cause a fortuitous coincidence with the subject of the phantasm and subsequent events, has served to countenance the popular views entertained regarding the sacred mission of apparitions. Of such a character was the well-known illusion of Dr Donne. This eminent poet married, against her father's consent, Anne, daughter of Sir George Moore; and to this lady he felt an attachment, which the verses of no poet have ever recorded in more fervent terms. And, that his declarations were no less sincere, numerous anecdotes, recorded of his life, have fully corroborated. The persecution which he suffered from his father-in-law on account of the marriage preyed upon a constitution naturally delicate, and excited to an intense degree a temperament evidently melancholic; so that it was far from remarkable, that, during such a state of mental excitement, spectral impressions should have resulted. Nor can it create much surprise, that the subject of his mental illusion should be a wife, whom, in an elegy which he composed upon parting from her, before he accompanied Sir Robert Drury to Paris, he has thus affectionately commemorated: Oh, Fortune! Rend us in sunder, thou canst not divide And we can love by letters still and gifts, And thoughts, and dreams: Love never wanteth shifts. *See Note 6.' Be ever then yourself, and let no woe Win on your health, your youth, your beauty so; Nor less by your contempt than her inconstancy; My deeds shall still be what my deeds are now; And when I change my love I'll change my heart." It is evident, from the foregoing lines, under what frame of mind Dr Donne yielded to Sir Robert Drury's importunity to accompany him to Paris, and quitted the object of his connubial attachment. The fear that any woe should "win upon her health, her youth, and beauty," must have resulted from the circumstance, that he had left her when she was not far from her expected confinement,-in an ill habit of body, and so unwilling to part with him, that, as it is added, "her divining soul boded some ill in his absence." Two days after Dr Donne had arrived in Paris, he was left alone in a room, where he had been dining with Sir Robert Drury and a few companions. Sir Robert returned about an hour afterwards. He found his friend in a state of ecstacy, and so altered in his countenance that he could not look upon him without amazement. The doctor was not able for some time to answer the question, What had befallen him?-but, after a long and perplexed pause, at last said, "I have seen a dreadful vision since I saw you ;-I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms. This I have seen since I saw you." To which Sir Robert answered,-" Sure, sir, you have slept since I went out; and this is the result of some melancholy dream, which I desire you to forget, for you are now awake." Donne replied,—“ I cannot be more sure that I now live, than that I have not slept since I saw you; and am as sure that at her second appearing she stopped, looked me in the face, and vanished." The poet's biographer (Isaac Walton) then adds, that a servant was dispatched to Drury-house, to know if Mrs Donne was living, and, if alive, in what condition; who brought back word, that he found and left this lady very sad and sick in bed; and that, after a long and dangerous labour, she had been delivered of a dead child. It is also stated, that the abortion took place on the same day, and about the same hour, that the spectral impression occurred. Other subjects of spectral illusions are those which have been excited by strong friendship. Illustrations of this fact are familiar to most readers of the marvellous. The celebrated apparition of Ficinus was seen by Michael Mercato the elder, in consequence of an agreement made between these two friends, that the first who died should acquaint the other with his final condition. This survivor was studying in his closet. He heard the trampling of a horse's feet, which suddenly ceased at the door of his house. The wellknown voice of Ficinus then vociferated in his ears, "O, Michael! Michael! those things are true!" Mercato immediately turned to the window, and had just time to behold his friend, dressed in white, and galloping off on a pale horse, when he was seen no more. At that very moment (says Baronius) Ficinus died at Florence. Regarding this story, of which I have given a brief abstract, Dr Ferriar, in his Theory of Apparitions, offers the following remarks:-"Many attempts have been made to discredit it, but I think the evidence has never been shaken. I entertain no doubt that Mercato had seen what he described in following the reveries of Plato, the idea of his friend, and of their compact, had been revived, and had produced a spectral impression, during the solitude and awful silence of the early hours of study." : In co-operation with morbific causes, RESENTMENT, when highly excited, has contributed to produce spectral impressions. This fact is strikingly illustrated in the life of the most undaunted of champions that was ever opposed to the enemies of the Protestant cause. "Martin Luther's life," says Atterbury, 66 was a continual warfare; he was engaged against the united forces of the papal world, and he stood the shock of them bravely, both with courage and success." In freely subscribing, however, to pay this great man the homage he so richly deserves from posterity, for the successful display of most of those eminent virtues which were essential to the sacred cause that oc 1 * Another apparition of the same kind, sent likewise into the world upon a similar errand, is that of Des Fontaines, as recorded by the Abbé de St Pierre.-See remarks in Note 7. cupied his mind, it cannot be concealed, that he possessed an irritable temper of resentment, too little softened by the mild tenets of Christianity. This impetuousness, therefore, which often incorporated itself with purer motives of zeal, was unluckily fed by the unmerited cruelties he met with from the Romish church. Thus, in Captain Bell's translation of Luther's Table-talk, there is the following self-confession of this great reformer :-" When I (said Luther) write against the Pope, I am not melancholie; for then I labour with the brains and understanding, then I write with joie of heart; insomuch, that, not long since, Doctor Reisenpusch said unto mee, I much marvel that you can be so merrie; if the case were mine, it would go near to kill me: whereupon I answered him, and said, Neither the Pope, nor all his shaven retinue, can make me sad; for I know that they are Christ's enemies; therefore I fight against him with joyful courage." But Luther's resentment was not wholly concentrated against the assumed successor of St Peter. For, in the true spirit of the reforming age, he had considered the Pope as invoking the aid of the devil to dissipate the dawning light of religious truth. And when a temporary plethoric state of the system, occasioned by the sudden change from a spare to a generous diet, had given to this vivid image of his fancy an apparent form and substance, his resentment against Satan resembled that which he had harboured against the pontifical coadjutor of the fiend ;-it was not merely spiritual, but even personal. "As I departed from Worms," said Luther, "and not far from |