These were inscribed by the owner over the gate in a half-faith that they might be efficacious in bringing him the good fortune he desired, and there they may still be seen to this day, or rather they were to be seen there when I last passed that way. But so many changes are taking place in that quarter that it is possible they may have been removed. Reumont tells this story, I believe, in his book on Rome-and " se non è vero, è ben trovato."

Belton. Have you ever looked up the subject of magic?

Mallett. Yes, a good deal; and very curious is the literature on this subject. Some of the old writers give you, for instance, complete formulas to raise spirits of various kinds, and seem to have had an absolute belief in their efficacy. It seems to be pretty clear that they did have faith in these invocations; for it is impossible to believe that such men as Cardanus and Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, Johannes Bodinus, Pietro Adana, Hieronymus Fracastorius, Torreblanca, Debris, Pomponatus, and Varius, and men of that stamp, should have wilfully endeavoured to palm off on the world, with such calm. seriousness, statements which they knew to be lies. At all events they clearly profess their faith in the power of man, by magical processes, to raise the dead, and wake spirits by incantation; and various receipts are given by them to effect such purposes.

Belton. I suppose that at the present day no one would believe in this. These men flourished in ignorant ages, when science was in its infancy, and when superstition was at its height.

Mallett. You are very much mis

taken if you believe that the day of the magicians is entirely past. The magical art is still cultivated, though in secrecy; and there are numbers of persons who still study it, practise it, and have faith in it. So at least I have been assured by men in whom I cannot but place trust, and who have declared to me that they themselves have attended magical séances, and employed the formulas of the magical books with successful results. Certain it is that the Abbé Constant devoted himself to the study of the magical arts and occult sciences, and, under the pseudonym of Elephas Levi, wrote some remarkable books on the subject, and specially one on La Haute Magie,' which I recommend to you, if you are curious in such matters. There is no doubt, too, that a few persons were and are his disciples and pupils in France, and among them may be mentioned Desbarolles, the author of Les Mystères de la Main.' I must confess, however, that after reading 'La Haute Magie' I was not very much enlightened on the subject. A great deal was hinted and insinuated and vaguely indicated, but comparatively little directly taught either as to the theory of the practice of magic.* A very accomplished and distinguished writer who lately died assured me that he himself, on one occasion, by following certain prescribed formulas, evoked one of the spirits held by those who believe to be very dangerous-understand me, not by means of any medium, but by his own practice; and that he satisfied himself by this and other experiments that the prescribed processes were not by any means delusions or follies. This same gentleman also told me, when I made a remark similar to yours

that I supposed no one in the present day believed in magical arts, that, on the contrary, he knew many who studied it, and believed in it. "Che volete," as the Italians say. You may make out of this what you choose; I merely repeat what I have been told.

Belton. Was he not making a fool of you, and trying to see if he could hoax you?

Mallett. By no means. He was very serious; and after giving me book and chapter for what he said, he finished by drawing my own horoscope very cleverly, thus showing that, at all events, he had studied the matter.

Belton. What did he prophesy about you.

Mallett. No matter; I shall not give you the chance of laughing at

ше.

Belton. You stimulate my curiosity. I think I should like to try some of these evocations and incantations, but I am sure nothing would come of them. Is there any difficulty in performing them?

Mallett. No; there is no real difficulty; but numerous materials and objects are required which are not to be obtained without trouble and expense, and certain arrangements must be made which are sometimes not easy; and though, if any one were seriously inclined to try the experiments, any little obstacles could be easily overcome, yet it requires a certain patience, seriousness, determination, and trouble that few persons would take in the vague hope of arriving at results in which they have a complete distrust. That is the whole of the matter. I have often thought of trying the experiments myself; but I have to begin with no faith, and therefore I shrank before the little obstacles of trouble, expense, and time. Besides, I don't know precisely what I should do with a de

mon, or even a spirit, after I had raised it. I am more used to men and women, and I like them better. That is, I like a spirit plus a body. more than a spirit minus a body. I talk and act more freely with them. them. As for the spirits that are said to come up at tables by the late processes of incantation, they are generally so badly educated, and speak such bad grammar, that I don't care for their company. I could stand any amount of bad grammar if they would only tell me something that we all of us do not know, and that we desire to know. To rap out by tedious processes feeble commonplaces of morality and tawdry statements of future existence which correspond solely to the vulgarest notions, or to advise us as to our conduct in copy-book phrases of evil communications corrupting good manners, does not pay. If what they said were really worth saying, I would endure even the tediousness of their methods; but I cannot see that they have added to our literature anything very valuable. Shakespeare bas so terribly degenerated at the table that I feel sorry to see that he has lost his mind in losing his body.

Belton. But you have had strange experiences, have you not?

Mallett. Very strange experiences, which I cannot explain, and which nobody has ever been able to explain, to my satisfaction at least. But all that were of any note were physical and material results; and I do not accept any spiritual explanation of them. But don't let us talk about them now. They bore me, and they wouldn't amuse you.

Belton. You seem to consider the fact of the utter triviality of all that is written and rapped at tables to be sufficient proof that it does not come from spirits. I agree with you in thinking that their utter

ances are not from the so-called spiritual world; but I do not see why we should expect spirits out of the body to have more intelligence than spirits in the body. We have no reason to think so. We know absolutely nothing in respect to the changes which take place after death. It may be that pure and refined spirits, freed from the body, ascend to higher existence; but in that case it is difficult to imagine that such spirits would return to rap out foolish statements at tables. But, on the other hand, there are many low, mean, contemptible spirits dwelling here in the flesh to whom the body may lend apparent respectability, and, stripped of this garment which conceals their inanity of intellect and baseness of desires, they may fall in the scale of being even below what they seemed here. Such spirits of the earth earthy-would long for the gratifications of the sense and the flesh, and might be supposed to haunt the earth to which their desires cling, and grasp at any means of communication with it. The heaven would be the heaven of the senses, and of the life they had lost, and one would naturally expect from them lies, hypocrisies, and deceit of every kind. Freed from the body, the naked spirit would be what it desiredthe high and pure of aspiration would therefore ascend to loftier planes of existence, the mean and base might descend even to lower. I only suggest this answer to any argument against spiritual communications founded upon their triviality, feebleness, and absurdity. Let us clear our minds of distinctions between human beings and spirits. We are all spirits; all our communications are spiritual. It is two spirits who talk together not two bodies - here on earth. We have no warrant for the belief that the instant the spirit is freed

from the body it necessarily leaves the earth-whatever be its condition-and becomes at once purified, and beyond its influences. It may be or it may not be; but it is certainly a possible supposition that they whose whole happiness, while here, has been in the joys of the body, and whose desires have been mean and depraved, may only continue to be possessed by the same desires, and long to regain the body through which they obtained their gratification.

Mallett. It never struck me before in this light, but it certainly is an intelligible theory, whether it be correct or not. We all have faith in gradations of future being, and we believe that the spirit survives the body, and retains its identity; and why not suppose, if its preparation in this life has been for higher spheres, it would naturally ascend to them, while if it had been for lower spheres, it would equally descend to them? If, after death, we retain an individuality, we naturally must remain what we inherently are, with the same desires, the same aspirations, the same tendencies. This would, if we accept it, enable the human being here to shape for himself his future sphere, by the training of his thoughts and aspirations to what is lofty, pure, and refined on the one hand, or, on the other, to what is low, bestial, and degraded. We should thus reap what we ourselves have sown, and not be subject to any judgment and sentence outside of ourselves. Would not this recommend itself to our sense of perfect justice?

Belton. If we choose to take another step, we might suppose that repeated trials might be allotted to every spirit to climb up to higher spheres of existence by the purgation of its desires (since every spirit is what it desires), by its devotion to noble ends, by its constant ex

perience that the low leads only to the low, by its sense of loss in consequence of its base aims.

Mallett. In respect to these socalled spiritual communications by means of table-rappings, and all that, we shall never have the phenomena properly investigated so long as we begin with a theory. To set out with the assumption that all the material phenomena are occasioned by spiritual intervention, is entirely unworthy of science and philosophy. But so strenuously is this theory advanced by believers, that the minds of those who pretend to investigate them are warped at the beginning: on the one side are those who are inclined to the spiritual theory, and on the other, those to whom such a theory is absurd and even worse; and both, for entirely opposite reasons, are averse to strict examination and investigation. The real question is, Do the facts exist or not? If so, how are they to be explained? If the facts clearly exist, it is idle to reject them because a foolish theory is advanced to explain them. Are there any facts outside our common experience of the laws of nature so called? If there be, let us arrange them with calmness and honesty. On both sides, on the contrary, I find precipitation and impatience, Those disposed to the spiritual theory accept everything at once as spiritual. Those who are sceptical and unbelieving reject every fact as a cheat, without carefully investigating it or explaining it.

It

suffices the latter class on one or two occasions to detect a charlatan at work, or to encounter an entire failure of the experiment, to come to the conclusion that the whole thing is the result of charlatanism. But repeated failures or repeated cheating prove nothing. No scientific man would investigate any other question in the same spirit as he does this.

If the matter were worthy of consideration at all, he would not be stopped in his researches by repeated failures to obtain his end. He would try again and again. He would not insist in the outset, for instance, that galvanism did not exist, unless he could produce its effects in the way he chose. He would not insist on his own conditions, and assert that unless the results were obtained through them, they did not exist at all. But this is what he constantly does in his professed investigation of so-called spiritual phenomena, because it is the term spiritual which annoys and disgusts him. If you recount to him any phenomena, perfectly material and physical, as having occurred in your presence under conditions contrary to his preconceived opinions or experience, he says, It would not have occurred had I been there; or he smiles, and says, Ah, indeed! and thinks you are a fool. If you press the point, and ask him to explain it, and tell him the details, and show him that his explanation does not accord with the facts, he assumes at once that you were incapable of investigation, that you were humbugged, or that you lie. Humbug is the great word he uses

If

a very expansive one, which means anything or nothing. you reply, How humbugged? where is the humbug? point it out-I desire to know as much as you; he declines to particularise, and prefers the generalisation of--Humbug.

Belton. I cannot wonder at his condition of mind, nor fail to sympathise with his disgust at so much absurdity as is put forth by spiritualists in general.

Mallett. Nor I; but, at the same time, he should, I think, preserve a more scientific and philosophic attitude, and not decide until he has thoroughly investigated. There may be nothing in all this; he