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joys and sorrows, the rights and wrongs, the hopes and fears of 

 our hard-headed, sound-hearted ancestors to whom it was not 

 given to denounce their oppressors in a weekly journal, or to 

 expose villanies in wearisome novels of three-volume regulation 

 length. Having food and raiment, the men and women of East 

 Lancashire in days gone by were still greatly moved by divine 

 discontent at all the evil done under the sun. They persuaded 

 themselves that there is no wrong wrought on earth which will 

 for ever go unrighted : that just as the very stones of the street 

 would have called out if the people had kept silence when the 

 Pale Gahlean passed through their midst to death and victory, 

 the spirits of the departed will rise from their mouldy graves and 

 avenge in one way or another, if men will not, the unpunished 

 rapine and wrong, cruelty and lust, misery and wretchedness 

 that make was meant to be an Earthly Paradise a howling 

 wilderness of sin and sorrow. What does it matter if you 

 demonstrate to me by all the laws of physics that every such 

 behef was utterly vain : while the correctness of your proof is 

 admitted, it is not to be denied that deep down under the piles 

 of superstition, which came to overlie the popular behef m 

 boggarts, there was at the very root of the matter a noble 

 instinct of sympathy with the wronged, and a warm yearning 

 for poetic justice, as between man and man. 



Vulgar Boggabts. 

 The boggarts, with whose proceedings middle-aged East Lan- 

 cashire people were made acquainted in their younger days, were, 

 for the most part, undeniably a stupid, vulgar, purposeless 

 assemblage of airy nothings. Every house that had outlasted 

 three or four generations of human tenants was supposed to be 

 haunted, though not once in twenty times could the oldest in- 

 habitant assign any reason for such a si^jposition. Bridge End 

 House, which is now the very centre of Burnley, had the reputa- 

 tion, a quarter of a century ago, of being frequently visited by a 

 " flaesome " boggart, but who or wherefore nobody then living 

 could understand, although many could tell glibly enough that 

 the body of a murdered man was buried under the foundations 

 of the bridge hard by, which was bound to fall whenever three 

 funerals passed over it during any one day. The shape that the 

 Bridge End House Boggart took nobody was able to declare. 

 The fact is, by the beginning of the present century, it had become 

 fashionable in all ranks of life, it had become the popular craze 

 of the multitude to seize upon any and every pretence to 

 associate a boggart with every scene and with every building 

 which appeared in the least appropriate. There are fashions in 

 sentiment, as there are fashions in clothes, and boggarts were 

 the mental fashion in East Lancashire at the close of last century 



