him, in all the buoyancy of childhood, restored apparently to health and vigour. ‘I am delighted, my dear lord,’ he exclaimed, ‘to see you, but, for Heaven’s sake, go immediately within doors—it is death to you to be here at this time of night.’ The child made no reply, but, turning round, was quickly out of sight. Mr. Alsop, unspeakably surprised, hurried to the house. Here all was distress and confusion, for Lord William, had expired a few minutes before he reached the portico.
“This sad event being with all speed announced to the Marquis of Lansdowne, in London, orders were soon received at Bowood, for the interment of the corpse, and the arrangement of the funeral procession. The former was directed to take place at High Wickham, in the vault which contained the remains of Lord William’s mother; the latter was appointed to halt at two specified places, during the two nights on which it would be on the road. Mr. Jervis and Dr. Priestley attended the body. On the first day of the melancholy journey, the latter gentleman, who had hitherto said little on the subject of the appearance to Mr. Alsop, suddenly addressed his companion with considerable emotion in nearly these words: ‘There are some very singular circumstances connected with this event, Mr. Jervis, and a most remarkable coincidence between a dream of the late Lord William and our present mournful engagement. A few weeks ago, as I was passing by his room door one morning, he called me to his bedside—‘Doctor,’ said he, ‘what is your Christian name?’ ‘Surely,’ said I, ‘you know it is Joseph.’ ‘Well, then,’ replied he, in a lively manner, ‘if you are a Joseph, you can interpret a dream for me, which I had last night. I dreamed, Doctor, that I set out upon a long journey; that I stopped the first night at Hungerford, whither I went without touching the ground; that I flew from thence to Salt Hill, where I remained the next night; and arrived at High Wickham on the third day, where my dear mamma, beautiful as an angel, stretched out her arms and caught me within them.’ ‘Now,’ continued the Doctor, ‘these are precisely the places where the dear child’s corpse will remain on this and the succeeding night, before we reach his mother’s vault, which is finally to receive it.’ ”
Now here is a tissue of events, as strange as they are circumstantial; and I might set myself to illustrate the apparition by the agitated state of Mr. Alsop’s mind, were it not for the utter fallacy of this mysterious story, on which the late Rev. Mr. Jervis, of Brompton, whom I knew and esteemed, deemed it essential to publish “Remarks,” in the year 1831. From these, you will learn that Mr. Warner is in error regarding the “address, designation, and age of the Hon. William Granville Petty, the nature and duration of his disorder, and the name of the place of interment.” And then it comes out that neither Dr. Priestley nor Mr. Jervis attended the funeral, nor conversed at any time on the circumstance. And, regarding Mr. Alsop’s death-bed declaration, Mr. Jervis, who was in his intimate confidence, never heard of such a thing until Mr. Warner’s volume was pointed out to him.
This strange story, believed by good and wise men, involved a seeming mystery, until we read in Mr. Jervis’s “Remarks,” one simple sentence in reference to the gentleman by whom it was first told—that “the enthusiasm of his nature predisposed him to entertain some visionary and romantic notions of supernatural appearances.”
PHANTASY FROM MENTAL ASSOCIATION.
“This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation, ecstacy
Is very cunning in.”
Hamlet.
Cast. How delightful to wander thus among the reliques of that age, when her citizens, the colonists of Britain, migrated from imperial Rome, and built their Venta Silurum, or Caerwent, from the ruins of which these now mouldering walls were formed. As we trod those pictured pavements of Caerwent beneath the blue sky of yesternoon, I felt all the inspiration of Astrophel, and a pageantry of Roman patricians seemed to sweep along the fragments of those painted tesselæ.
“Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain,
Our thoughts are link’d by many a hidden chain;
Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise,
Each stamps his image as the other flies.”
There is a happy combination of antiquity and simplicity in this land of Gwent. Almost within the shadow of the Roman Caerleon, the Monmouthshire peasants, at Easter and Whitsuntide, assemble to plant fresh flowers on the graves of their relatives. How I love these old customs! the chanting of the carol at Christmas; its very homeliness so redolent of love and friendship: and that quaint old Moresco dance which was introduced to England by the noble Katherine of Arragon. Then the pastimes of Halloween and Hogmanay in Scotland, and the Walpurgis night of Germany, and the May-day in Ireland, the festival of their patron saint, and the Midsummer night when the bealfires cast an universal lumination over the fells of the green isle, and the still more sacred fire, lighted up in November in worship of their social deity, Samhuin, whose potent influence charms the warm hearts of all the maids of Erin around the winter hearth of their homes. I listen unto these pleasures as if they were mine own: as children associate all the legends of their school histories with themselves and their own time.
In every spot of this land of Wales the very names of the olden time are before us: the romaunt of Prince Arthur and his knights is ever present to our fancy, for he hath, as on the crag that towers over Edinburgh, a seat on many a mountain rock in Wales; as the Cadair Arthur over Crickhowel, and the semicircle on Little Doward, and Maen Arthur on the moors of Cardigan.
Astr. I never look on scenes like this without the echo of that beautiful apostrophe of Johnson, among the ruins of Iona, whispering in my ear.
Inspired by such an influence, I have roamed over the Isle of Elephanta, and gazed on its gorgeous pagoda hewn from the rock, and adorned by gigantic statues and mysterious symbols of the same eternal granite: on the beauteous excavations of Salsette: on the wonders of Elora, and on the classic reliques of Persepolis: on the beautiful columns of Palmyra, the Tadmor in the wilderness, where Solomon built his “fenced city;” as well as those arabesque and gothic temples, the abbeys and cathedrals of our own island. I too have almost dared to think that superstition and idolatry might be forgiven for the splendours of its architecture, even for the elevation of those giant blocks of Stonehenge and Avebury, the mouldering altars of the druidical priesthood, in the city consecrated to their god.
So do I feel in this court-yard of Chepstow Castle, whilom the Est-brig-hoel of Doomsdaye Booke, and in later times so blended with English history. See you not the Conqueror and his knights in panoply on prancing steeds before you? See you not Fitz Osborne and Warren, its former lords, loom out upon your sight? And, lo! the portal opens, and the dungeon of Henry Martin, the regicide, yawns like a bottomless pit before us. The shade of Charles Stewart rises; and again the phantom of Cromwell, uttering his epithets of scorn, as if the wanton puritan were about to dash the ink in the face of his colleague as he signed the death-warrant of the king. And now the scene changes, and behold the doomed one is chained to those massive rings of iron, and there with groaning dies.
Ev. I am most willing that you should thus indulge in your wild rhapsody, Astrophel, for it is the happy illustration of one potent cause of spectral illusion—association. There are few whose minds are not excited in some degree when they tread the localities of interesting events. By memory and its combinations something like an inspired vision may often seem to come over us—a day-dream. Or, if we have been brooding over a subject or gazing on the relics of departed or absent love and friendship: or while we stand on a spot consecrated by genius, or when we have passed the scene of a murder, still will association fling around us its visionary shadows.
Shortly after the death of Maupertuis, the president of the Academy of Berlin, Mr. Gleditsch, the curator of natural history, was traversing the hall in solitude, when he saw the phantom of the president standing in an angle of the room with his eyes intensely fixed on him: an effect perfectly explicable by the association of intense impression of memory in the very arena of the president’s former dignity.
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