of
healing, and the cure of the troubled souls and bodies of men and women,
which are not accorded but at odds with nature and supernature. The
spirits of discord are indeed always with us; and whether you see them
as witches, disguised in the living human form, or as monstrous and
terrifying dream-figures, or as floating impalpable atmospheres, they
are vigilantly to be guarded against. We know

"Vervain and dill
Hinders witches from their will!"

in the old herbals; but we need new drugs. As for that witch which hath
haunted all of us, "Maladicta," Lilly in his _Astrology_ has a remedy.
"Take unguentum populeum, and Vervain and Hypericon, and put a red-hot
iron into it: You must anoint the back-bone, or wear it in your breast."

The haunting apparitions are not all of earth. Cornelius Agrippa, in his
book of the Secret Doctrine, shows that they are astral too. The
familiar spirits of Mars, in his account, are no lovelier than Macbeth's
witches:--"They appear in a tall body, cholerick, a filthy countenance,
of colour brown, swarthy or red, having horns, like Harts' Horns, and
gryphon's claws, and bellowing like wild Bulls."

But the spirits of Mercury are delightful. They indeed are "of colour
clear and bright, like unto a knight armed,--and the motion of them is
as it were silver-coloured clouds." So, if Mars has troubled the world,
as in the unhappy history of our own time, we must hope for the brighter
forms, and the remedial and aerial messengers of Mercury.

We may seem to have strayed from the proper boundaries in going so far.
But it is one of the offices of this book to widen the area of research,
and relate the ghost-story anew to the whole literature of wonder and
imagination. Such sagas as that which Dr Douglas Hyde has translated
with consummate art from the Irish, "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse," which
Mr W.B. Yeats called a little masterpiece; or Boccaccio's story of the
spectre-hounds that pulled down the daughter of Anastasio, or Scott's
"Wandering Willie's Tale," or Hawker's "Cruel Coppinger," or Edgar Poe's
"Fall of the House of Usher," are of their kind not to be beaten. And in
their own way some of the later records are as telling. One can take the
book as a text-book of the supernatural, or as a story-book of that
middle world which has given us the ghosts that Homer and Shakespeare
conjured up.

ERNEST RHYS.

I

GHOST STORIES FROM LITERARY SOURCES

I

THE FALL O