1872.] Notices of Books. 239 
stories are narrated (the authors appearing afraid to contemplate 
the logical consequences of a story they yet maintain to be true) 
that it will be well to give a few of the cases in outline, with the 
author’s summing up at length, in order to see what a well- 
educated and highly-intelligent man can say in favour of what is 
generally considered to be an exploded superstition. Let us first 
take an old but well-authenticated story. Lord Erskine related 
to Lady Morgan (herself a perfect sceptic) the following personal 
narrative. On arriving at Edinburgh one morning, after a con- 
siderable absence from Scotland, he met, in the street, his father’s 
old butler, looking very pale and wan. He asked him what 
brought him to Edinburgh. The butler replied, ‘* To meet your 
honour, and solicit your interference with my Lord, to recover a 
sum due to me, which the steward at the last settlement did not 
pay.” Lord Erskine then told the butler to step with him into a 
bookseller’s shop close by, but on turning round again he was 
not to be seen. Puzzled at this he found out the man’s wife, 
who lived in Edinburgh, when he learnt for the first time that 
the butler was dead, and that he had told his wife on his death- 
bed that the steward had wronged him of some money, and that 
when Master Tom returned he would see her righted. This Lord 
Erskine promised to do, and shortly afterwards kept his promise. 
Lady Morgan then says, “ Either Lord Erskine did or did not 
believe this strange story: if he did, what a strange aberration 
of intellect! if he did not, what a stranger aberration from 
truth! My opinion is that he did believe it.” Probably hun- 
dreds of readers of this narrative by Lady Morgan have said 
with her, ‘‘ What a strange aberration of intellect!” and have 
thought no more about the matter. Mr. Owen is not satisfied 
with this careless mode of getting over a difficulty. His remarks 
are as follows: ‘‘ What sort of mode to deal with alleged facts is 
this? A gentleman distinguished in a profession of which the 
eminent members are the best judges of evidence in the world— 
a gentleman whom the hearer believes to be truthful —relates 
what, on a certain day, and in a certain place, both specified, he 
saw and heard. What he saw was the appearance of one, in life 
well known to him, who had been some months dead. What he 
heard, from the same source, was a statement in regard to 
matters of which previously he had known nothing whatever; 
which statement, on after enquiry, he learns to be strictly true ; 
a statement, too, which had occupied and interested the mind of 
the deceased just before his decease. The natural inference 
from these facts, if they are admitted, is that, under certain cir- 
cumstances which as yet we may be unable to define, those over 
whom the death change has passed, still interested in the con- 
cerns of earth, may, for a time at least, retain the power of 
occasional interference in these concerns; for example, in an 
effort to right an injustice done. But rather than admit such an 
inference—rather than accept disinterested evidence coming 
