e no doubt that he is strongly inclined
to superstition. He is naturally credulous, and passes so much of his
time searching out popular traditions and supernatural tales, that his
mind has probably become infected by them. He has lately been immersed
in the Demonolatria of Nicholas Remigus, concerning supernatural
occurrences in Lorraine, and the writings of Joachimus Camerius,
called by Vossius the Phoenix of Germany; and he entertains the ladies
with stories from them, that make them almost afraid to go to bed at
night. I have been charmed myself with some of the wild little
superstitions which he has adduced from Blefkenius, Scheffer, and
others, such as those of the Laplanders about the domestic spirits
which wake them at night, and summon them to go and fish; of Thor, the
deity of thunder, who has power of life and death, health and
sickness, and who, armed with the rainbow, shoots his arrows at those
evil demons that live on the tops of rocks and mountains, and infest
the lakes; of the Jubles or Juhlafolket, vagrant troops of spirits,
which roam the air, and wander up and down by forests and mountains,
and the moonlight sides of hills.

The parson never openly professes his belief in ghosts, but I have
remarked that he has a suspicious way of pressing great names into the
defence of supernatural doctrines, and making philosophers and saints
fight for him. He expatiates at large on the opinions of the ancient
philosophers about larves, or nocturnal phantoms, the spirits of the
wicked, which wandered like exiles about the earth; and about those
spiritual beings which abode in the air, but descended occasionally to
earth, and mingled among mortals, acting as agents between them and
the gods. He quotes also from Philo the rabbi, the contemporary of the
apostles, and, according to some, the friend of St. Paul, who says
that the air is full of spirits of different ranks; some destined to
exist for a time in mortal bodies, from which being emancipated, they
pass and repass between heaven and earth, as agents or messengers in
the service of the deity.

But the worthy little man assumes a bolder tone, when he quotes from
the fathers of the church; such as St. Jerome, who gives it as the
opinion of all the doctors, that the air is filled with powers opposed
to each other; and Lactantius, who says that corrupt and dangerous
spirits wander over the earth, and seek to console themselves for
their own fall by effecting the r