123 



souls of the departed might suffer no detriment from the want of 

 the prayers of the Church. Persons dressed in black traversed 

 the streets, ringing a dismal-toned bell, callmg on the people to 

 remember the souls suffering penance m purgatory, and to join 

 in prayer for their liberation and repose. Charnel houses in 

 some places were during the day thrown open, lighted with 

 torches, and decked with flowers, while crowds flocked through 

 the vaults to visit the bodies of their friends and relatives, whose 

 fleshless skeletons were dressed up in robes and arranged in 

 niches along the wall. In other places sumptuous entertainments 

 were provided in every house on the eve of All Souls' Day for the 

 souls who were supposed then to revisit temporarily and make 

 merry in the scenes of their earthly pilgrimage. 



Boggarts, Souls, Spirits, Ghosts. 



What did the teachers of the MediaBval Church mean by the 

 soul, and did they mean what the founders of the festival of AU 

 Hallows meant ? In the oldest translations of the Bible we read 

 in the Book of Job " I have seen a bug " where we now read " I 

 have seen a spirit." The fairies of the Isle of Man are still 

 *' bugganees," the half-fairies and the half-ghosts of the Scottish 

 Lowlands are still known as bogles or bogeys. In everyday 

 English to "bogle" is to start as if frightened by a boggart. 

 The King says to Bertram in " All's Well That Ends Well," 

 " you boggle shrewdly, every feather starts you." Dr. Johnson 

 is rather inclined to derive the word " bugbear " from " pug," 

 an old word for the devil, who was, of course, the chief of the 

 boggarts, and even modern philologists who reject this derivation 

 are all at one in deriving it from the Celtic word " bwg " a hob- 

 goblin. " Bogelu " in Welsh again means to affright. We make 

 bold to give our own beUef that "humbug" was originally intended 

 to represent everything and everybody who was as unreliable 

 and unsubstantial as a boggart. A boggart therefore is a spirit, 

 a ghost, a soul released from the flesh. Now, turning to the 

 scholars who have made philology their work, we learn that 

 together with the equivalent words in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, 

 Sanscrit, and other languages, soul, spirit, and ghost literally 

 denote air or breath. The metaphor is eminently just and 

 beautiful, seeing that the air is the physical image and repre- 

 sentative of Hfe, and that it is in the invisible, spiritual part of 

 man that Hfe is supremely throned. Every one of these names 

 denotes accordingly, in addition to air or wind, the life of the 

 body. Soul is coincident with the Latin halitus, breath, derived 

 from halsixe, to breathe, a root familiar in the words exhale and 

 iahale. Colloquially, and in miscellaneous literature, " soul" is 

 not now used m the sense of "breath," but in the Authorised 



