f fiction. But has it not grown and increased since Wordsworth
wanted the "Ancient Mariner" to have "a profession and a character,"
since Southey called that poem a Dutch piece of work, since Lamb had to
pretend to dislike its "miracles"? Why, as science becomes more cock-
sure, have men and women become more and more fond of old follies, and
more pleased with the stirring of ancient dread within their veins?

As the visible world is measured, mapped, tested, weighed, we seem to
hope more and more that a world of invisible romance may not be far from
us, or, at least, we care more and more to follow fancy into these airy
regions, _et inania regna_. The supernatural has not ceased to tempt
romancers, like Alexandre Dumas, usually to their destruction; more
rarely, as in Mrs. Oliphant's "Beleaguered City," to such success as they
do not find in the world of daily occupation. The ordinary shilling
tales of "hypnotism" and mesmerism are vulgar trash enough, and yet I can
believe that an impossible romance, if the right man wrote it in the
right mood, might still win us from the newspapers, and the stories of
shabby love, and cheap remorses, and commonplace failures.

"But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill."

CHAPTER XVI: AN OLD SCOTTISH PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER

ADVERTISEMENT

"If any Gentlemen, and others, will be pleased to send me any
relations about Spirits, Witches, and Apparitions, In any part of the
Kingdom; or any Information about the Second Sight, Charms, Spells,
Magic, and the like, They shall oblige the Author, and have them
publisht to their satisfaction.

"Direct your Relations to Alexander Ogstouns, Shop Stationer, at the
foot of the Plain-stones, at Edinburgh, on the North-side of the
Street."

Is this not a pleasing opportunity for Gentlemen, and Others, whose Aunts
have beheld wraiths, doubles, and fetches? It answers very closely to
the requests of the Society for Psychical Research, who publish, as some
one disparagingly says, "the dreams of the middle classes." Thanks to
Freedom, Progress, and the decline of Superstition, it is now quite safe
to see apparitions, and even to publish the narrative of their
appearance.

But when Mr. George Sinclair, sometime Professor of Philosophy in
Glasgow, issued the invitation which I have copied, at the end of his
"Satan's Invisible World Discovered," {12} the vocation of a seer was not
so secure from harm.