something singular upon my first entrance. He went up stairs with me, but evidently hesitated occasionally as he went. When he got into his chamber, he expressed some apprehension lest I' should consider him as insane, and send him to the asylum at York, whither I had not long before sent one of his potcompanions. Whence all these apprehensions ?What is the matter with you?-Why do you look so full of terror? He then sat down, and gave me a history of his complaint.

"About a week or ten days before, after drawing some liquor in his cellar for a girl, he desired her to take away the oysters which lay upon the floor, and which he supposed she had dropped ;—the girl, thinking him drunk, laughed at him, and went out of the

room.

"He endeavoured to take them up himself, and to his great astonishment could find none. He was then going out of the cellar, when at the door he saw a soldier, whose looks he did not like, attempting to enter the room in which he then was. He desired to know what he wanted there; and upon receiving no answer, but, as he thought, a menacing look, he sprung forward to seize the intruder, and to his no small surprise found it a phantom. The cold sweat hung upon his brow-he trembled in every limb. It was the dusk of the evening as he passed along the passage the phantom flitted before his eyes-he attempted to follow it, resolutely determined to satisfy himself; but as it vanished, there appeared others, and some of them at a distance, and he exhausted himself by fruitless attempts to lay hold of them. He

hastened to his family, with marks of terror and confusion; for, though a man of the most undaunted resolution, he confessed to me that he never had before felt what it was to be completely terrified. During the whole of that night, he was constantly tormented with a variety of spectres, sometimes of people who had been long dead, and other times of friends who were living; and harassed himself with continually getting out of bed, to ascertain whether the people he saw were real or not. Nor could he always distinguish who were and who were not real customers, as they came into the rooms in the daytime, so that his conduct became the subject of observation; and though it was for a time attributed to private drinking, it was at last suspected to arise from some other cause; and when I was sent for, the family were under the full conviction that he was insane, although they confessed, that, in every thing else, except the foolish notion of seeing apparitions, he was perfectly rational and steady; and during the whole of the time that he was relating his case to me, and his mind was fully occupied, he felt the most gratifying relief, for in all that time he had not seen one apparition; and he was elated with pleasure indeed, when I told him I should not send him to York, for his was a complaint I could cure at home. But whilst I was writing a prescription, and had suffered him to be at rest, I saw him suddenly get up, and go with a hurried step to the door. What did you do that for?— he looked ashamed and mortified:-he had been so well whilst in conversation with me, that he could not

believe that the soldier whom he saw enter the room was a phantom, and he got up to convince himself.

"I need not here detail particularly the medical treatment adopted; but it may be as well just to state the circumstances which probably led to the complaint, and the principle of cure. Some time previously he had had a quarrel with a drunken soldier, who attempted, against his inclination, to enter his house at an unseasonable hour, and in the struggle to turn him out, the soldier drew his bayonet, and, having struck him across the temples, divided the temporal artery; in consequence of which he bled a very large quantity before a surgeon arrived, as there was no one who knew that, in such a case, simple compression with the finger, upon the spouting artery, would stop the effusion of blood. He had scarcely recovered from the effects of this loss of blood, when he undertook to accompany a friend in his walkingmatch against time, in which he went forty-two miles in nine hours. Elated with success, he spent the whole of the following day in drinking, but found himself, a short time afterwards, so much out of health, that he came to the resolution of abstaining altogether from liquor. It was in the course of the week following that abstinence from his usual habits, that he had the disease. It kept increasing for several days till I saw him, allowing him no time for rest. Never was he able to get rid of these shadows by night when in bed, nor by day when in motion; though he sometimes walked miles with that view, and at others got into a variety of company. He told

me he suffered even bodily pain, from the severe lashing of a waggoner with his whip, who came every night to a particular corner of his bed, but who always disappeared when he jumped out of bed to retort, which he did several nights successively. The whole of this complaint was effectually removed by bleeding with leeches, and active purgatives. After the first employment of these means, he saw no more phantoms in the daytime; and after the second, only once saw his milkman in his bed-room, between sleeping and waking. He has remained perfectly rational and well ever since, and can go out in the dark as well as ever, having received a perfect conviction of the nature of ghosts."

CHAPTER VIII.

SPECTRAL ILLUSIONS ARISING FROM A HIGHLY-EXCITED STATE OF NERVOUS IRRITABILITY ACTING GENERALLY ON THE SYSTEM.

"This bodiless creation Ecstacy
Is very cunning in."—HAMLET.

THE examples brought forward in the last chapter have, I trust, sufficiently illustrated the delusions liable to occur from an extremely morbid state of the nervous system. We had previously seen, that although an undue vividness of ideas directly results from certain changes induced in the circulating fluid, such changes might not only be traced to an inherent quality of the blood, arising from constitutional affections, or to the suppression of customary and natural evacuations, but that they might also ensue from adventitious agents of a chemical nature introduced into the system. In extending these researches, we further added to such causes of spectral impressions the influence of the nervous system, which nothing appeared more forcibly calculated to illustrate than inflammatory states of the brain or its membranes. Such extreme cases, therefore, of nervous irritability, which take their rise from manifest derangements of organic structure, give us the best reason to expect