tion says:

"Dismiss me. Enough!"

The spirit, likewise, in "2 Henry VI." (i. 4) utters these words:

"Ask what thou wilt. That I had said and done!"

Spirits were supposed to maintain an obdurate silence till interrogated
by the persons to whom they made their special appearance.[75] Thus
Hamlet, alluding to the appearance of the ghost, asks Horatio (i. 2):

"Did you not speak to it?"

Whereupon he replies:

"My lord, I did;
But answer made it none: yet once, methought
It lifted up its head and did address
Itself to motion, like as it would speak."

[75] We may compare the words "unquestionable spirit" in "As
You Like It" (iii. 2), which means "a spirit averse to
conversation."

The walking of spirits seems also to have been enjoined by way of
penance. The ghost of Hamlet's father (i. 5) says:

"I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg'd away."

And further on (iii. 2) Hamlet exclaims:

"It is a damned ghost that we have seen."

This superstition is referred to by Spenser in his "Fairy Queen" (book
i. canto 2):

"What voice of damned ghost from Limbo lake
Or guileful spright wand'ring in empty ayre,
Sends to my doubtful eares these speeches rare?"

According to a universal belief prevalent from the earliest times, it
was supposed that ghosts had some particular reason for quitting the
mansions of the dead, "such as a desire that their bodies, if unburied,
should receive Christian rites of sepulture, that a murderer might be
brought to due punishment," etc.[76] On this account Horatio ("Hamlet,"
i. 1) invokes the ghost:

"If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me."

And in a later scene (i. 4) Hamlet says:

"Say, why is this? wherefore? What should we do?"

[76] Douce's "Illustrations of Shakespeare," pp. 450, 451.

The Greeks believed that such as had not received funeral rites would be
excluded from Elysium; and thus the wandering shade of Patroclus
appears to Achilles in his sleep, and demands the performance of his
funeral. The younger Pliny tells a story of a haunted house at Athens,
in which a ghost played all kinds of pranks, owing to his funeral rites
having been neglected. A further