nd, having once received either the
one or the other, is likely to retain them as long as it subsists in the
body. All these deplorable follies proceed from wrong and unworthy
apprehensions of God's providence, in his care of man, and government of
the world. Surely no reasonable creature can ever imagine, that the
all-wise God should inspire owls and ravens to hoot out the elegies of
dying men; that he should have ordained a fatality in numbers, inflict
punishment without an offence; and that being one amongst the fatal
number at a table, should be a crime (though contrary to no command) not
to be expiated but by death! Thus folly, like gunpowder, runs in a train
from one generation to another, preserved and conveyed by the perpetual
tradition of tattling gossips.

I now conclude this Introduction; and, in the following pages, shall
present my readers with some admirable Essays on the subject by eminent
writers: and a Collection of Stories will follow, which, I trust, will
not only entertain, but likewise convince the _thinking_ part of mankind
of the absurdity in believing every silly tale without first tracing
the promulgation to its original source; for

"Whatever warms the heart, or fills the head,
As the mind opens, and its functions spread,
Imagination plies her dangerous art,
And pours it all upon the peccant part."

J. TAYLOR.

_London, March 20, 1815._

AN

ESSAY

ON

GHOSTS AND APPARITIONS.

There is no folly more predominant, in the country at least, than a
ridiculous and superstitious fear of ghosts and apparitions. Servants,
nurses, old women, and others of the same standard of wisdom, to pass
away the tediousness of a winter's evening, please and terrify
themselves, and the children who compose their audience, with strange
relations of these things, till they are even afraid of removing their
eyes from one another, for fear of seeing a _pale spectre_ entering the
room. Frightful ideas raised in the minds of children take so strong a
possession of the faculties, that they often remain for ever fixed, and
all the arguments of reason are unable to remove them. Hence it is,
that so many grown-up people still keep the ridiculous fears of their
infancy. I know a lady, of very good sense in other things, who, if she
is left by herself after ten o'clock at night, will faint away at the
terror of thinking some horrid spec