life and death, had a figure of himself painted in a shroud, and laid by his bedside in a coffin, he did a higher thing than the monks and hermits with their skulls. It was taking his humanity with him into the other world, not affecting to lower the sense of it by regarding it piecemeal, or in the framework. Burns, in his "Tam o' Shanter," shows the dead in their coffins, after the same fashion. He does not lay bare to us their skeletons or refuse, things with which we can connect no sympathy or spiritual wonder. They still are flesh and body, to excite the one; yet so look and behave, inconsistent in their very consistency, as to excite the other.

"Coffins stood round like open presses,

Which showed the dead in their last dresses: And, by some devilish cantrip sleight, Each, in his cauld hand, held a light." Reanimation is perhaps the most ghastly of all ghastly things, uniting as it does an appearance of natural interdiction from the next world with a supernatural experience of it. Our human consciousness is jarred out of its self-possession. The extremes of habit and newness, of commonplace and astonishment, meet suddenly, without the kindly introduction of death and change; and the stranger appals us in proportion. When the account appeared the other day in the newspapers of the galvanised dead body, whose fea

tures as well as limbs underwent such contortions that it seemed as if it were about to rise up, one almost expected to hear, for the first time, news of the other world. Perhaps the most appalling figure in Spenser is that of Maleger (“ Faery Queene," book ii., c. 11):

"Upon a tygre swift and flerce he rode,

That as the winde ran underneath his lode,
Whiles his long legs nigh raught unto the ground:
Full large he was of limbe, and shoulders brode,
But of such subtle substance and unsound,
That like a ghost he seemed, whose grave-clothes
were unbound."

Mr Coleridge, in that voyage of his to the brink of all unutterable things, the "Ancient sentiment), does not set mere ghosts or hobgobMariner" (which works out, however, a fine lins to man the ship again, when its crew are dead; but reanimates, for a while, the crew themselves. There is a striking fiction of this sort in Sale's "Notes upon the Koran." Solomon dies during the building of the Temple, but his body remains leaning on a staff, and overlooking the workmen, as if it were alive; till a The contrast of the appearance of humanity with worm gnawing through the prop, he falls down. something mortal or supernatural, is always the more terrible in proportion as it is complete. In the pictures of the temptations of saints and hermits, where the holy person is surrounded, teased, and enticed, with devils and fantastic shapes, the most shocking phantasm is that of the beautiful woman. To return also to the "Ancient Mariner." The most appalling personage in Mr Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" is the spectre-woman, who is called Life-in-Death. He renders the most hideous abstraction more terrible than it could otherwise have been, by embodying it in its own reverse. "Death" not only "lives" in it, but the "unutterable" becomes uttered. To see such an unearthly passage end in such earthliness, seems at the moment to turn commonplace itself into a sort of spectral doubt. The Mariner, after describing the horrible calm, and the rotting sea, in which the ship was stuck, is speaking of a strange sail which he descried in the distance.

"The western wave was all a-flame,
The day was well-nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright sun;
When that strange ship drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the sun.

"And straight the sun was flecked with bars (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered, With broad and burning face.

"Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the sun,
Like restless gossameres?

"Are those her ribs, through which the sun

Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that woman's mate?
"Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold,
Her skin was as white as leprosy :
The Night-Mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold."

But we must come to Mr Coleridge's story with all our imagination upon us. Now let us put our knees a little nearer the fire, and tell a homelier one about life-in-death. The groundwork of it is in Sandys's "Commentary upon Ovid," and quoted from Sabinus.*

A gentleman of Bavaria, of a noble family, was so afflicted at the death of his wife, that, unable to bear the company of any other person, he gave himself entirely up to a solitary way of living. This was the more remarkable in him, as he had been a man of jovial habits, fond of his wine and visitors, and impatient of having his numerous indulgencies contradicted. But in the same temper, perhaps, might be found the cause of his sorrow; for, though he would be impatient with his wife, as with others, yet he loved her as one of the gentlest wills he had; and the sweet and unaffected face which she always turned round upon his anger might have been a thing more easy for him to trespass upon while living, than to forget when dead and gone. His very anger towards her, compared with that towards others, was a relief to him, and rather a wish to refresh himself in the balmy feeling of her patience than to make her unhappy herself, or to punish her, as some would have done, for that virtuous contrast to his own vice.

But whether he bethought himself, after her death, that this was a very selfish mode of loving; or whether, as some thought, he had wearied out her life with habits so contrary to her own; or whether, as others reported, he had put it to a fatal risk by some lordly piece of self-will, in consequence of which she had caught a fever on the cold river during a night of festivity; he surprised even those who thought that he loved her by the extreme bitterness of his grief. The very mention of festivity, though he was patient for the first day or two, afterwards threw him into a passion of rage; but, by degrees, even his rage followed his other old habits. He was gentle, but ever silent. He ate and drank but sufficient to keep him alive, and used to spend the greater part of the day in the spot where his wife was buried.

He was going there one evening in a very melancholy manner, with his eyes turned towards the earth, and had just entered the rails

*The Saxon Latin poet, we presume, Professor of Belles-Lettres at Frankfort. We know nothing of him except from a biographical dictionary.

of the burial-ground, when he was accosted by the mild voice of somebody coming to meet him. "It is a blessed evening, sir," said the voice. The gentleman looked up. Nobody but himself was allowed to be in the place at that hour, and yet he saw with astonishment a young chorister approaching him. He was going to express some wonder when, he said, the modest though assured look of the boy, and the extreme beauty of his countenance, which glowed in the setting sun before him, made an irresistible addition to the singular sweetness of his voice, and he asked him, with an involuntary calmness and a gesture of respect, not what he did there, but what he wished. "Only to wish you all good things," answered the stranger, who had now come up; "and to give you this letter." The gentleman took the letter, and saw upon it, with a beating yet scarcely bewildered heart, the handwriting of his wife. He raised his eyes again to speak to the boy, but he was gone. He cast them far and near round the place, but there were no traces of a passenger. He then opened the letter; and by the divine light of the setting sun, read these words:

"TO MY DEAR HUSBAND, WHO SORROWS

Otto (for such, it seems, was the gentleman's name) went instantly, calmly, quickly, yet with a sort of benumbed being, to the public walk. He felt, but with only a half-consciousness, as if he glided without a body. But all his spirit was awake, eager, intensely conscious. It seemed to him as if there had been but two things in the world--Life and Death; and that Death was dead. All else appeared to have been a dream. He had awaked from a waking state, and found himself all eye, and spirit, and locomotion. He said to himself once, as he went, "This is not a dream. I will ask my great ancestors to-morrow to my new bridal feast, for they are alive." Otto had been calm at first, but something of old and triumphant feelings seemed again to come over him. he again too proud and confident? Did his earthly humours prevail again, when he thought them least upon him? We shall see.

Was

The Bavarian arrived at the public walk. It was full of people with their wives and children, enjoying the beauty of the evening. Something like common fear came over him, as he went in