NOTES ON GHOSTS AND GOBLINS. 41 1 



hours of darkness, depend on mental peculiarities 

 inherited from our gloom-fearing savage ancestors. 



As respects the ordinary feeling of dread in darkness, 

 although there can be no doubt that it is sometimes 

 engendered by the talk of foolish nurses to young chil- 

 dren (and, by the way, what an unhappy thing it is 

 that so many must pass through the mischievous ordeal 

 of training by foolish and ignorant persons), yet it is a 

 mistake to suppose that this is the sole or even the 

 main cause. Some children fear to be in darkness 

 who have never heard of ghost or goblin. ' It is not 

 book or picture,' says Lamb very justly, ' or the stories 

 of foolish servants, which create these terrors in chil- 

 dren. They can at most but give them a direction. 

 Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought 

 up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint 

 of superstition who was never allowed to hear of 

 goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, 

 or to read or hear of any distressing story finds all 

 this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly 

 excluded, ab extra, in his own 6 thick-coming fancies ; ' 

 and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of 

 optimism will start at shapes unborrowed of tradition, 

 in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned 

 murderer are tranquillity. Oorgons and Hydras and 

 Chimseras dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies 

 may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition ; 

 but they were there before. They are transcripts, 

 types the archetypes are in us, and eternal.' 



Another remarkable circumstance in the superstitious 



