204 VISIT TO DENMARK AND SCANDINAVIA. [1799. 



warrant us to expect. Nor is it surprising, consider- 

 ing the variety of our thoughts in sleep, and* that they 

 all bear some analogy to the affairs of life, that a 

 dream should sometimes coincide with a cotempor- 

 aneous or even with a future event. This is not much 

 more wonderful than that a person, whom we had no 

 reason to expect, should appear to us at the very 

 moment we had been thinking or speaking of him. 

 So common is this, that it has for ages grown into the 

 proverb, " Speak of the devil." 



I believe every such seeming miracle is, like every 

 ghost story, capable of explanation. 



There never was, to all appearance, a better authen- 

 ticated fact than Lord Lyt tie ton's ghost. I have heard 

 my father tell the story ; but coupled with his entire 

 conviction that it was either a pure invention, or the 

 accidental coincidence of a dream with the event. 



He had heard the particulars from a lady a Mrs 

 Affleck, or some such name during a visit he made 

 to London about the year 1780, not very long after 

 the death. The substance of what he heard was, that 

 Lord Lyttleton had for some time been in failing 

 health ; that he was suffering from a heart complaint; 

 that a few days before his death he related to some 

 female friends who were living in his house in London 

 an extraordinary dream, in which a figure appeared 

 to him and told him he should shortly die ; that his 

 death, which really took "place a few days after the 

 dream, had been very sudden, owing no doubt to the 

 heart disease. My father was convinced that the female 



