criminal code. De Béranger then stood only liable to punishment on the second charge, "d'avoir commis le délit d'outrage à la morale public et religieuse ;" and his sentence for this offence was, three months' imprisonment, a fine of 500 francs, (207.), and the suppression of his work. The announcement of so slight a penalty on charges so serious, the small majority of the jury by which he was convicted, and the general feeling that the attack was prompted much less by respect for religion and "bonnes mœurs" than by political malice, left De Béranger and his friends no triumph to desire. He enjoyed his imprisonment and paid his fine; for the first was a continued fête, and his wealthy friends showered offers upon him, which, if accepted, would have repaid his forfeited francs a thousand-fold. But he declined all assistance. The profits of his publication produced a sum which gives him an annual income of about 807., and on this he lives independent, respectable, and content. He has written but little since his trial. An occasional Song escapes him, as it were, without effort; and if he does not court, he has too much gallantry to decline, the visits of the willing Muse. In the spirit of this independence De Béranger passes his days. The soundness of his judgment causes him to be consulted in almost every important question, by several of the leading members of the Coté Gauche; and he is not more valued in public as a poet, than in his private circle as a politician. Literary friends continually urge him to write, and we may safely say that all parties look anxiously for the publication of those Idyls already alluded to, and which are pronounced to be admirable by many competent judges to whom they have been shewn. It is natural to suppose that a man, who possesses so much conversational talent, and who is so intently listened to, has had many of his sayings recorded. We shall content ourselves with citing one of these. When urged to compose a song against a celebrated statesman then in disgrace, he replied, " à la bonne heure, quand il sera ministre." We should be glad to see this reply reprinted in as many multiplications as the copies of his songs, which are altogether, including the editions of Bruxelles and Geneva, 35,000. In conclusion we have only to say, that though we could wish to give the reader an idea of De Béranger in an English translation, we feel the difficulty of the task, and the probability of our failure if we should attempt it. But we shall give one specimen in the original : Le Vieux Drapeau. De mes vieux compagnons de gloire, Nos souvenirs m'ont enivré; Le vin m'a rendu la mémoire. Fiers de mes exploits et de leurs, J'ai mon drapeau dans ma chaumière. Qui ternit ses nobles couleurs? Il est caché sous l'humble paille Lui qui, sûr de vaincre, a volé : Chargé de lauriers et de fleurs, Nos fils jouaient avec sa lance. Son aigle est resté dans la poudre, Quand, &c. Las d'errer avec la victoire, Mais il est là près de mes armes : Viens, mon Drapeau! Viens, mon espoir! Le Ciel entendra la prière. Oui, je secoûrai la poussière G. ACCOUNT OF AN APPARITION, Seen at Star-Cross, in Devonshire, the 23d July, 1823. ""Tis true, 'tis certain, man, though dead, retains Part of himself; th' immortal mind remains : POPE. I AM perfectly aware of the predicament in which I am placing myself, when in the present age of incredulity I venture to commit to paper, in all sincerity of spirit and fulness of conviction, a deliberate and circumstantial account of an Apparition. Imposter and visionary, knave and fool, these are the alternate horns of the dilemma on which I shall be tossed with sneers of contempt, or smiles of derision; every delusion practised by fraud or credulity, from the Cock-lane Ghost, down to the Reverend Mr. Colton, and the Sampford Spectre, will be faithfully registered against me, and I shall be finally dismissed, according to the temperament of the reader, either with a petulant rebuke for attempting to impose such exploded superstition upon an enlightened public; or with a sober and friendly recommendation to get my head shaved, and betake myself to some place of safe custody with as little delay as may be. In the arrogance of my supposed wisdom, I should myself, only a few weeks ago, have probably adopted one of these courses towards any other similar delinquent, which will secure me from any splenetic feeling, however boisterous may be the mirth, or bitter the irony, with which I may be twitted and taunted for the following narration. I have no sinister purposes to answer, no particular creed to advocate, no theory to establish; and writing with the perfect conviction of truth, and the full possession of my faculties, I am determined not to suppress what I conscientiously believe to be facts, merely because they may militate against received opinions, or happen to be inconsistent with the ordinary course of human experience. The author of the Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, represents Berkeley as teaching us, "that external objects are nothing but ideas in our minds; that matter exists not but in our minds; and that, independent of us and our faculties, the earth, the sun, and the starry heavens have no existence at all; that a lighted candle is not white, nor luminous, nor round, nor divisible, nor extended; but that for any thing we know, or can ever know to the contrary, it may be an Egyptian pyramid, the King of Prussia, a mad dog, the island of Madagascar, Saturn's ring, one of the Pleiades, or nothing at all." If this be a faithful representation of Berkeley's theory, it may be adduced as a striking illustration of the perversity of human reason, that such a man shall be deemed a philosopher, and persuade bishops and divines, in spite of the evidence of their senses, to adopt his notions, and deny the existence of matter; while the poor wight, who, in conformity to the evidence of his senses maintains the existence of disemoodied spirit, is hooted and run down as a driveller and a dotard. Dr. Johnson's argument, that the universal belief in ghosts, in all ages and among all nations, confirms the fact of their apparition, is futile and inconclusive; for the same reasoning would establish the truth of necromancy, witchcraft, idolatry, and other superstitions; but the opposers of this belief not only brand as impostors all those who relate their own experiences of its confirmation; they not only repudiate the Agatho-dæmon of Socrates, and slight the averment of Scripture, that Saul desired the Witch of Endor to raise up the spirits of those whom he should name; but they deny even the possibility of the fact. To admit a posthumous existence in the next world, and reject the competency of nature to accomplish a similar mystery in this, is surely an unwarranted limitation of her powers. Who shall circumscribe the metamorphoses of our being? When we start from the ante-natal void into existence, the change is certainly wonderful; but it is still more strange, startling, and incomprehensible, when we quit life in the fulness of intellect, and return into the invisible world. In the first case, we advance from nonentity to a very confined state of consciousness, to an animal existence, for an infant has no mind. That celestial portion of our system is evolved by the painful elaboration of time and of our own efforts; it requires a series of years to perfect its inscrutable developement; and is this sublime image and emanation of the Deity to be suddenly, instantly, degraded into a clod of earth, an inert lump of matter, without undergoing any intermediate state of VOL. VI. No. 34.-1823. 40 existence between death and final resurrection? Abstract theory sanctions the supposition of Ghosts; and by what authority do we gainsay those who solemnly declare that they have beheld them? They never appear, it is urged, to more than one person at a time, which is a strong presumption of individual falsehood or delusion. How so?-this may be the law of their manifestation. If I press the corners of my eyes, I see consecutive circles of light, like a rainbow; nobody else can discern them but will it be therefore maintained that I do not? It is notorious, that in dreams objects are presented to us with even a more vivid distinctness than they assume to the visual organ; but it would be idle to assert that those configurations were not presented to us, because they were invisible to others. Our waking eyes may indeed be made the "fools of our other senses, or else worth all the rest ;”— granted; but still you may give us credit for the sincerity of our relation, for we pretend not to describe apparitions that other men have seen, but those which we ourselves have witnessed. It may not be unimportant to remark, that so far from my being subject to the blue devils and vapours with which hypochondriacs and invalids are haunted, I possess that happy physical organization, which ensures almost uninterrupted health of body and mind, and which, in the elasticity and buoyancy of my spirit, renders the sensation of mere existence an enjoyment. Though I reside in the country, winter has for me no gloom; nature has prepared herself for its rigours; they are customary; and every thing seems to harmonize with their infliction ; but for the same reason that the solitude of a town is desolating and oppressive, while the loneliness of the country is soothing and grateful, I do feel the sadness of perpetual fogs and rains in July, although they excite no melancholy feeling at the season of their natural occurrence. To see one's favourite flowers laying down their heads to die; one's plantation strewed with leaves not shaken off in the fulness of age, but beaten to earth in the bloom of youth: here a noble tree laid prostrate; and there a valuable field of corn lodged in the swampy soil (which were familiar objects in July last), is sufficient to excite melancholy associations in the most cheerful temperament. Confessing that mine was not altogether proof against their influence, and leaving to the caviller and the sceptic the full benefit of this admission, I proceed to a simple statement of the fact which has elicited these preliminary observations. Actuated by the disheartened dulness of the scene to which I have alluded, I had written to my friend Mr. George Staples, of Exeter, requesting him to walk over some day and dine with me, as I well knew his presence was an instant antidote to mental depression, not so much from the possession of any wit or humour, as from his unaffected kindness and amiability, the exuberance of his animal spirits, the inexhaustible fund of his laughter, which was perpetually waiting for the smallest excuse to burst out of his heart, and the contagion of his hilarity, which had an instant faculty of communicating itself to others. On the day following the transmission of this letter, as I was sitting in an alcove to indulge my afternoon meditation, I found myself disturbed by what I imagined to be the ticking of my repeater; but, recollecting that I had left it in the house, I discovered the noise proceeded from that little insect of inauspicious augury, the death-watch. De spising the puerile superstitions connected with this pulsation, I gave it no farther notice, and proceeded towards the house, when, as I passed an umbrageous plantation, I was startled by a loud wailing shriek, and presently a screech-owl flew out immediately before me. It was the first time one of those ill-omened birds had ever crossed my path; I combined it with the memento-mori I had just heard, although I blushed at my own weakness in thinking them worthy of an association; and, as I walked forward, I encountered my servant, who put a letter into my hand, which I observed to be sealed with black wax. It was from the clerk of my poor friend, informing me that he had been that morning struck by an apoplectic fit, which had occasioned his almost instantaneous death! The reader may spare the sneer that is flickering upon his features: I draw no inference whatever from the omens that preceded this intelligence: I am willing to consider them as curious coincidences, totally unconnected with the startling apparition which shortly afterwards assailed me. Indifferent as to death myself, I am little affected by it in others. The doom is so inevitable; it is so doubtful whether the parties be not generally gainers by the change; it is so certain that we enter not at all into this calculation, but bewail our deprivation, whether of society, protection, or emolument, with a grief purely selfish, that I run no risk of placing myself in the predicament of the inconsolable widow, who was reproached by Franklin with not having yet forgiven God Almighty. Still, however, there was something so awful in the manner of my friend's death, the hilarity I had anticipated from his presence formed so appalling a contrast with his actual condition, that my mind naturally sunk into a mood of deep sadness and solemnity. Reaching the house in this frame of thought, I closed the library window-shutters as I passed, and entering the room by a glass-door, seated myself in a chair that fronted the garden. Scarcely a minute had elapsed, when l I was thrilled by the strange wailful howl of my favourite spaniel, who had followed me into the apartment, and came trembling and crouching to my feet, occasionally turning his eyes to the back of the chamber, and again instantly reverting them with every demonstration of terror and agony. Mine instinctively took the same direction, when, notwithstanding the dimness of the light, I plainly and indisputably recognised the apparition of my friend sitting motionless in the great arm-chair!! It is easy to be courageous in theory, not difficult to be bold in practice, when the mind has time to collect its energies; but taken as I was by surprise, I confess, that astonishment and terror so far mastered all my faculties, that, without daring to cast a second glance towards the vision, I walked rapidly back into the garden, followed by the dog, who still testified the same agitation and alarm. Here I had leisure to recover from my first perturbation; and as my thoughts rallied, I endeavoured to persuade myself that I had been deluded by some conjuration of the mind, or some spectral deception of the visual organ. But in either case, how account for the terror of the dog? He could neither be influenced by superstition, nor could his unerring sight betray him into groundless alarm, yet it was incontestable that we had both been appalled by the same object. Soon recovering my natural fortitude of spirit, I resolved, whatever might be the consequences, to return and address the apparition. I even began to |