COINAGES OF THE BRAIN. 311 



way of antiquarian study,' seems the right one, and I think I can 

 identify the 'ghost.' 



" The ecclesiastically dressed large man with closely cut reddish- 

 brown hair and shaved cheek appears to me the Doctor's remem- 

 brance of the portrait of Parsons, the Jesuit father, whom he calls in 

 his ' One Generation of a Norfolk House' 'the manager and moving 

 spirit ' of the Jesuit mission in England, and who is described as 

 1 tall and big of stature, smooth of countenance, beard thick and of 

 a brown colour, and cut short' (p. 95). Dr. Jessopp, when he 

 thought he saw the spectre, was, at dead of night, alone in an old 

 library belonging to a Walpole, and Father Parsons was the leader of 

 Henry Walpole, the hero of his just-cited book. Small wonder, 

 therefore, if the association of ideas made him think of Parsons. 



" Probably every one who has specially studied the history of any 

 family has framed for himself a vivid fancy portrait of one of its 

 members. Having been working for some years at the pedigree of 

 Isham of Lamport, I conceived just such a one of young Sir Thomas 

 Isham, who died in the year 1681, very shortly before the day fixed 

 for his marriage ; and one night, when in bed at Lamport Hall, the 

 reproduction of my idea visited me, sat by my bedside, and con- 

 versed for some time with me very affably, giving me various details 

 as to the cause of his death, &c., some of which I regret, for the sake 

 of the spectre's veracity, to say I have since found to be wholly in- 

 correct. I was certainly under the impression the next morning that 

 I had only had a very vivid dream, just such another, in fact, as that 

 which I shrewdly suspect Dr. Jessopp had whilst admittedly yawning 

 over his books in Mannington Hall. The fact, common to both our 

 experiences, that we were not at all afraid of our visitant seems to 

 strongly bear this out, for if, when undoubtedly wide awake, we were 

 to meet a conventional white-robed ghost in a dark lane, we should, 

 I do not doubt, be abjectly afraid of it. But there is great virtue in 

 the ' if.' The first disappearance of the ' spectre,' as it were with a 

 jerk, at a movement of the seer's arm, and its equally jerky disap- 

 pearance at the fall of a book, remind one much of incidents happen- 

 ing during those short, sweet snatches of sleep not unusually stolen 

 during dull sermons, snatches which cannot last more than a second 

 or two." 



The case of Dr. Jessopp's ghost becomes of extreme interest, 

 therefore, when treated as a subjective and unconscious reproduction 

 of sensations or ideas with which he was familiar enough, but of 

 which at the time his memory apparently entertained no recollection. 

 We can readily imagine that had such an incident occurred in the 

 experience of an uneducated and superstitious person, how stoutly 

 would all attempts at rational explanation have been combated. It 

 is really because the spiritualist, the theosophist, the ghost-seer, and 



